The traveller's library

On Friday nights a group of six different and disparate women meet. They range in age from Jules, who is 22 and wants to be a DJ, to Eleanor, who is a retired professional and walks with a stick. And then one of them meets a man and the whole dynamic changes. The bonds that have been so closely forged are tested.

The year is 1814, and the newly married Zachariah Coleman is restless. An ardent Dissenter, the tensions in his deeply held religious convictions are coming to the surface. A convinced Republican, his political commitments are leading him into conflict. And while he longs to love his young wife, he begins to fear he cannot. In due course, Zachariah becomes involved with the march of Blanketeers that left Manchester for London in 1817, but which quickly ended in disaster. Zachariah himself flees, his life changed forever. Once this story plays itself out, the narrative moves on twenty years to the next generation, and to the sleepy town of Cowfold where, again, the winds of political and religious change are blowing. Zachariah, now resident in London, has friends in the village. Their story begins to echo Zachariah’s own, albeit on a different scale, and with different contours and consequences. The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane is the third novel by Mark Rutherford, the pen name of William Hale White. His writing career developed relatively late in his life: he published his first novel at the age of fifty while working as a parliamentary reporter. He published his novels in such secret that his own family was not aware of them—which was his intention, as the novels were deeply autobiographical, and he wished to avoid associating his fiction with his family.

In 1912, a young D.H. Lawrence traveled to northern Italy. He spent nearly a year on the shores of Lake Garda, lodged in elegantly decaying houses set amid lemon groves and surrounded by the fading life of traditional Italy. It was here that he wrote Sons and Lovers and here too that we see the early flowering of the prose that would come to define Lawrence' s oeuvre. This is a travel book unlike any other, where landscapes and people are backdrops to Lawrence s deeper wanderings into philosophy, life, nature, religion and the fate of man. With sensuous descriptions of late harvests, darkening days and the fragility of ancient traditions, Twilight in Italy is suffused with nostalgia and premonition. For, looming over the idyll of rural Italy are the arrival of the industrial age and the brewing storm of World War I; upheavals that would change the face of Europe forever."

On a Chinese Screen was first published in 1922 by Heinemann Publishers, London. Its 58 short vignettes are based on Maugham’s travels along the Yangtze River from 1919 to 1920. Although later editions of the book added the subtitle “Sketches of Life in China,” there are actually only a few descriptions of the places he visited and the local Chinese people he met; rather, Maugham focuses on relaying his encounters with a range of Europeans living and working in the country. Maugham is quite critical of many of them and their lack of interest in, and sometimes disdain, for the country and its people, except for the extent to which their careers and pockets could benefit. His sketches highlight the difficulties that many expatriates encounter while living in a foreign culture.

“A young poet tramped across America, crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic as a cattleman, begged and peddled in England, developing meanwhile in the power to write with rare perception and beauty.” — A.L.A. Catalog 1926

Ambrose Bierce’s second major short story collection, Can Such Things Be? collected nearly all of Bierce’s supernatural horror stories. Bierce himself was a skeptic of the supernatural, having once written a satirical essay “The Clothing of Ghosts,” in which he insisted that “The materialized spook appealing to our senses for recognition of his ghostly character must authenticate himself otherwise than by familiar and remembered habiliments. He must be credentialed by nudity—and that regardless of temperature or who may happen to be present.” Despite his personal skepticism, Bierce was able to capture the essence of the supernatural horror story. “The Moonlit Road” is a strong example, providing three distinct vantage points of the same events, and both “The Death of Halpin Frayser” and “The Damned Thing” are frequently anthologized as pioneers in the genre. Not all stories in the collection are strictly “ghost stories”—“Moxon’s Master” is one of the first examples in English literature to describe a robotic thinking machine (and the fate of its master), and “Haïta the Shepherd” is a tale of a young man’s search for meaning in his life. Bierce also plays with the idea of holes in reality in the various “Mysterious Disappearances” stories, portals to horrifying locations in “The Spook House,” and parallel dimensions or altered states in “A Psychological Shipwreck” and “The Realm of the Unreal.” H.P. Lovecraft discusses Bierce in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” quoting Samuel Loveman: “In Bierce, the evocation of horror becomes for the first time, not so much the prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hack, take on an unholy horror, a new and unguessed transformation.” Like his other major published collection of short stories, Bierce updated and modified his stories for each new edition. This collection includes all stories as revised and published in his 1910 Collected Works, Volume III: Can Such Things Be?, as well as several stories from the “Bodies of the Dead” section in an earlier 1903 edition, which were not included in his Collected Works.