The Other Garden Francis Wyndham
Oscar and Lucinda Peter Carey
Where I’m Calling From Raymond Carver
Paris Trout Pete Dexter
The Sugar Mother Elizabeth Jolley
Forty-Seventeen Frank Moorhouse
Ice-Candy-Man Bapsi Sidhwa
Breathing Lessons Anne Tyler
The Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe
The Book of Evidence John Banville
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Oscar Hijuelos
The Joy Luck Club Amy Tan
Possession A. S. Byatt
Age of Iron J. M. Coetzee
A Home at the End of the World Michael Cunningham
The Snapper Roddy Doyle
Get Shorty Elmore Leonard
Amongst Women John McGahern
The Great World David Malouf
Friend of My Youth Alice Munro
The Regeneration Trilogy (1991–95) Pat Barker
Wise Children Angela Carter
A Strange and Sublime Address Amit Chaudhuri
American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis
The Redundancy of Courage Timothy Mo
Mating Norman Rush
Downriver Iain Sinclair
A Thousand Acres Jane Smiley
Reading Turgenev William Trevor
Cloudstreet Tim Winton
Death and Nightingales Eugene McCabe
The Butcher Boy Patrick McCabe
The Secret History Donna Tartt
The Virgin Suicides Jeffrey Eugenides
Birdsong Sebastian Faulks
A River Sutra Gita Mehta
The Shipping News E. Annie Proulx
My Idea of Fun Will Self
A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth
Trainspotting Irvine Welsh
What a Carve Up! Jonathan Coe
(US: The Winshaw Legacy)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis de Bernières
(US: Corelli’s Mandolin)
The Folding Star Alan Hollinghurst
Original Sin P. D. James
How Late it Was, How Late James Kelman
The Tortilla Curtain T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Blue Flower Penelope Fitzgerald
A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry
Alias Grace Margaret Atwood
Asylum Patrick McGrath
Last Orders Graham Swift
The Night in Question Tobias Wolff
Quarantine Jim Crace
Underworld Don DeLillo
Cold Mountain Charles Frazier
American Pastoral Philip Roth
The Lady From Guatemala V. S. Pritchett
THE MODERN LIBRARY
Chinua Achebe 1930–
1958 Things Fall Apart
This short novel, written in short chapters, tells the story of the end of one era of civilization in a remote part of Nigeria, and the beginning of colonialism and Christianity. Achebe’s touch is so light, however, and his skill with character and pacing so brilliant, and his sense of detail and nuance so delightful, that you barely realize as you turn the pages that you are being steeped in the atmosphere of a crucial moment in history. The novel focuses on the character of Okonkwo, strong, stubborn and hard-working, locked into the traditions he has inherited. It tells the story of his wives and his children, village life, local traditions, including the story of a boy who is taken from another village as retribution; he comes to live with Okonkwo’s family, and slowly Okonkwo grows to love him, but the reader knows that he will eventually have to be sacrificed. The scene where he is killed is magnificently stark, almost unbearable to read. It is clear now that Okonkwo’s strength is a sort of weakness. The arrival of the English is seen first as a small, insignificant event, and there are moments towards the end of the book where Achebe presents what the reader knows will be a tragedy with a mixture of irony, sadness and a sort of anger. When this novel was first presented to Heinemann, the reader wrote ‘the best first novel since the war’. Forty years later, it is still the best first novel since the war.
Chinua Achebe was born in eastern Nigeria and divides his time between Nigeria and the USA. Things Fall Apart has sold over two million copies and been translated into thirty languages. It is the first book of the Africa trilogy; the others are No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964). He was awarded the Man Booker International Prize in 2007.
Age in year of publication: twenty-eight.
Kingsley Amis 1922–1995
1954 Lucky Jim
This is the story of Jim Dixon, who finds himself lecturing in Medieval History in a provincial university. Jim’s prospects are grim; he knows hardly anything about his subject. His real skills are making funny faces behind people’s backs and disguising his complete contempt for those around him (especially his dreadful boss) — but the second of these fails him when he meets Bertrand, his boss’s bearded and pretentious artist son. Jim is half in love with mad Margaret who teaches at the university; she throws him out of her room when ‘he made a movement not only quite unambiguous, but, even perhaps, rather insolently frank’. In one set scene the boss gives a really awful party, and our hero manages to burn the bedclothes.
The writing is constantly funny; Dixon’s ability to cause calamity all around him and then make things much worse, his mixture of innocence and pure malice, make you laugh out loud and follow his antics and his fate with amusement and great interest. Amis is brilliant at stringing out a joke, at twisting and turning the plot, and at never making Jim either ridiculous or stupid, but somehow right to get drunk when he does, or put on funny voices, or curse his boss, or hate the Middle Ages and an appalling student called Michie. The comedy is brilliantly sustained in the book, and the conflicts well articulated, so that the narrative becomes a picture of the post-war age when a new generation — the Jims of this world — grew up having no respect for their elders and betters.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London and taught at the University of Swansea and then Cambridge before settling again in London. He was the author of more than twenty works of fiction. Lucky Jim was filmed in 1958. He won the Booker Prize for The Old Devils in 1986.
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Martin Amis 1949–