Twentieth Century Classics

From amazon dot com: "This slim book starts with the meeting of an English traveler and an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman on an Aegean island. He is captivated by her painting of a busy Caribbean port in the shadow of a volcano, which leads her to tell him the story of her childhood in that town back at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tale she unfolds, set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, is one of romantic intrigue and decadence involving the descendants of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. Then, on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ball, a whole world comes to a catastrophic and haunting end." From Google Books: "Originally published in 1953, this novel was immediately hailed as a rare sweep of color across the drab post-war years. Fermor's writing about this tropical island is as beautiful and haunting as the sound of the violins rising from the water, which is all that remains of the island and its inhabitants."

A classic 20th-century novel. Sammy Rice, a weapons scientist and one of the "backroom boys" of World War Two, suffers from a crippling disability that has left him cynical, disillusioned, and riddled with self-doubt. But, when the enemy begins dropping a new form of booby bomb, causing terrible casualties, Sammy alone has the know-how to defuse it. Face to face with real danger, he must confront his inadequacies - if he is to succeed.

Langston Hughes's spare yet eloquent tribute to his people has been cherished for generations. Now, acclaimed photographer Charles R. Smith Jr. interprets this beloved poem in vivid sepia photographs that capture the glory, the beauty, and the soul of being a black American today.

"Sir Osbert's novel Before the Bombardment is one of the finest pieces of sustained satire in English; it can take its place beside The Way of All Flesh without apology." - Robertson Davies

A most enjoyable book about a girl of 23 who is bringing up 3 brothers in a small town in the Scottish Borders soon after the First World War. A very interesting picture of life at that time in that place, and at that social level (enough money for a live-in servant, but not fashionable living). An engaging heroine, with many and varied friends. Her social conscience, and the tales of the pasts of her friends, broaden the picture we get of life at the time. But it is the story of a girl and her heart, not a history lesson. With a little poking fun at some of the characters one might meet in a small town. This book has a sequel "Priorsford", and another book set close by, "Pink Sugar", mentions some of the same characters in the time between the other two books and has been sometimes packaged with them as an omnibus.

The amorous and pastoral problems of a very liberal minister. Satirical, light comedy.

From the dust jacket blurb of the Book Club Edition: Like George Orwell's classic, 1984, Facial Justice is a novel about the New State -- both terrifying and believable. It is a revelation of a life to come, founded on self-abasement and equality; all citizens are delinquents: none can be branded worse than another...

Riceyman Steps, first published in 1923, is set in “dingy and sordid” Clerkenwell, in central London, where “existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter.” It’s there that Henry Earlforward runs a gloomy, dusty store full of secondhand books. He eats less and less with every day, keeps his young servant Elsie working long hours for minimal pay, and never lights a candle when darkness will do. One day he takes notice of Violet, a middle-aged widow who owns a confectionary shop nearby, and they become husband and wife soon after. It quickly becomes clear that his miserliness, his “grand passion and vice,” has rubbed off on Violet, threatening her chances at happiness just as much as his. His obsession also imperils Elsie’s ability to help her lover Joe, who returned from World War I with shell shock, and who desperately needs her. The year it was published Riceyman Steps won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Its tragic tone represents a departure from many of the novels and stories Arnold Bennett set in the “Five Towns,” the fictional location inspired by his Staffordshire childhood. Instead, it reflects the pain and disappointment of the years immediately following the Great War. As Earlforward tells a customer early on, “We’re not quite straight here yet. The truth is, we haven’t been straight since 1914.”

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.