Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two betrothed Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their world comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love […]
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Mrs Bridge (1959) is an inspired novel set in the years around World War II that testifies to the sapping ennui of an unexamined suburban life (in Kansas City, in this case). India Bridge, the eponymous character, has three children and a meticulous workaholic lawyer husband. She defends her dainty, untouched guest towels from son Douglas, who has
Traffics and Discoveries (1904) is a collection of short stories, mostly South African or technological in emphasis, and with accompanying poems. ‘The Captive’, ‘A Sahib’s War’, and ‘The Comprehensions of Private Copper’ reproduce the flavour of Kipling’s early stories about the lower ranks in the context of the Boer War. The same knowing narrator who recorded
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Staying On (1977) is about post colonial India. Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return ‘home’ when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pangkot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the
The Lost Weekend (1944) is the story of a man in the grip of alcohol; it moves forward with speed, force, and heartbreaking truth. Don Birnam is someone you know and care about. His loneliness, his craving for drink, his dangerous hangovers, his daydreams of himself as a genius and actual nightmares are unforgettable experiences. Perhaps the only
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The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) celebrates the romance of even the most ordinary lives in the course of tracing the passage of time over three generations. It tells the story of the two Baines sisters, placid stay-at-home Constance and rebellious Sophia, from their girlhood to their last days. They move from the family drapery shop
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Mrs. Dalloway (1925) follows a set of characters as they go about their lives on a normal day. The eponymous character, Clarissa Dalloway, does simple things: she buys some flowers, walks in a park, is visited by an old friend and throws a party. She speaks to a man who was once in love with
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After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1935 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise
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After a decade in one South Seas mission, a London bank-clerk-turned-minister sets his heart on serving a remote volcanic island. Fanua contains neither cannibals nor Christians, but its citizens, his superior warns, are like children—immoral children. Still, Mr. Timothy Fortune sets out for Fanua. After three years, he has made only one convert, and his devotion
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