18 books like Clayhanger
Mr. Scarborough's Family
It will be necessary, for the purpose of my story, that I shall go back more than once from the point at which it begins, so that I may explain with the least amount of awkwardness the things as they occurred, which led up to the incidents that I am about to tell; and I may as well say that these first four chapters of the book - though they may be thought to be the most interesting of them all…
Shares: Fathers and sons, British and irish fiction, England, Social life and customs
Ladies whose bright eyes
What would really happen to a modern man thrown back to the Middle Ages ?
Shares: British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships, England
The Black Robe
The Black Robe is an 1881 partially-epistolary novel by famed English writer, Wilkie Collins. The book, which relates the misadventures of one "Lewis Romayne", is noted for its anti-Catholic lens.
Shares: British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships, England
The peppered moth
"It is 1912 and Bessie Bawtry is a small child living in Breaseborough, a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the kind of life her ancestors have never even thought to question. Her parents are in awe of her - who is this swan-child, is she a freak? (Where did she get her…
Shares: Bildungsromans, British and irish fiction, Social life and customs
Armadale
Cuando el anciano Allan Armadale escribe su terrible confesión en el lecho de muerte, no puede ni imaginarse las repercusiones que tendrá esa carta cuando su hijo recién nacido la lea años después. Por segunda vez, dos hombres con el mismo nombre y el mismo apellido se verán implicados en la prosecución de una herencia que parece maldita. Mientras tanto, se suceden las sigilosas intrigas de Lydia…
Shares: Fathers and sons, British and irish fiction, England, Social life and customs
The Newcomes
The Newcomes is Thackeray's most essentially 'Victorian' novel, generous in its proportions, sharp in its criticism of the moral convolutions of the age, and encyclopaedic in its reference. Set in the 1830s and 1840s, a period of rapid change and of political and economic development, the novel considers the fortunes and misfortunes of a 'most respectable' extended middle-class family. The action…
Shares: British and irish fiction, England, Social life and customs
Miss Marjoribanks
When Dr. Marjoribanks’s wife dies, his teenage daughter makes it her purpose in life “to be a comfort to dear papa.” At least, Lucilla thinks, ten years of such devotion might suffice, by which time she might have begun to “go off.” But beneath this grand intention lies a yet more ambitious plan: to revolutionize the moribund and constricted social life of Carlingford. She is remarkably…
Shares: Bildungsromans, England
Imago bird
"This novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colorful crowd of television personalities, politicians, young Trotskyites, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and…
Shares: Bildungsromans, England
Miss or Mrs.?
The night had come to an end. The new-born day waited for its quickening light in the silence that is never known on land - the silence before sunrise, in a calm at sea.
Shares: British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships, England, Social life and customs
Shirley
Shirley, published in 1849, was Charlotte Brontë’s second novel after Jane Eyre. Published under her pseudonym of “Currer Bell,” it differs in several respects from that earlier work. It is written in the third person with an omniscient narrator, rather than the first-person of Jane Eyre, and incorporates the themes of industrial change and the plight of unemployed workers. It also features…
Shares: British and irish fiction, England, Social life and customs
Can you forgive her?
The Palliser Novels, book 1: Can You Forgive Her?
Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the upright and gentlemanly John Grey - and finds herself accepting and rejecting each of them in turn. Increasingly confused about her own feelings and unable to forgive herself for such vacillation, her situation is contrasted with that of her friend Lady…
Shares: British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships, England, Social life and customs
Weir of Hermiston
In Stevenson's tale of father - son confrontation, the father, Adam Weir, is modelled on Lord Braxfield, the eighteenth-century 'hanging judge'. Weir, a 'risen man' who has married a wealthy but weak woman, is both feared and respected, not least by his own son, Archie. At a public hanging, Archie speaks out against capital punishment, knowing that it was his own father who sentenced the man.
He…
Shares: Fathers and sons, British and irish fiction, Social life and customs
No name
No Name is a 19th-century novel by the master of sensation fiction, Wilkie Collins. A country gentleman is killed in an accident and his wife dies shortly after him. The blow is double for their daughters, who discover that they were born before their parents were married. Their sudden illegitimacy robs them of their inheritance and their accustomed place in society.
Shares: British and irish fiction, England, Social life and customs
The uncommercial traveller
A collection of seventeen sketches which grew out of Dickens' insomnia. He took long walks through London at night and his observations resulted in these sketches.
Shares: British and irish fiction, Social life and customs
Rachel Ray
"Rachel Ray is an 1863 novel by Anthony Trollope. It recounts the story of a young woman who is forced to give up her fiancé because of baseless suspicions directed toward him by the members of her community, including her sister and the pastors of the two churches attended by her sister and mother" --
Shares: British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships, England, Social life and customs
The egoist
Presents the text of George Meredith's classic satirical novel along with critical essays by Robert Mayo, Virginia Woolf, and others, textual notes, and background essays by the author.
Shares: British and irish fiction, Romance & Relationships, England
The Man of Property
The first book of the Forsyte Saga, initially published in 1906 (the second was not published until 1921). Here the reader is introduced to the large Forsyte clan, with special attention paid to the rapacious Soames who’s urge to possess includes his beautiful wife Irene, who he eventually alienates by his jealous and grasping nature.
Shares: British and irish fiction, England, Social life and customs
The troll garden
"This collection of Willa Cather stories - her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career - is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society.
The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of…
Shares: Romance & Relationships, Social life and customs