The Debt to Pleasure is a 1996 novel by John Lanchester published by Picador. The novel won the 1996 Whitbread Book Award in the First Novel category and the 1997 Hawthornden Prize. [1] It was described as a skilful and wickedly funny account of the life of a loquacious Englishman named Tarquin Winot, revealed through his thoughts on cuisine as he undertakes a mysterious journey around France. The revelations become more and more shocking as the truth about the narrator becomes apparent.
The novel centres on the character of Tarquin Winot (originally Rodney Winot), an erudite English writer, hedonist, and gastronome, who is nonetheless a profoundly unreliable narrator. Its structure is divided into four separate sections, all of which correspond to different seasons of the year. In each section there are recipes in addition to the narrative.
It opens with the observation that "This is not a conventional cookbook", taken from a comment made by Bertrand Russell regarding the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It then features Winot driving through France as he travels in the direction (so he tells us) of his house in Provence. During the journey he provides long disquisitions upon the art and food of the Normandy and Brittany regions of France, discussions of famous chefs and gastronomists such as Brillat-Savarin and Elizabeth David, and a wide variety of classical allusions and quotations. [2] When he finally arrives at his house he sets up electronic surveillance equipment, follows a young couple, and grants an interview with a biographer of his elder brother, Bartholomew. [3] In the course of the novel, a darker and more sinister motive for Winot's journey is revealed. [4]
In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche, is a novel in seven volumes by French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. The most famous example of this is the "episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume.
John Boynton Priestley was an English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster and social commentator.
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by English author Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. The novel is a bildungsroman and depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens' second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman & Hall published the novel in three volumes.
The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. The plot explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles' authority in Victorian literature, both following and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels.
"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856. In the story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a new clerk who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copies or do any other task required of him, responding to any request with the words "I would prefer not to."
Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks's fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen's experience of the war.
A Maggot (1985) is a novel by British author John Fowles. It is Fowles' sixth major novel, following The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Daniel Martin and Mantissa. Its title, as the author explains in the prologue, is taken from the archaic sense of the word that means "whim", "quirk", "obsession", or even a snatch of music. Another meaning of the word "maggot" becomes apparent later in the novel, used by a character to describe a white, oblong machine that appears to be a spacecraft. Though the author denied that A Maggot is a historical novel, it does take place during a precise historical timeframe, April 1736 to March 1737, in England. It might be variously classified as historical fiction, mystery, or science fiction. Because of the narrative style and various metafictional devices, most critics classify it as a postmodern novel.
The Prestige is a 1995 science fiction novel by British writer Christopher Priest. It tells the story of a prolonged feud between two stage magicians in late 1800s England. Its structure is that of a collection of diaries that were kept by the protagonists and later collated. The title derives from the novel's fictional practice of stage illusions having three parts: the setup, the performance, and the prestige (effect).
The Purple Cloud is an apocalyptic "last man" novel by the British writer M. P. Shiel. It was published in 1901. H. G. Wells lauded The Purple Cloud as "brilliant" and H. P. Lovecraft later praised the novel as exemplary weird fiction, "delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty."
John Henry Lanchester is a British journalist and novelist.
Free indirect speech is the literary technique of writing a character's first-person thoughts in the voice of the third-person narrator. It is a style using aspects of third-person narration conjoined with the essence of first-person direct speech. The technique is also referred to as free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or, in French, discours indirect libre.
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in post-World War II Japan and is narrated by Masuji Ono, an ageing painter, who looks back on his life and how he has lived it. He notices how his once-great reputation has faltered since the war and how attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed. The chief conflict deals with Ono's need to accept responsibility for his past actions, rendered politically suspect in the context of post-War Japan. The novel ends with the narrator expressing good will for the young white-collar workers on the streets at lunchbreak. The novel also deals with the role of people in a rapidly changing political environment and with the assumption and denial of guilt.
George William Lamming OCC was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. He first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel. He also held academic posts, including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and lectured extensively worldwide.
The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic (2000) is a chick-lit novel by Sophie Kinsella, the first in the Shopaholic series. It focuses on Becky Bloomwood, a financial journalist who is in serious debt due to her shopping addiction.
Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk. It was Palahniuk's first published novel, and follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia. The protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups, after his doctor remarks that insomnia is not "real suffering" and that he should find out what it is really like to suffer. The protagonist then meets a mysterious man named Tyler Durden and establishes an underground fighting club as radical psychotherapy.
Gold By The Inch is a novel by author Lawrence Chua.
The Fair Jilt: or, the Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda is a short novella by Aphra Behn published by Will Canning in 1688, a year before Behn's death. The plot is loosely based around rumors Behn had heard regarding a story of Prince Francisco de Tarquini. Though Behn did insist that the story was true, it is sensationalized. The story follows a woman named Miranda who, slighted by the rejection of a priest, accuses him of rape. After Miranda marries Prince Tarquin, the story observes their series of deceptive acts and multiple murder attempts instigated by the passions of love and desire. The Fair Jilt occupies itself with themes of deceit, infatuation, and impassioned acts of love, common ideas within the amatory fiction genre. Behn herself introduces the story as a study of the destructive power of love.
Yayati is a 1959 Marathi-language historical novel by Indian writer V. S. Khandekar. One of Khandekar's best-known works, it retells the story of the historical Hindu king, Yayati, from the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. The novel has multiple narrators, and poses several questions on the nature of morality. Scholars have analysed its hero, Yayati, as a representation of modern man. Accepted as classic of Marathi literature, Yayati has won several awards, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960 and the Jnanapith Award in 1974.
Checkout 19 is a novel by British writer Claire-Louise Bennett. It is Bennet's second book, after 2015's Pond. It was selected for The New York Times's "10 Best Books of 2022" list. The book was also shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, which seeks to celebrate novels which expand the possibilities of the novel as an art form. The novel follows an unnamed female narrator from early childhood to adulthood, documenting her interactions with books and how those interactions shaped her life. The book has been described as an example of autofiction, or a fictionalized, autobiographical account of Bennett's life.