Fiction - Classical Literature Books at Dial a Book Sydney

Letters Between a Father and Son: Early Correspondence Between V.S.Naipaul and Family
Naipaul, V.S.
Book Number: 50662
ISBN: 0349113130
Publisher: Abacus September 7, 2000
8vo softcover 333pp very good. In 1949, aged 17, V.S. Naipaul left his native Trinidad to take up an Island Scholarship at University College, Oxford. This volume presents his letters to his father - a journalist with the "Trinidad Guardian" - over four years until his father's death from a heart attack in 1953, aged 47.
Price: $5.00

The Slow Train To Milan
St. Aubin De Teran, Lisa
Book Number: 44691
ISBN: 0060152397
Publisher: Harper and Row 1984
8vo. Hardcover in d/w, both very good. She is sixteen he is 35, she falls in with his entourage of European travelers and South American Exiles. As they travel through Europe on the Slow Train incurring outrageous expenses, following every idle whim, Lisaveta soon questions her tolerance of these passionate, chaotic, arrogant individuals.
Price: $10.00

Ernest Pontifex or The Way Of All Flesh
Butler, Samuel
Book Number: 45611
ISBN:
Publisher: Methuen & Co, London, 1966,
8vo. hardcover. 365pp. Very good. / Very good, slightly foxed d/w.
Price: $15.00

The Other Detective Pulp Heroes
Carr, Wooda N.
Book Number: 49683
ISBN: 15
Publisher: Tattered Pages Press, Chicago 1992.
8vo. softcover. 96pp. b/w illus. Near Fine.
Price: $8.00

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Alvarez, Julia
Book Number: 50656
ISBN: 0452268060
Publisher: Plume June 1, 1992
8vo softcover 290pp very good. Fifteen tales vividly chronicle a Dominican family's exile in the Bronx, focusing on the four Garcia daughters' rebellion against their immigrant elders.
Price: $7.00

Salome
Wilde, Oscar, Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley
Book Number: 62019
ISBN:
Publisher: Dover New York
4to. softcover. 66pp. b/w illus. good+, foxing inside covers & endpapers, cover corners rubbed.
Price: $15.00

B-Berry and I Look Back
Dornford Yates - aka C. W. Mercer
Book Number: 54846
ISBN:
Publisher: Ward, Lock & Co., London, 1958
8vo. Hardcover in d/w. po inscription on ffl., light foxing on page edges, otherwise very good. 285pp. Mercer wrote two books of fictionalized memoirs, As Berry and I were Saying and B-Berry and I Look Back, written as conversations between Berry and his family. They contain many anecdotes about his experiences as a lawyer, but are, in the main, an elegy for a passed upper-class way of life.
Price: $12.00

Losing Nelson
Unsworth, Barry
Book Number: 54610
ISBN: 0140260919
Publisher: Penguin Books July 6, 2000
8vo softcover 312pp very good. Perched high atop his pedestal in London, Admiral Horatio Nelson has remained one of the loftiest icons of English nationalism. Now, however, he has been seriously rattled by Barry Unsworth's Losing Nelson, a gripping study of the dark side of heroism and hero worship. In the basement of his large, anonymous North London house, Charles Cleasby obsessively reenacts the admiral's every military maneuver: "Usually when we fought these battles I had a feeling of fulfilment, they brought me closer to him..." Cleasby's admiration also extends upstairs--to his life's work, a biography of the great man. His only assistant in his heroic struggle is Miss Lily (real name, Lilian Butler), a hired secretary who carefully transcribes his painstaking pages. Cleasby wants nothing better than to rescue Nelson from the revisionist clutches of unpatriotic academic cynics. Alas, his passion soon reveals a sinister side, as he declares that he is in fact the admiral's twin: I will say what I think angels are. They can be dark or bright, but they all have the gift of spontaneity, of creating themselves anew. This is a pure form of energy, and Horatio was winged with it. All the same, angels are not complete, they need their counterparts, the dark needs the bright, the hidden needs the open, and vice versa. Sometimes they meet and recognize each other. Sometimes, as with Horatio and me, the pairing occurs over spaces of time or distance. He became a bright angel on February 14, 1797, during the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. I became his dark twin on September 9, 1997, when I too broke the line. As the book builds to its inexorable climax--and Cleasby's only solace is his amanuensis--Losing Nelson confirms Unsworth as one of England's most elegant, understated novelists. His historical grasp of Nelson is outstanding. But his book really excels, and also profoundly disturbs, in its exploration of the tarnished angels of patriotism. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.nnFrom Publishers WeeklynUnsworth (Sacred Hunger; Morality Play) delivers another memorable tour de force in this tense portrait of a London man obsessed with Britain's greatest naval hero, Lord Nelson. Charles Cleasby lives by the "Horatio calendar," reenacting Nelson's battles with model shops on a glass table in his basement. In his mind they are joined: Nelson is a radiant angel, a hero of unstained virtue, and he is Nelson's other, shadow side: "I was his heir, I had inherited his being." For years Cleasby has been writing a book extolling Nelson's heroism, but has become blocked over a controversial incident in June 1799, when Nelson apparently tricked two fortresses of Neapolitan rebels into surrendering, under promise of a safe conduct, then turned them over to their murderous Bourbon king and queen for hanging. Unsworth's control of his material, and his artistic ingenuity, his narrative skill in what is essentially a highly literate suspense novel, are supreme here. By compressing the milestones of one man's lifetime into the calendar of another man's year, he creates a shuffled chronology of historical events that parallels his narrator's wavering state of mind. Paragraph by paragraph, Cleasby's sense of self shifts and dissolves; in one paragraph he describes the view of Nelson's ship entering Naples harbor, in the next "we" are standing at its prow, and in the next it's "I" onto whose arm Lady Hamilton is swooning. Cleasby's erotic stirrings for Emma Hamilton and his misadventures with London's Nelson Club are the stuff of high comedy, and it's hard to say exactly why this novel seems so unsettling and suspenseful. Unsworth holds open a door to normalcy in Cleasby's growing attraction to Miss LilyAhired to transcribe his manuscript to a word processorAwhose down-to-earth and very contemporary responses put Nelson on a more human scale. The book's surprise ending, held back to the final
Price: $6.00

Debits and Credits
Kipling, Rudyard
Book Number: 35015
ISBN:
Publisher: London Macmillan 1982. Centenary Edition
8vo hardcover 416pp. very good+. / very good d/w with faded spine.
Price: $12.00

The Hiding Place
Azzopardi, Trezza
Book Number: 49386
ISBN: 0330486500
Publisher: Picador August 4, 2000
8vo softcover 278pp very good. The Gaucis' story is seen through the eyes of Dolores, the youngest daughter and the embodiment of bad luck in her father's estimation, condemned to bear the mark of a family that is rapidly singeing at the edges. Dolores presents an unsparing portrayal of the fear and hopelessness of childhood amid grim poverty and neglect, of children growing up without safety nets and on sunken foundations. Sustained by a tightrope tension and a stark, youthful wisdom, The Hiding Place conjures the coarse sensuality of life among the docks, the smoky cafes and bars, the crumbling homes and gambling rooms of Tiger Bay.
Price: $8.00

The Library of H.Bradley Martin: Highly Important English Literature,
SOTHEBY'S
Book Number: 1768
ISBN:
Publisher: 1990, New York,
4to., 792 lots, many coloured & plain plates, fine, A major sale catalogue and detailed bibliographical reference. Or. Green cloth with tipped in plate. Includes Auction Estimates insert.
Price: $45.00