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Title: The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
Genre: Fiction – Classic                                                                                                            Author: Umberto Eco                                                                                        Edition:  Published by Vintage Books 2006 – Midsize Paperback – Good secondhand condition.

In this fascinating book by Umberto Eco, a rare-book dealer has suffered a bizarre form of memory loss.  He can remember every book he has ever read but nothing about his own life. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws to his old family home and searches through the boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums and diaries kept in the attic. And so Yambo relives his youth: Mussolini, Catholic education, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire. His memories run wild and life racing before his eyes takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the frames to capture one simple, innocent image..that of his first love.

Title: Ben Hur
Genre: Fiction/Classic                                                                                                             Author:  Lew Wallace
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 1996 – Paperback - Good secondhand condition.

Ben-Hur spans some thirty years and is set in many different parts of the ancient world.  It is a novel about the life and eventual conversion to Christianity of Judah Ben-Hur, heir of a rich orthodox Jewish family. Betrayed by his ambitious Roman friend, Messala, Ben-Hur’s fortunes change drastically….

Title: Germinal
Genre: Fiction/Classic                                                                                                             Author:  Emile Zola
Edition:  Published by Penguin 1994 - Small Paperback - Average secondhand condition (shows age spots, still tightly bound).

Into the grim mining village of Montsou comes Etienne Lantier, a penniless down-and-out with no mining experience. Learning his trade from the beginning. Etienne becomes part of the struggle between capital and labour in Second Empire France, where the poor are caught up in the relentless grind of exploitation and misery. Etienne comes to lead the rebellious miners…

Title: Orlando
Genre: Fiction/Classic                                                                                                             Author:  Virginia Woolf
Edition:  Published by Group 2011 - Small Paperback - Very good secondhand condition.

Orlando, deciding not to grow old, pursues his quest for passion, adventure, fulfilment and protracted youth. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha ?  Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man ? And what form will Orlando take on the journey – a nobleman; gypsy; writer?  Man or..woman?

Title: The Witches of Eastwick
Genre: Fiction/Classic                                                                                                             Author:  John Updike
Edition:  Published by Penguin 2009 - Small Paperback - Good secondhand condition (cover shows signs of wear).

The air of Eastwick breeds witches - women whose powerful longings can stir up thunderstorms and fracture domestic peace.  Jane, Alexandra and Sukie, divorced and dangerous, have formed a coven. Into the void of Eastwick breezes Darryl Van Horne, a charismatic magus of a man who entrances the trio.

Title: Rob Roy
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                    Author:  Sir Walter Scott
Edition:  Published by Everyman 1995 - Paperback - Good secondhand condition. (small tear front page).

Young Hero Francis Osbaldistone is plunged into intrigue and adventure of the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion when he is falsely accused of highway robbery on his journey to the North of England.  In his fight for both love and justice he must outwit his villainous cousin, Rashleigh, and travel to Scotland – a land of breathtaking beauty and dark foreboding – where his salvation can only be obtained with the help of the greatest outlaw of all, Robert Roy Campbell MacGregor.

Title: Anna Karenina
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                 Author:  Leo Tolstoy
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 1999 - Small Paperback – New.   Complete and Unabridged.

Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density.

Title: War & Peace
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                 Author:  Leo Tolstoy
Edition:  Published by Penguin 2006 - Small Paperback - Very good secondhand condition.

St. Petersburg 1805: a city of glittering parties and socialites.  Into this scene step three young people seeking fulfilment in their different ways. Pierre is looking for life’s meaning, but his cheating wife is driving him insane.  Cynical Andrey is unable to find true love.  And Natasha’s impulsive and affectionate nature could threaten her future happiness.  But their lives – and the lives of so many of their fellow countryment are about to change forever. Napoleon’s army is approaching, and soon battle and terror will engulf them.

Title: Valley of the Dolls
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                                       Author: Jacqueline Susann 
Edition:  Published by Corgi 1988 – Small Paperback - Good secondhand condition. (name whited out).

First published in 1966 – Valley of the Dolls is one of the most celebrated novels of all time.  It is the story of three of the most exciting women you’ll ever meet. They live in a world where sex is a success weapon, where love is the smiling mask of hate – a world where magic tickets to peace or oblivion are “dolls” – pep pills, sleeping pills, red pills, blue pills – and, sometimes, death pills…..

Title: The Mill on the Floss (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  George Eliot
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 1999 – Paperback - New.  Complete and Unabridged.

As the headstrong Maggie Tulliver grows into womanhood, the deep love which she has for her brother Tom turns into conflict, because she cannot reconcile his bourgeois standards with her own lively intelligence.  Maggie is unable to adapt to her community or break free from it, and the result , on more than one level, is tragedy.

Title: Middlemarch (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  George Eliot
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2000 – Paperback – New.  Complete and Unabridged.

Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. It is set during the time of social unrest prior to the first Reform Bill of 1832. It is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.

Title: Homer – The Iliad (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction  / Classic                                                                                           Author:  Homer
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2003 – Paperback – Good Secondhand quality.

The product of more than a decade’s continuous work (1598-1611), Chapman’s translation of Homer’s great poem of war is a magnificent testimony to the power of the Iliad. It retells the story of Achilles, the great warrior, and his terrible wrath before the walls of besieged Troy, and the destruction it wreaks on both Greeks and Trojans.

Title: Homer – The Odyssey (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction  / Classic                                                                                                           Author:  Homer
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2002 – Paperback - Very good secondhand condition.

Homer’s great epic describes the many adventures of Odysseus, Greek warrior, as he strives over many years to return to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. Odysseus’s quick witted heroismn his colourful adventures, his endurance, his love for his wife and son have the same power to move and inspire readers today as they did in Archaic Greece, 2800 years ago.

Title: Heart of Darkness & Other Stories (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction  / Classic                                                                                                           Author:  Joseph Conrad
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 1999 – Paperback – New.

Heart of Darkness is a chilling tale of horror, which, as the author intended, is capable of many interpretaions. Set in the Congo, during the period of rapid colonial expansion in the nineteenth century, the story deals with the highly disturbing effects of economic, social and political exploitation on European and African societies and cataclysmic behaviour this induced in some individuals. The other two stories in this book – Youth and The End of the Tether concern the sea and those who sail upon it.

Title: Nostromo (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction  / Classic                                                                                                           Author:  Joseph Conrad
Edition: Wordsworth Classic 2000 – Paperback – New.  Complete and Unabridged.

Nostromo is the only man capable of the decisive action needed to save the silver of the San Tome mine and secure independence for Sulaco, Occidental Province of the Latin American state of Costaguana.  Is his integrity as unassailable as everyone believes, or will his ideals, like those which have inspired the struggling state itself, buckle under economic and political pressures ?

Title: The Secret Agent (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  Joseph Conrad
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2000 – Paperback – New.   Complete and Unabridged.

Conrad’s “monstrous town” is London, and his story of espionage and counter-espionage, anarchists and embassies, is a detective story that becomes the story of Winnie Verloc’s tenacity in maintaining her devotion to her peculiar and simple-minded brother, Stevie, as they pursue their very ordinary lives above a rather dubious shop in the back streets of Soho.

Title: Lord Jim (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  Joseph Conrad
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2002 – Paperback - New.   Complete and Unabridged.

The pivotal moment in Lord Jim occurs when the protagonist, the disgraced first officer of the Patna recounts how he leapt from what he believed to be a sinking ship, abandoning its passengers. Jim tells Marlow, a middle-aged British merchant seaman who is narrating the tale at this point, “I had jumped…it seems”.  Lord Jim at its most basic level,  is a story of one man’s failure to live up to a self-imposed moral ideal.

Title: Great Expectations (New)
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  Charles Dickens
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2007 - Paperback - New. Complete and Unabridged.

Great Expectations traces the growth of the book’s narrator, the orphan Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abounds with some of the most memorable characters. As Pip unravels the truth behind his own “great expectations” in his quest to become a gentleman, through a series of thrilling adventures.

Title: Little Dorrit (Wordsworth Classic)
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                             Author:  Charles Dickens
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 1996 – Midsize Paperback - Good secondhand condition.

Little Dorrit is classic Dickensian tale of imprisonment – both literal and symbolic. William Dorrit lives in Marshalsea prison, where he has been consigned for many years for debt with his three children, Edward, Fanny and Amy – the diminutive, sweet, amiable and generous “Little Dorrit”. Amy was born in prison, spends most of her life there and in the end chooses to be married in custody. Indisputably one of Dickens’ finest works.

Title: Sons and Lovers
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  D.H. Lawrence
Edition:  Published by Penguin Books 1987 – Small paperback - Good secondhand condition.

Living on the Nottinghamshire coalfields, the Morel family are beset with conflict. Gertrude Morel, restless and disillusioned with her inarticulate working class husband, pours her energies and aspirations into her son Paul. But inevitably tensions develop when Paul falls in love and seeks to escape from his family ties.

Title: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  D.H. Lawrence
Edition:  Published by Penguin Books 1997 – small paperback - Good secondhand condition.  Complete & Unabridged.

The story of Constance Chatterley’s sexual awakening through her affair with Mellors the gamekeeper has remained one of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century.  Frustrated and ensnared by her marriage to Clifford Chatterley, an invalid, Constance is deeply unhappy and unfulfilled.  Her relationship with Mellors rekindles her sexual feelings and brings her back to life. She decides, however, to leave England to live with her sister Hilda and, though pregnant, she finds her own form of personal freedom.

Title: Women in Love
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  D.H. Lawrence
Edition:  Published Penguin Books 1986 – Small Paperback - Good secondhand condition (ex library).

The Brangwen sisters are now teachers in Beldover, a small town dominated by the great colliery that seems to express the full dehumanizing ugliness of industrialization. Here Ursula falls in love with Birkin – in some ways a self-portrait of Lawrence – while Gudrun has a tragic and demonaic affair with Gerald, son of the colliery owner.

Title: The Plumed Serpent
Genre: Fiction / Classics                                                                                                            Author:  D.H. Lawrence
Edition:  Published Wordsworth Editions 1995 – Paperback - Very Good secondhand condition. Complete & Unabridged.

In this disturbing novel, symptomatic of Lawrence’s later work, his pagan side finds full expression. Kate Leslie, an Irish widow visiting Mexico, finds herself equally repelled and fascinated by what she sees as the primitive cruelty of the country. As she becomes involved with the intellectual and politicial leader Don Ramon, and General Cipriano, a pure-bred Indian of raw sexual energy, her perceptions change.

Title: Dracula
Genre: Fiction  / Classic                                                                                                           Author:  Bram Stoker
Edition:  Published by Penguin 1993 - Midsize Paperback -Very Good secondhand condition.

Dracula, perhaps the ulitmate terror myth, probes deeply into the questions of human identity and sanity, sexual power versus sexual desire. Told in journal fragments that cannot provide any single reliable perspective, Dracula (1897) is at the same time intensely Romantic and very modern. It unfolds the story of a Transylvanian Don Juan, the aristocratic vampire Count Dracula who preys on desirous damsels, and of the mission launched to destroy him from the perplexingly appropriate setting of a lunatic asylum.

Title: Farewell to Arms
Genre: Fiction / Classics                                                                                                            Author:  Ernest Hemingway
Edition:  Published by Arrow Books 2004 – small paperback – very good secondhand copy.

In 1918 Ernest Hemingway enlisted to fight in the “war to end all wars”. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteers and the men and women he encounters along the way with conviction and brutal honesty.  A love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.

Title: Across the River and into the Trees
Genre: Fiction / Classics                                                                                                            Author:  Ernest Hemingway
Edition:  Published by Arrow Books 2004 – small paperback – very good secondhand condition.

This is Hemingway’s powerful, poignant story of the inability to capture lost youth.  The War is just over. In Venice, a city elaborately and affectionately described, the American Colonel, Richard Cantrell falls passionately in love with Renata, a young Italian countess who has a profile that could break your or anyone else’s heart.

Title: Death in the Afternoon
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  Ernest Hemingway
Edition:  Published by Arrow Books 2004 – small paperback – good quality secondhand.

A fascinating look at the history, grandeur and pageantry of bullfighting. Death in the Afternoon is also a deeper contemplation on the nature of cowardice and bravery, sport and tragedy, and is enlivened throughout by Hemingway’s pungent commentary on life and literature.

Title: Northanger Abbey
Genre: Fiction  / Classics                                                                                                           Author:  Jane Austen
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2007 – Paperback – New.  Complete & Unabridged.

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland, who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her.

Title: Persuasion
Genre: Fiction  / Classics                                                                                                           Author:  Jane Austen
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2007 – Paperback – New.   Complete and Unabridged.

Anne Elliot is one of Jane Austen’s quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances.  A woman of no importance, she manoeuvres in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love Captain Wentworth did in the wars. 

Title: Emma
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                             Author:  Jane Austen
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2007 – Paperback – New.  Complete & Unabridged.

Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a “heroine whom no one but myself will much like” : but Emma is irresistible.  “Handsome, clever and rich” Emma is also an “imaginist”, on fire with speculation and foresight. She sees the signs of romance all around her, but thinks she will never be married. Her matchmaking maps out relationships that Jane Austen ironically tweaks into a clearer perspective. Judgement and imagination are matched in games the reader too can enjoy, and the end is a triumph of understanding.

Title: Pride and Prejudice
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  Jane Austen
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2007 - Paperback - New.   Complete and Unabridged.

Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners.  In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim – that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. In this she is mocked by her cynical and indolent husband. A great classic with an irresistible heroine.

Title: Sense & Sensibility
Genre: Fiction  / Classics                                                                                                      Author:  Jane Austen
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 2007 - Paperback - New.   Complete & Unabridged.

Sense & Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent two qualities. Elinor’s character is one of Augustan detachment, while Marianne, a fervent disciple of the Romantic Age, learns to curb her passionate nature in the interests of survival.  

Title: War and Peace
Genre: Popular Fiction / Classic                                                                                                         Author: Leo Tolstoy
Edition:  Published by Penguin Books 2006 – Small Paperback – Very good secondhand.

St. Petersburg 1805: a city of glittering parties and socialites. Into this scene step three young people seeking fulfilment in their different ways. Pierre is looking for life’s meaning, but his cheating wife is driving him insane. Cynical Andrey is unable to find true love. And Natasha’s impulsive and affectionate nature could threaten her future happiness. But their lives – and the lives of so many of their fellow countrymen – are about to change forever. Napoleon’s army is approaching and soon battle and terror will engulf them. They must learn to survive when their world is thrown into total war.

Title: Perfume
Genre: Thriller                                                                                                                        Author: Patrick Suskind

A cult International bestseller, Perfume is a bewitching, darkly humerous fable of desire, obsession and death.
Small paperback , Penguin, published 2007. New copy.

Title: Women in Love
Genre: Fiction / Classic                                                                                                            Author:  D.H. Lawrence
Edition:  Wordsworth Classic 1999 - Paperback - Good secondhand condition. Complete & Unabridged.

The Brangwen sisters are now teachers in Beldover, a small town dominated by the great colliery that seems to express the full dehumanizing ugliness of industrialization. Here Ursula falls in love with Birkin – in some ways a self-portrait of Lawrence – while Gudrun has a tragic and demonaic affair with Gerald, son of the colliery owner.