Sigmund Freud’s theories of the personality and the unconscious mind received international attention in his lifetime as psychoanalysis became an accepted method of treating emotional disorders. Freud’s ideas rather quickly became the basis of an approach to literary criticism that… Read More ›
A mystery, a thriller, and a low-keyed romance, this novel takes the form of a puzzle. Life follows its uneventful course at The Franchise, a somewhat decayed estate inherited by a mother and daughter, Mrs. Sharpe and Miss Marion Sharpe,… Read More ›
Volume five in the Children of Violence series, this novel follows Landlocked (1965) and concludes the adventures of Martha Quest in an apocalyptic vision of a future in which human beings overcome the limitations of communication and mutual understanding through… Read More ›
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in the year it was published, this short novel examines Irish-English relations on the intimate scale of family life. Two “great houses,” Woodcombe Park in Dorset, England, and Kilneagh in County… Read More ›
A novel that sometimes disguises itself as a scholarly treatise, Flaubert’s Parrot was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1984. The novel’s structure showcases the stylized self-awareness that is characteristic of postmodernism. The author dispenses with much of the traditional… Read More ›
The three novels in this sequence include Herself Surprised (1941), To Be a Pilgrim (1942), and The Horse’s Mouth (1944); Cary’s heirs collected the three titles into one volume in 1957 and christened it First Trilogy. Joyce Cary had been… Read More ›
A legendarily difficult novel, Finnegans Wake is the culmination of James Joyce’s life and work as an artist. It is a playground, a wrecking yard, a battlefield of literary experimentation and mythic allegory, placing demands on its readers that can… Read More ›
Set in India in 1975 and 1976 under an impending political crisis, A Fine Balance follows the lives of four characters in a coastal city in India (Mumbai, formerly Bombay) and the many other figures to whom they are connected…. Read More ›
A suspenseful thriller that alternates between the story of a potential victim and that of her potential predator, Felicia’s Journey follows the title character from her bleak young life in Ireland to an unknown future in England. She is pursuing… Read More ›
Winner of the Booker Prize (known then as the Booker-McConnell Prize) in 1991, this novel of magic realism is set in the African nation of Nigeria and serves as an allegory of Nigeria’s transformation from a British colony to an… Read More ›
Drawing on her own experience with mental illness and the institutions that manage those afflicted by it, Janet Frame creates a novel that is itself a part of her psychiatric therapy: writing used as a path to greater wholeness and… Read More ›
An epic novel that was published the same year Patrick White won the Nobel Prize, The Eye of the Storm is set in Australia, White’s native country, and covers the period of the first 70 years of the 20th century…. Read More ›
As this last novel by Elizabeth Bowen opens, Eva Trout is deceiving people into believing that she has been engaged and has tragically lost her beloved. In fact, Eva is emotionally stunted: her mother had abandoned her infant daughter upon… Read More ›
Toward the end of World War II, in the Villa San Girolamo in Italy, four shattered survivors cope with the physical and emotional suffering the war has brought about. They come from different parts of Europe and the dissolving British… Read More ›
Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 2000 and a selection on the short list for the Booker Prize, English Passengers uses multiple narrators and textual devices to tell the 19th-century story of a voyage to Tasmania…. Read More ›
In this comic novel, Julian Barnes satirizes a publicity campaign to increase tourism in England by reinventing the nation as a commercial brand of entertainment. The novel begins and ends in England—that is to say, in “Old England,” the island… Read More ›
A novel that examines love, faith, fidelity, and saintliness, The End of the Affair is one of Greene’s Catholic novels, along with Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and A Burnt-Out… Read More ›
When four women rent a villa in Italy for a month, they find their lives changed for the better as a result—especially their love lives—in this example of romance fiction. Elizabeth Von Arnim narrates this story through the third-person omniscient… Read More ›
Based on Ballard’s childhood experiences in a Japanese concentration camp outside Shanghai, this autobiographical novel became a successful film adaptation for director Steven Spielberg in 1985. The story unfolds in three parts, opening in Shanghai on the eve of the… Read More ›
Named for King Edward VII, this era begins in the late 19th century, when Edward was Prince of Wales, and lasts through the first decade of the 20th century, covering the fin de siècle culture of England and the British… Read More ›
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