FICTION G

FACING THE TANK

Patrick Gale
FACING THE TANK
The cathedral city of Barrowcester is the very synthesis of civilised middle-class England. But when Evan J Kirby arrives from America, intent on researching the local saint, he finds the community anything but blissful, peopled with an array of quirky ecccentrics in outrageous multi-sexual carryings-on.
303 pages paperback (Black Swan 1989)
Condition:: good (unread) with slighly faded top page edges

THE FACTS OF LIFE

Patrick Gale
THE FACTS OF LIFE
Edward Pepper, a young composer is exiled from his native Germany by the war and struck down by TB and falls in love with his doctor, Sally Banks. The years pass and Edward watches as his daughter and her children come to terms with some of the tougher aspects of life. Like when both his grandchildren, Alison and Jamie, fall prey to the charms of Sam, an enigmatic young builder and the bonds of love which bind them are tested to the limit. Jamie discovers that winning this particular sibling battle is not without its price.
511 pages hardback (Flamingo, 1995)
Condition: mint

KANSAS IN AUGUST

Patrick Gale
KANSAS IN AUGUST
In the hinterlands of West London, above the Shiva Late-Nite Deli, Hilary Metcalfe - twenty-five, eligible, budding actor-cum-teacher - celebrates the passing of his youth. But not for long.
Hilary ventures out into the night in search of adventure and returns with an unexpected addition to the family. Ever one to respond to a cry for help, Hilary can't refuse the wails of Dan, abandoned in his carrycot in a dripping subway. As Hilary encounters the delights and pitfalls of parenthood, Rufus, his lover, discovers the pleasures of love in the arms of Henry.
To all outward appearances, both men have found the focus they needed. Except that Henry is Hilary's sister. And Dan has been noticed by the DHSS who have their own plans for him!
140 pages hardback (Century, 1987)
Condition: very good

LITTLE BITS OF BABY

Patrick Gale
LITTLE BITS OF BABY
When Robin abandoned a brilliant career at university to start a new life at an eccentric island monastery, he gave no explanation, but it was thought to have something to do with the engagement of Candida, Robin's childhood friend, and Jake, their devoted and rich admirer.
Eight years later, Robin returns to the world and falls in love at the christening of Candida's baby. But he has little idea of the impact this will have on the tightly-knit circle around him, or of how extraordinary the consequences will be.
288 pages hardback (Chatto & Windus, 1989)
Condition: good

NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON

Catherine Gavin
NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON
Jacques Brunel, a young barrister, fights for his clients in the courts by day, and for his country by night as a member of the French Resistance. Polly Preston wants to be on the right side of the war and finds herself on the wrong side of the law. Fabienne Leroux is a patriot whose fear of treachery becomes an instinct to betray. Alain Renaudon misguided and betrayed, dies loyal to his friends.
A well-researched thriller of the French Resistance and the way things really were in 1942.
315 pages, paperback (Coronet, 1978)
Condition: has faded pages

THE COINERS

Andre Gide
THE COINERS
Gide's main preoccupation is with youth; the eager, curiously intiricate reactions of young minds. The emotional abandonment peculiar to adolescence, the paralysing introspection, the sens of walking a tight rope over unknown gulfs, have never been so well described as here, with a Parisian setting and a universal porce and application. Translated by Dorothy Bussy in Standard Edition of Works of Andre Gide.
420 pages hardback (Cassell, 1952)
Condition: D/w is worn and frayed and book has owner's signature

THE IMMORALIST

Andre Gide
THE IMMORALIST
This is the story of a man's rebellion against social and sexual conformity. The narrator is Michel - a rich, young, agnostic scholar who has just married and gone to stay with his wife in Algeria. Finding that he has tuberculosis, he gradually changes his life, abandoning the aspects of morality which restrict him, and following his own wants and needs.
This development is the author's theme, but it does not obscure the other characters in the novel: Michel's wife Marceline, various members of Parisian society, the youths on his estate in the country, and Arab boys.
159 pages paperback (Penguin, 1970)
Condition: has faded pages and owner's signature

EASE

Patrick Gale
EASE
Domina Tey is one of life's success stroies: an award-winnign playwright, living with an equally celebrated writer in a magazine-featured home. A lucky woman, who knowss and appreciates it. But at the moment, she's just not happy.
Convinced that a spell of seedy living would give both work and soul a much-needed spring-clean, she elopes with her typewriter in search of la sleazy vita - discovering it in Bayswater's tarnished bedsit jungle. Within a week she has settled into a warm friendly world of Lady Tilly (landlady and ex-mortician), all-night sauna clubs and midnight snackland; and her search for a fresh start becomes an overwhelming desire to make passionate love to a much younger man.
150 pages paperback (Flamingo, 1986) œ3.00
Condition: has faded page edges and owner's signature

THE MINERVA BOOK OF SHORT STORIES 4

Giles Gordon & David Hughes (ed.)
THE MINERVA BOOK OF SHORT STORIES 4
Impressive collection of 25 short stories from such writers as Margaret Attwood, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Nadine Gordimer, Rose Tremain and William Trevor among others.
308 pages paperback (Minerva, 1991)
Condition: has slightly faded top page edges

OIL & GASOLINE

Billi Gordon & Taylor-Anne Wentworth
OIL & GASOLINE: A Story of Two Survivors
In the pages of this heavily autobiographical novel, two outwardly different individuals discover that they have much in common. With an honesty usually expected only from small children or cameras, they grapple with their shared experiences: incest, dependency, child abuse, and the human will to survive. Their story is one of healing and power: the healing that can come only from forgiveness; the power that can come only from love
220 pages, paperback (Alyson, 1991)
Condition: good

THE FLOUNDER

Gunter Grass
THE FLOUNDER
The story begins in the Stone Age, when a talking fish, the Flounder, is caught by a fisherman, at the very spot where millenia later Grass' home tonw Dazig, will arise. Like the fish, the fisherman is immortal, and down the ages they move together. Despire the Flounder's advice, the narrator remains subject to women - all of them cooks. To his pregnant wife, the insatiable Ilsebill, he tells the tales of his entanglements with cooks throught his various lifetimes, one cook for each month of pregnancy, with two more thrown in for good measure.
547 pages hardback (Seckar & Warburg, 1977)
Condition: has faded d/w and page edges and owner's signature

HOMER'S DAUGHTER

Robert Graves
HOMER'S DAUGHTER
Graves has recreated a strong and convincing setting: the scene of the Odyssey which he believes occurred in Sicily. Based on the arguments made by Samuel Butler, who believed that the author of the Odyssey was not the blind and bearded Homer of legend, but the young woman who calls herself Nausicaa in the story.
283 pages paperback (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1982)
Condition: has faded cover

WIFE TO MR MILTON

Robert Graves
WIFE TO MR MILTON
Marie Powell, the willful daughter of a penniless gentleman farmer, was sixteen when John Milton married her for her dowry. The dowry proved illusory, and the Puritan genius proved a domineering prig with little sympathy for his sensuous, sharp-witted young wife. Graves lets Marie tell her own story: his sympathy for the woman's point of view is strong and uncannily perceptive.
378 pages paperback (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1979)
Condition: has faded cover and page edges

SERGEANT LAMB'S AMERICA

Robert Graves
SERGEANT LAMB'S AMERICA
The novel takes place in the early years of the American War of Independence and is based on the adventures of one Sergeant Lamb, a Dublin man in the service of His Majesty's Army. It begins with Lamb's early days in Dublin and ends with his arrival in Boston as a member of the regiment taken prisoner after Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga.
339 pages paperback (Academy Chicago, 1986)
Condition: good

DOCTOR FISCHER OF GENEVA OR THE BOMB PARTY

Graham Greene
DOCTOR FISCHER OF GENEVA OR THE BOMB PARTY
A black entertainment which is also a profound study in human greed.
139 pages hardback (Bodley Head, 1980)
Condition: has slightly faded d/w

THE MABINOGION

Lady Charlotte Guest
THE MABINOGION
A facsimile reproduction of the complete 1877 edition
504 pages paperback (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1977)
Condition: has faded spine and cover, otherwise good

THE GANGSTERS

Herve Guibert
THE GANGSTERS
The narrator, Herve, returns to Paris tormented by a painful attack of shingles, to discover that Louise and Suzanne, his two elderly great-aunts, are being terrorised and robbed by a gang of extortioners posing as building workers renovating their house. He calls the police, but the investigation fizzles out in a morass of inertia, buck-passing and covert racism.
Wearied, ill and sliding by degrees into paranoia, the narrator leaves for a holiday. With him goes Vincent, a friend whose ambiguous and menacing presence has become increasingly oppressive and who, at the end of the book, may - or may not - murder him.
107 pages paperback (Serpent's Tail, 1991) Condition: has slightly faded page edges

EACH MAN IN HIS DARKNESS

Julien Green
EACH MAN IN HIS DARKNESS
The story begins with the arrival of a young man at a small country station in the US. The characters in the book all struggle with their emotions, their sensuality, their age, their appearance, their faith and their emptiness but the two principle themes are Christianism and homosexuality.
347 pages paperback (Quartet 1990)
Condition: good with slighly soiled unlaminated cover and page edges.

ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

ELECTIVE AFFINITIES

This is a fictional work which depicts the emotional turmoil into which Eduard and Charlotte are thrown by the introduction into their home of two fresh faces.

Goethe had lived with Christine Vulpius for eighteen years before he married her in 1809. Less than two years later he fell in love with a girl of nineteen and Elective Affinities is a reflection of the conflicting loyalties in his heart as well as being a witty portrayal of the life of the landed nobility in Germany at the beginning of the 19^th century.

300 pages paperback (Penguin, 1971)

Condition: has faded pages and owner’s signature

THE LIFE OF A USELESS MAN

Maxim Gorky

THE LIFE OF A USELESS MAN

Gorky began this novel in 1907, less than two years after the unsuccessful armed rebellion on Bloody Sunday, with which he had been closely involved.

Frail, battered and orphaned, Yevsey Klimkov creeps through the undergrowth of life; his intelligence remains observant, but his will is cowed, and he is easily coerced into spying for the military in support of the Tsar. He makes some friends who are capable of defying oppression, and his heart responds to them – but it is this association which is going to bring him to the terrible crisis of his life, which coincides with the insurrection and its suppression.

284 pages paperback (Penguin, 1972)

Condition: has faded pages and owner’s signature