The books Highstreett recommends most

The Great Mutiny: India 1857

Christopher Hibbert

Non-fiction · Indian history

'By far the best single-volume description of the mutiny yet written' - "Economist". A beautifully written and meticulously researched narrative history of the great Indian uprising of 1857 by one of our most acclaimed living historians

Recommended to 11 readers · About this book

The Indian Mutiny: 1857

Saul David

Non-fiction · Indian history

The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was the bloodiest insurrection in the history of the British Empire. It began with a large-scale uprising by native troops against their colonial masters, and soon developed into general rebellion as thousands of discontented civilians joined in. It is a tale of brutal murder and heroic resistance from which innocents on both sides could not escape. This work covers the story of the Mutiny. It challenges the accepted wisdom that a British victory was inevitable, showing just how close the mutineers came to dealing a fatal blow to the British Raj.

Recommended to 9 readers · About this book

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857

William Dalrymple

Non-fiction · Indian history

In this evocative study of the fall of the Mughal Empire and the beginning of the Raj, award-winning historian William Dalrymple uses previously undiscovered sources to investigate a pivotal moment in history. The last Mughal emperor, Zafar, came to the throne when the political power of the Mughals was already in steep decline. Nonetheless, Zafar—a mystic, poet, and calligrapher of great accomplishment—created a court of unparalleled brilliance, and gave rise to perhaps the greatest literary renaissance in modern Indian history. All the while, the British were progressively taking over the Emperor's power. When, in May 1857, Zafar was declared the leader of an uprising against the British, he was powerless to resist though he strongly suspected that the action was doomed. Four months later, the British took Delhi, the capital, with catastrophic results. With an unsurpassed understanding of British and Indian history, Dalrymple crafts a provocative, revelatory account of one the bloodiest upheavals in history.

Recommended to 8 readers · About this book

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India

Shashi Tharoor

Non-fiction · Indian history

Inglorious Empire' tells the real story of the British in India from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj, revealing how Britain's rise was built upon its plunder of India. In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift" - from the railways to the rule of law -was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.

Recommended to 7 readers · About this book

India: A History

John Keay

Non-fiction · Indian history

"This book is a compelling epic of cultures and conquest, colonization and independence. It vividly re-creates the turning points of Indian history and brings to life the leaders who shaped India's evolution, from Ashoka, the "Caesar of Ancient India," who ruled the vast Mauryan empire in the third century B.C., to twentieth-century figures such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Along the way Keay provides fresh insights into the patterns of invasion and migration that have stirred the subcontinent's cultures for centuries, from the "Aryan" invaders, to Alexander's Macedonian armies, to the Islamic conquerors, to the coming of the East India Company and the establishment of the British Raj. He also profiles the rise of religions and philosophies that have profoundly shaped these cultures, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.". "Throughout the book Keay synthesizes recent revelations from archaeology, anthropology, and textual scholarship to explode the myths that have plagued the highly politicized historiography of the region. He investigates the controversy surrounding the origins of the Harappan peoples who built the first cities of the subcontinent, explains the cultural and political significance of India's architectural marvels such as the Taj Mahal, and details the bloody suppressions that characterized the "Pax Britannica" of the Raj."--BOOK JACKET.

Recommended to 6 readers · About this book

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

William Dalrymple

Non-fiction · Indian history

Finalist for the Cundill History Prize ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal and NPR “Superb ... A vivid and richly detailed story ... worth reading by everyone.” —The New York Times Book Review From the bestselling author of Return of a King, the story of how the East India Company took over large swaths of Asia, and the devastating results of the corporation running a country. In August 1765, the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and set up, in his place, a government run by English traders who collected taxes through means of a private army. The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional company and became something much more unusual: an international corporation transformed into an aggressive colonial power. Over the course of the next 47 years, the company’s reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London. The Anarchy tells one of history’s most remarkable stories: how the Mughal Empire—which dominated world trade and manufacturing and possessed almost unlimited resources—fell apart and was replaced by a multinational corporation based thousands of miles overseas, and answerable to shareholders, most of whom had never even seen India and no idea about the country whose wealth was providing their dividends. Using previously untapped sources, Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before and provides a portrait of the devastating results from the abuse of corporate power. Bronze Medal in the 2020 Arthur Ross Book Award

Recommended to 6 readers · About this book

The Discovery of India

Jawaharlal Nehru

Non-fiction · Indian history

Walk into the world of India and its civilization as seen by Pandit jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of Independent India

Recommended to 6 readers · About this book

The Go-Between

L. P. Hartley

Fiction · Literary fiction

Narrated as a memoir, this excellent novel tells the story of one summer at the turn of the century when the narrator was a young boy. The boy spends the summer in question as a guest at a country estate where he befriends a local farmer. He soon finds himself acting as an unwitting messenger, carrying letters back and forth between the farmer and the daughter of his host on whom he has a crush.

Recommended to 6 readers · About this book

The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj

David Gilmour

Non-fiction · Indian history

For nearly 200 years a small group of British officials administered vast areas of south Asia. In 1900 just over a thousand civil servants ruled a population of nearly 300 million people spread over a territory now covered by India, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh. This absorbing book traces their lives from recruitment to retirement, from a jungle to Government House, from a bungalow in Burma to a Residency in Rajputana. It describes their work and their leisure, their intellectual and their private lives, explaining their reasons for going to India and what they did when they got there. The result is a portrait more varied and complicated than that painted by their old admirers, and yet fairer and subtler than those routinely produced by postcolonial detractors.

Recommended to 6 readers · About this book

The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience

David Gilmour

Non-fiction · British history

A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN, TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR The British in this book lived in India from shortly after the reign of Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Elizabeth II. Who were they? What drove these men and women to risk their lives on long voyages down the Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean or later via the Suez Canal? And when they got to India, what did they do and how did they live? This book explores the lives of the many different sorts of Briton who went to India: viceroys and offcials, soldiers and missionaries, planters and foresters, merchants, engineers, teachers and doctors. It evokes the three and a half centuries of their ambitions and experiences, together with the lives of their families, recording the diversity of their work and their leisure, and the complexity of their relationships with the peoples of India. It also describes the lives of many who did not fit in with the usual image of the Raj: the tramps and rascals, the men who 'went native', the women who scorned the role of the traditional memsahib. David Gilmour has spent decades researching in archives, studying the papers of many people who have never been written about before, to create a magnificent tapestry of British life in India. It is exceptional work of scholarly recovery portrays individuals with understanding and humour, and makes an original and engaging contribution to a long and important period of British and Indian history.

Recommended to 5 readers · About this book

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

Fiction · Literary fiction

*The Master and Margarita* (Russian: Мастер и Маргарита) is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1940. The story concerns a visit by the devil and his entourage to the officially atheist Soviet Union. The devil, manifested as one Professor Woland, challenges the Soviet citizens' beliefs towards religion and condemns their behavior throughout the book. *The Master and Margarita* combines supernatural elements with satirical dark comedy and Christian philosophy, defying categorization within a single genre. Many critics consider it to be one of the best novels of the 20th century, as well as the foremost of Soviet satires. A censored version, with several chapters cut by editors, was published posthumously in Moscow magazine in 1966–1967 by his widow Elena Bulgakova. The manuscript was not published as a book until 1967, in Paris. A samizdat version circulated that included parts cut out by official censors, and these were incorporated in a 1969 version published in Frankfurt. The novel has since been published in several languages and editions.

Recommended to 5 readers · About this book

The Buddha of Suburbia

Hanif Kureishi

Fiction · Literary fiction

Karim lives with his Mum and Dad in a suburb of south London and dreams of making his escape to the bright lights of the big city. But his father is no ordinary Dad, he is 'the buddha of suburbia', a strange and compelling figure whose powers of meditation hold a circle of would-be mystics spellbound with the fascinations of the East. Among his disciples is the glamorous and ambitious Eva, and when 'the buddha of suburbia' runs off with her to a crumbling flat in Barons Court, Karim's life becomes changed in ways that even he had never dreamed of . . .

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational

Nick Robins

Non-fiction · Economic history

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Established in 1600, its trading empire encircled the globe, creating a lifestyle revolution. The Company's practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This book explores the Company's enduring global legacy. It investigates how the Company's spectacular rise and fall were driven by the four forces of finance, technology, monopoly and regulation.

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

The Evenings

Gerard Reve

Fiction · Literary fiction

Twenty-three-year-old Frits - office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes - finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.This is the story of ten evenings in Frits's life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city street and tries to make sense of the minutes, hours and days that stretch before him. Darkly funny and mesmerising, The Evenings takes the tiny, quotidian triumphs and heartbreaks of our everyday lives and turns them into a work of brilliant wit and profound beauty.

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company

John Keay

Non-fiction · Indian history

During 200 years the East India Company grew from an association of Elizabethan tradesmen into a powerful organization. As a commercial enterprise it came to control half the world's trade and as a political entity it administered an empire. This book looks at the history of the Company.

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

The House of the Spirits

Isabel Allende

Fiction · Magical realism

Primera novela de Isabel Allende. *La casa de los espíritus* narra la saga de una poderosa familia de terratenientes latinoamericanos. El despótico patriarca Esteban Trueba ha construido, con mano de hierro, un imperio privado que empieza a tambalearse a raíz del paso del tiempo y de un entorno social explosivo. Finalmente, la decadencia personal del patriarca arrastrará a los Trueba a una dolorosa desintegración. Atrapados en unas dramáticas relaciones familiares, los personajes de esta portentosa novela encarnan las tensiones sociales y espirituales de una época que abarca gran parte de este siglo. *La casa de los espíritus* ha sido adaptada al cine en una película protagonizada, entre otros, por Jerermy Irons, Meryl Streep y Antonio Banderas.Con ternura e impecable factura literaria, Isabel Allende perfila el destino de sus personajes como parte indisoluble del destino colectivo de un continente, marcado por el mestizaje, las injusticias sociales y la búsqueda de la propia identidad. Este logrado universo narrativo es el resultado de una lúcida conciencia histórica y social, así como de una propuesta estética que constituye una singular expresión de realismo mágico.

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

The Long Firm

Jake Arnott

Fiction · Crime fiction

London. The 1960s. The capital is swinging, but underneath the boomtown there's a dark underbelly. Meet Harry Starks: club owner, racketeer, porn king, sociology graduate and keen Judy Garland fan. Harry's business is fronting violence with rough charm and cheap glamour; putting the frighteners on, performing menace while trying to desperately trying to jump the counter into legitimacy. Five characters tell five tales that combine in an extraordinary narrative that is both an explosively paced thriller and brilliantly imagined sociological and topographical portrait of sixties London.

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain

Nicholas B. Dirks

Non-fiction · Imperial history

Many have told of the East India Company’s extraordinary excesses in eighteenth-century India, of the plunder that made its directors fabulously wealthy and able to buy British land and titles, but this is only a fraction of the story. When one of these men—Warren Hastings—was put on trial by Edmund Burke, it brought the Company’s exploits to the attention of the public. Through the trial and after, the British government transformed public understanding of the Company’s corrupt actions by creating an image of a vulnerable India that needed British assistance. Intrusive behavior was recast as a civilizing mission. In this fascinating, and devastating, account of the scandal that laid the foundation of the British Empire, Nicholas Dirks explains how this substitution of imperial authority for Company rule helped erase the dirty origins of empire and justify the British presence in India. The Scandal of Empire reveals that the conquests and exploitations of the East India Company were critical to England’s development in the eighteenth century and beyond. We see how mercantile trade was inextricably linked with imperial venture and scandalous excess and how these three things provided the ideological basis for far-flung British expansion. In this powerfully written and trenchant critique, Dirks shows how the empire projected its own scandalous behavior onto India itself. By returning to the moment when the scandal of empire became acceptable we gain a new understanding of the modern culture of the colonizer and the colonized and the manifold implications for Britain, India, and the world.

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

The Summer Book

Tove Jansson

Fiction · Literary fiction

"This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland." -- Publisher's description.

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

The Wasp Factory

Iain Banks

Fiction · Crime fiction

Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly. Iain Banks' celebrated first novel is a work of extraordinary originality, imagination and horrifying compulsion: horrifying, because it enters a mind whose realities are not our own, whose values of life and death are alien to our society; and compulsive, because the humour and compassion of that mind reach out to us all.

Recommended to 4 readers · About this book

A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920

Hugh Tinker

Non-fiction · Indian history

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

Excellent Women

Barbara Pym

Fiction · Literary fiction

The lightly satiric focus is on loneliness bravely borne, the bearing-up being done by that excellent woman Mildred Lathbury, a 30-something spinster in the lingering post-WWII rationing of the early 1950s. Living in suburban London and on the fringes of academia, she becomes embroiled with the vicar, the neighbors, the neighbors' lodgers, and a few hopeless (and one rather intriguing) gentleman friends. Dryly, wryly funny, with a riveting sense of place, time, and character. (Part of the synopsis comes from the online Kirkus Review.)

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

High Fidelity

Nick Hornby

Fiction · Literary fiction

Nick Hornby's first novel, an international bestseller and instantly recognized by critics and readers alike as a classic, helps to explain men to women, and men to men. Rob is good on music: he owns a small record shop and has strong views on what's decent and what isn't. But he's much less good on relationships. In fact, he's not at all sure that he wants to commit himself to anyone. So it's hardly surprising that his girlfriend decides that enough is enough.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson

Fiction · Literary fiction

An unabridged audio edition of this classic work on the 25th anniversary of its first publicationA modern classic, housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town " chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition

Nisid Hajari

Non-fiction · Indian history

Describes how a cycle of rioting and violence leading up to the partition of India and birth of Pakistan resulted in brutal and widespread ethnic cleansing on both sides of the border, creating a divide between India and Pakistan that persists decades later.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century

Charles Allen

Non-fiction · Indian history

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The City & the City

China Miéville

Fiction · Crime fiction

Inspector Tyador Borlú must travel to Ul Qoma to search for answers in the murder of a woman found in the city of Besźel.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The company-state

Philip J. Stern

Non-fiction · British imperial history

Almost since the event itself in 1757, the English East India Company's victory over the forces of the nawab of Bengal and the territorial acquisitions that followed has been perceived as the moment when the British Empire in India was born. Examining the Company's political and intellectual history in the century prior to this supposed transformation, The Company-State rethinks this narrative and the nature of the early East India Company itself. In this book, Philip J. Stern reveals the history of a corporation concerned not simply with the bottom line but also with the science of colonial governance. Stern demonstrates how Company leadership wrestled with typical early modern problems of political authority, such as the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationships among law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; the constitution of civic institutions ranging from tax collection and religious practice to diplomacy and warmaking; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, territory, and the sea. Their ideas emerged from abstract ideological, historical, and philosophical principles and from the real-world entanglements of East India Company employees and governors with a host of allies, rivals, and polyglot populations in their overseas plantations. As the Company shaped this colonial polity, it also confronted shifting definitions of state and sovereignty across Eurasia that ultimately laid the groundwork for the Company's incorporation into the British empire and state through the eighteenth century. Challenging traditional distinctions between the commercial and imperial eras in British India, as well as a colonial Atlantic world and a "trading world" of Asia, The Company-State offers a unique perspective on the fragmented nature of state, sovereignty, and empire in the early modern world.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The East India Company: A History

Philip Lawson

Non-fiction · Economic history

"This is the first short history of the East India Company - the trading company that became an imperial power - to be designed for student and academic use. It covers the Company's entire history from its foundation through to its demise after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, paying particular attention to the Company's important but often neglected early years. An important contribution to both Anglo-Indian and imperial historiography, it also reflects the very lively state of scholarship in both fields today." "The East India Company received its charter from parliament in 1600 for the monopoly of trade in the eastern hemisphere. Unable to compete with the Dutch in the East Indies themselves, the Company soon came to concentrate its energies on trade with India. Its growing regional influence - mercantile, political and military - led to clashes with the French, who had expansionist ambitions of their own. The campaigns of 1745-61, culminating in Clive's spectacular victories, made the Company the dominant power in India. It remained in essential control of the subcontinent until the upheaval of the Mutiny, in the aftermath of which the Crown assumed direct government of India in 1858." "The crucial role that the East India Company played in the development of British overseas expansion is fully surveyed here by Philip Lawson; but he breaks new ground in also analysing the impact that the Company's developing role had on Britain itself. He throws new light on the global imperatives affecting policy decisions in London, as well as the diplomatic complexities under which the Company operated in India. He also shows that the dynamic by which the Company acquired its imperial role was not always in the interests of the state, the Company, India or the East Indies: the progress, profitability and even the viability of the Company were frequently compromised by destructive internal forces, like political corruption and militarism, long before its formal demise.". "Philip Lawson argues that the East India Company's history can no longer be seen as somehow detached from the mainstream history of Britain itself, which was open to, and influenced by, imperial as well as domestic considerations throughout these years. Contemporaries did not view the Company's world at home and abroad as separate spheres: indeed, the Company's history is inextricably bound up with Britain's own rise from a backward European state to a global imperial power. The story of the Company can thus be understood only within the context of the broader themes in Britain's past - and that is how Philip Lawson presents it in this vigorous and impressive study."--BOOK JACKET.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The Football Factory

John King

Fiction · Crime fiction

Summary:Only a phenomenally talented and empathetic writer working from within his own culture can achieve the power and authenticity this book pulses with. Buy, steal, or borrow a copy now, because in a short time anyone who hasn't read it won't be worth talking to. --Irvine Welsh, author, Trainspotting The Football Factory is driven by its two main characters--late-20s warehouseman Tommy Johnson and retired ex-soldier Bill Farrell. Tommy is angry at his situation in life and those running the country. Outside of work, he is a lively, outspoken character, living for his time with a gang of football hooligans, the excitement of their fights and the comradeship he finds with his friends. He is a violent man, at the same time moral and intelligent. Bill, meanwhile, is a former World War II hero who helped liberate a concentration camp and married a survivor. He is a strong, principled character who sees the self-serving political and media classes for what they are. Tommy and Bill have shared feelings, but express their views in different ways. Born at another time, they could have been the other. As the book unfolds both come to their own crossroads and have important decisions to make. The Football Factory is a book about modern-day pariahs, people reduced to the level of statistics by years of hypocritical, self-serving party politics. It is about those who are insulted, marginalized, and unseen. Graphic and disturbing, and at times very funny, The Football Factory is a rush of literary adrenalin. This edition includes a new introduction by the author

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco

Fiction · Historical mystery

It is the year 1327. Franciscans in an Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, but Brother William of Baskerville’s investigation is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths. Ultima settimana del novembre 1327. Il novizio Adso da Melk accompagna in un'abbazia dell'alta Italia frate Guglielmo da Baskerville, incaricato di una sottile e imprecisa missione diplomatica. Ex inquisitore, amico di Guglielmo di Occam e di Marsilio da Padova, frate Guglielmo si trova a dover dipanare una serie di misteriosi delitti (sette in sette giorni, perpetrati nel chiuso della cinta abbaziale) che insanguinano una biblioteca labirintica e inaccessibile. Per risolvere il caso, Guglielmo dovrà decifrare indizi di ogni genere, dal comportamento dei santi a quello degli eretici, dalle scritture negromantiche al linguaggio delle erbe, da manoscritti in lingue ignote alle mosse diplomatiche degli uomini di potere. La soluzione arriverà, forse troppo tardi, in termini di giorni, forse troppo presto, in termini di secoli. La copertina dell'articolo può variare.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India

David Burton

Non-fiction · Culinary history

While the British were in India they developed a curious cuisine all of their own. As they made their mark on their host culture, the formidable memsahib - or English housewife - made sure that much traditional cuisine was rejected in favour of an impossible combination of European customs, and the results were frequently chaotic.Anglo-India cooking was at its best when it achieved a kind of cultural balance; mulligatawny, kedgeree and Worcestershire sauce are all products of the Raj.David Burton's book - subtitled 'A Culinary History of the British in India' - is now considered a classic, and was acclaimed by the Observer on publication as 'one of those rare and delightful works from which, once caught, you have no desire to escape'.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

Fiction · Literary fiction

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past . . .A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro's beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The Sea, The Sea

Iris Murdoch

Fiction · Literary fiction

GENERAL & LITERARY FICTION. When Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood sweetheart and sets his heart on destroying her marriage. His equilibrium is further disturbed when his friends all decide to come and keep him company and Charles finds his seaside idyll severely threatened by his past.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The Secret History

Donna Tartt

Fiction · Literary fiction

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last - inexorably - into evil.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The Siege of Krishnapur

J.G. Farrell

Fiction · Historical fiction

This story is set in Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a bloody mutiny. Then the Sepoys at the military cantonment revolt and the British community retreats into the Residency. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency becomes ever more vulnerable.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book

The Trick is to Keep Breathing

Janice Galloway

Fiction · Literary fiction

"A young drama teacher in the West of Scotland suffers deep psychological problems which affect all areas of her life. She fails to find meaning in anything around her, but in her search she strips situations of their conventional values and sees them in a sharp, new light." --Publisher's description.

Recommended to 3 readers · About this book