The Cruise of the Rolling Junk by F Scott Fitzgerald – review
F Scott Fitzgerald's picaresque memoir reflects the American obsession with the automobileIn the summer of 1920, F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, three months married, decided to flee the ennui of the New England noon, and so they fired up their dilapidat...
No Surrender by Constance Maud – review
Constance Maud's 1911 call to arms from the suffragette soapbox is a powerful and authentic social document of its timeTwo years before she threw herself under the king's horse at Epsom, Emily Wilding Davison reviewed a book that, she declared, "breath...
The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty – review
Eudora Welty's short stories are loaded with myth and fables, as well as the rich cadences of the American southIn the fictional Mississippi Delta town of Morgana, King MacLain walks out one morning, leaves his hat by the river, and disappears. Like fa...
Jules et Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché – review
A perceptive exploration of desireA shadowy figure amid the 20th-century beau monde – friend to Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and buyer for the American art collector John Quinn – Henri-Pierre Roché waited until his 70s to publish his teasingly semi...
Ginger, You’re Barmy by David Lodge – review
David Lodge's 1962 comic novel about national service offers little sign of Britain's dawning sexual revolutionLanguishing in the dog days of national service, David Lodge's 1962 novel is a close contemporary and very English bedfellow to Joseph Heller...
Dracula by Bram Stoker – review
Bram Stoker's 1897 gothic masterpiece is an uncanny reflection of the concerns of the ageThe latest generation of his monstrous progeny might have been something of a disappointment to Bram Stoker's Dracula, but the extent to which he has infected our ...
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles – review
Named by Tennessee Williams as his favourite book, Two Serious Ladies (first published in 1943) is a singular achievement – a modernist cult classic, and Jane Bowles's only novel.Bowles, the darling of the avant garde, anatomises women's place in soc...
Poison Penmanship by Jessica Mitford – review
Jessica Mitford's exposé of the seamier side of the USA highlights a generous, exuberant witHailed by Time magazine as "Queen of the Muckrakers", Jessica Mitford had a talent for investigative journalism that brought her a very different kind of fame ...
Precious by Sapphire | Book review
Recently adapted for film, Precious is the fictional diary of Claireece Precious Jones. Obese, illiterate and sexually abused by both her parents, Precious gives birth, aged 12, to a "Down sinder" daughter, and is expelled from school when her second incestuous pregnancy is discovered. Sapphire is unflinching in her...
The Letters of Samuel Pepys, edited by Guy de la Bédoyère | Book review
Drawing together more than 30 unpublished letters, this new collection spans Pepys's entire political career, and a fascinating period of British history. While the early letters contain rare vignettes of political life in the dying days of the Protectorate, the later correspondence maps the complex web of loyalties and...
