FICTION I-L

DORUNTINE

Ismail Kadare
DORUNTINE
In a medieval Albanian town, two women, mother and daughter, are on their death-bed. Three years have passed since Doruntine married a foreigner and went off with him to his home far to the west in Bohemia. During those years there had been no communication with her. War broke out, and of her nine brothers, some died in battle, some of plague caught from enemy soldiers. All were dead. And last night Doruntine came home - and brought her brother Constantine with her - even though he was three years dead.
Translated from French by Jon Rothschild.
180 pages hardback (Saqi Books, 1988)
Condition: D/w has faded spin and owner's signature

FROZEN MUSIC

Francis King
FROZEN MUSIC
King returns to India, scene of his own childhood. Rupert, recently divorced, returns to his childhood home with his father and his father's new wife, a Finnish girl closer in age to Rupert himself. The India they visit and the India they each separately recall are distinct - yet the images subtly merge in ways which point to a past mystery. But it is a mystery which may yet be re-enacted in the present.
Dark themes of things done and undone are here illuminated against the vivid backdrop of India itself.
144 pages paperback (Arena, 1988)
Condition: has slightly shelf-soiled page edges

SWAMP ANGEL

Dorothy Langley
SWAMP ANGEL
This is the story of Bertha, a strong passionate woman, caught in a wrteched marriage to a bully. Of her four children, she is most inv9olved emotionally with her oldest son, Clance, who has artistic talents and sensitivity. Bertha is caught up by the young male schoolteacher's sympathy for Clance, and all her pent-up sexual feelings are released in desire for the teacher. In the primitive rural Missouri of sixty years ago, these feelings of Bertha's inevitably sweep the novel to a powerful and harrowing conclusion.
166 pages paperback (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1982)
Condition: has slightly shelf worn page edges

THE BALLAD & THE SOURCE

Rosamund Lehmann
THE BALLAD & THE SOURCE
Fourteen year old Rebecca is living in the country with her family when Mrs Jardine, an enigmatic and powerful old woman, returns to her property in the neighbourhood. The two familes, once linked in the past, mingle again, with the result that Rebecca becomes drawn into the strange and passionate complications of the old lady's life, with her husband, her errant daughter and her grandchildren.
318 pages hardback (Collins, 1978)
Condition: has dust stained top page edges and owner's signature

LAOCOON, NATHAN THE WISE & MINNA VON BARNHELM

Gottfried E Lessing
LAOCOON, NATHAN THE WISE & MINNA VON BARNHELM
296 pages hardback (J M Dent, 1930)
Condition: Everyman's Library edition with owner's signature

MEN AT WORK

Michael Levey
MEN AT WORK
Sidney Fieldare's past has had its moments of pleasurable human contact - even a hectic love-affair with a vivid, high-flying female official in the Treasury. But now he is very much alone. His abrupt awareness of the appeal, unconsciously excercised, of one of the "men at work" around him us at first disturbing. Yet the mere prescence of Alf enlivens his own existence. What happens next is far from foreseen.
270 pages hardback (Hamish Hamilton, 1989) Condition: has slightly faded page edges

THE RAIN GOD

Arturo Islas
THE RAIN GOD
Set in a fictional small town on the Texas-Mexican border, it tells the funny, sad and quietly outrageous saga of the children and grandchildren of Mama Chona - the indomitable matriarch of the Angel clan who fled bullets and blood in the 1911 revolution for a gringo land of promise.
Islas paints an unforgettable family portrait of souls haunted by ghosts and madness - sinners torn by loves, lusts and dangerous desires. From gentle hearts plagued by violence and epic delusions to a child who can fortell the coming of rain, here is a rich poignant tla eof outcasts struggling to live and die with dignity.
180 pages paperback (Avon, 1991)
Condition: good

ACT OF DARKNESS

Francis King
ACT OF DARKNESS
The novel opens in India during the 1930s, at the lush summer house of the Thompson family. Father, stepmother, daughter, governess, ayah - the whole shocked family are under suspicion. A "confession" is made. But in King's hands the spiciest of evil motives are merely decoys, and the truth seems to wink and slither forever out of reach.
332 pages paperback (Penguin, 1984)
Condition: has faded pages and owner's signature

THE HARD WAY

Michael Lassell
THE HARD WAY
A first collection of renowned gay writer Lassell's poetry, fiction and essays which offers a chronicle of post-Stonewall gay life as well as being a compendium of the authors work.
319 paperback (Richard Kasak, 1995)
Condition: good

IN TRANSLATION

Annamarie Jagose
IN TRANSLATION
Helena begins an affair with the renowned translator, Navaz Nicholson, and travels with her to India, a country she never fully understands. Abandoned by Navaz, a strange pride does not allow Helena to return home and she maintains anonymous contact with her lover by intercepting installments of the Japanese novel Navaz is translating. Rewriting first a word here, a phrase there, she finally takes over completely, writing the novel's love triangle beyond its original meaning.
191 pages paperback (Allen & Unwin, 1995)
Condition: good

TRYING TO GROW

Firdaus Kanga
TRYING TO GROW
It was his sister Dolly's idea to call him Brit, short for brittle, because of his bones. Besides, Parsees don't like long names, and it pleased his mother because it sounded so English. It's not much fun when you reach eighteen and you're still the size of an eight year old, and Brit starts to try his own way of growing. His sexual adventures in Bombay soon show that he's different in another way.
242 pages hardback (Bloomsbury, 1990)
Condition: has slightly worn edges

FROM THE BROKEN TREE

Lee Langley
FROM THE BROKEN TREE
For three generations the family fought to survive. They withstood the violence and prejudice of the Polish ghetto, they struggled to live in London tenements as grim and pitiless as a Dickens novel, they evaded the dangers of Nazi Germany, to build a position of wealth and security which, in the end, was just as precarious.
For Leah, Manny and Joe, who loved, hated, despaired and strived, the experiences were all different. Only their past and their Jewishness remained the same.
446 pages, paperback (Penguin, 1980)
Condition: has very faded pages

THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY

John Le Carre
THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY
'The ultimate espionage novel. London, Hong Kong, Valentiane are the setting and George Smiley and company are back.
543 pages, paperback (Pan, 1978)
Condition: has faded pages and owner's signature