The Way Of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
“I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.”
With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler’s death, the novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth “in the bosom of a Christian family.” With irony, wit and sometimes rancour, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning inside-out the conventional novel of a family’s life through several generations.
( from the sleeve, 445 pages )
The Sea-Wolf and Other Stories, Jack London
Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Suicide Club, Robert Louis Stevenson
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, Samuel L. Clemens ( Mark Twain )
Gulliver’s Travels And Other Writings, Jonathon Swift
Maurice, E.M. Forster
The Ballad Of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark
The Rising Tide, M.J. Farrell ( Molly Keane )
In 1900 Lady Charlotte French-McGrath is mistress of Garonlea, a huge gothic house in Ireland. She rules her household and her family — husband Ambrose and children Muriel, Enid, Violet, Diana and Desmond — with a rod of iron. Desmond’s marriage to the beautiful, lively Cynthia and, several years later, the onset of the First World War are the two events which finally, and irrevocably, break Lady Charlotte’s matriarchal hold. Cynthia enters the Jazz Age and on the surface her life passes in a whirl of fox-hunting, drinking and love-making. But the ghosts of Garonlea are only biding their time: they know the source of their power, a secret handed on from one generation to the next.
( from the sleeve, 320 pages )