976. Thomas, D.M.: The White Hotel
Published by Gollancz, 1981
Hardback, 4th impression, very good in a very good dust wrapper. It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, THE WHITE HOTEL is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate.
977. Thomas, D.M.: Ararat
Published by Gollancz, 1983
1st edition hardback, very good in a very good dust wrapper. At the request of a blind woman with whom he has just spent the night, Rozanov, poet and improvisatore, weaves an eloquent tale on the theme of improvisation itself -- the Armenian peak of Ararat a recurring vision in his impromptu story. Any description will pale beside Thomas's brilliant unfurling of poetry and erotica; it simply must be read.
975. Thomas, D.M.: Summit
Published by Gollancz, 1987
1st edition hardback in fine condition in a fine dust wrapper. Here the author turns his attention to the tense, serious world of international politics, and completely makes a mockery of it. The book centres on the Summits held in the 1980's between the leaders of the USSR and the USA, who are very thinly veiled caricatures of Reagan and Gorbachev.
978. Thomas, Lesley: Bare Nell
Published by Eyre Methuen, 1977
1st edition hardback in very good condition, the dust wrapper is very good too. The story of Nelly Luscombe, a 20th century Moll Flanders. Nelly grows up in Devon and from her early wartime days as a friendly child who befriends homesick American soldiers, to her later years, thrice spectacularly widowed and brothel keeper to MPs, fate's commanding hand is never far away.
979. Thubron, Colin: Falling
Published by Heinemann, 1989
Hardback reprint. Nr fine book and unclipped d/w. Isolated in the spotlight, a circus-girl performs a trapeze-act of strange daring. From the crowd below a journalist watches bewitched. This novel explores the symbols we create for one another. Colin Thubron has written three novels and six travel books including "Among the Russians".
980. Tilley, Patrick: Fade-Out
Published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 1975
1st edition hardback, near fine in a very good dust wrapper. The date was Friday 3rd August. For some people, depending where they lived, the day was just beginning. For others, it was the end of another, perfectly normal, day. Suddenly all the world's radar screens went haywire...This time it had really happened. An alien spacecraft was in orbit around earth. In utmost secrecy, an undercover team of the best brains the US government could muster desperately tried to analyse an enigma that nothing had prepared them for. Nine weeks later, civilisation was on the brink of a total breakdown, more devastating than any natural or man-made disaster. The unknown was here - and it defied all powers of human comprehension...
981. Toibin, Colm: The Blackwater Lightship
Published by Picador, 1999
Hardback, 2nd printing in fine condition. The dust wrapper is price clipped otherwise fine. Set in Ireland in the 1990s, the The Blackwater Lightship tells the story of the Devereux family. Helen doesn't get on with her mother Lily, and Lily doesn't get on with her mother Dora. Three generations of women, tetchy with recriminations and memory, are forced together when they discover that Helen's younger brother, Declan, is dying from an AIDS-related illness
393. Trapido, Barbara: Juggling
Published by Hamish Hamilton, London, 1994
First edition hardback in very good+ condition, signed on title page, black pen on bottom page edges saying damaged but I cannot see where. The dust wrapper has rubbing to the extremities especially spine and corners, its has not been price clipped and still retains the £9.99 net price. A novel of "exquisite humour" looking at how the paths of two very different sisters and the two boys they met at boarding school diverge only to reunite later in their lives in strange and unexpected ways.
1554. Van Lustbader, Eric: The Bourne Legacy
Published by St Martin's Press, New York, 2004
1st US hardback in near fine condition, the book leans ever so slightly otherwise fine. The dust wrapper is only slightly rubbed at the edges with a tiny nick at the top of the rear fold otherwise fine and unclipped. Of all Robert Ludlum's bestsellers, the Bourne novels are the ones that have intrigued his thousands of readers the most. A man without a past is washed into the nets of a fishing boat. He is barely alive and has no knowledge of who he is or how he got there. All he has is a passport in the name of Jason Bourne - a man, it seems, who has many deadly skills and even more deadly enemies. Over the course of three books, The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, he gradually comes to realize who and what he really is - a strange amalgam of his original self, a man named David Webb, and the deadly killer identity that goes by the name Jason Bourne. An identity that many would like to see gone forever...Now, fourteen years later, we have an amazing, brand-new Bourne novel. Written by the legendary Eric Van Lustbader. David Webb is now living a peaceful life as a university professor in the backwoods of America with a wife and children. But from the other side of the world someone is reaching out to take him out of the game forever. A deadly assassin is on his trail and his former handler has been brutally murdered already. It seems that David Webb must once again turn to Bourne to save his life and family.
2187. Van Lustbader, Eric: The Bourne Dominion
Published by Orion, London. 2011
1st edition UK hardback in very good condition with no previous owner names or marks. The book leans ever so slightly and the unclipped dust wrapper is a little rubbed at the top edge else fine. This is the ninth outing for Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne. Bourne's enemies are gathering force. Severus Domna, a secret and ancient cabal, has called forth its members from around the globe, with one objective: to vanquish the last person capable of destroying their bid to de-stabilize the world economy - Jason Bourne. But how can they possibly succeed where so many others have failed? By turning Bourne's most trusted friend into his greatest - and most deadly - enemy. Now Bourne finds himself in a world where friend and foe go hand-in-hand. Bourne's journey will lead him down a path of brutal murder and destruction - one from which there is no escape...
Published by Orion, London. 2011
1st edition UK hardback in fine condition with no previous owner names or marks. The unclipped dust wrapper is also fine. This is the ninth outing for Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne. Bourne's enemies are gathering force. Severus Domna, a secret and ancient cabal, has called forth its members from around the globe, with one objective: to vanquish the last person capable of destroying their bid to de-stabilize the world economy - Jason Bourne. But how can they possibly succeed where so many others have failed? By turning Bourne's most trusted friend into his greatest - and most deadly - enemy. Now Bourne finds himself in a world where friend and foe go hand-in-hand. Bourne's journey will lead him down a path of brutal murder and destruction - one from which there is no escape...
2088. Voltaire, Jean-Francois: Candide
Published by Random House, New York, 2002
1st thus US hardback in near fine condition. There are no previous owners etc although the front end papers seem to have been bound in upside down. There is a slight dark mark to the upper panel otherwise the jacket is also near fine and unclipped. A flamboyant and controversial personality of enormous wit and intelligence, Voltaire remains one of the most influential figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Candide, his masterpiece, is a brilliant satire of the theory that our world is "the best of all possible worlds." The book traces the picaresque adventures of the guileless Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved Cunegonde, tortured by the Inquisition, et cetera, all without losing his resilience and will to live and pursue a happy life. This Modern Library edition, published to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House, is a facsimile of the first book ever released under the Random House colophon. It includes the timeless illustrations by Rockwell Kent, a twentieth-century artist whose wit and genius serve as a counterpart and compliment to Voltaire's.
2090. Vonnegut, Kurt: Hocus Pocus
Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 1990
UK hardback edition, reprint in fine condition. There are no previous owner's names the jacket is near fine. Slightly rubbed at the edges with a couple of small 1 cm tears but no loss and unclipped. It is the year 2001. Eugene Debs Hartke, a West Point graduate who, in 1975, found himself in charge of the humiliating evacuation of personnel from the roof of the American embassy 'after the excrement hit the air-conditioning' in Vietnam, now finds himself awaiting trial for supposedly masterminding the biggest prison-break in history - the escape of 10,000 convicts from the New York state maximum security Adult Correctional Institution. How did a good soldier who never used profane language come to be in such a mess? Time and luck. Unknowingly fathering an illegitimate son with the young female war correspondent from the Des Moines Register on the way home from Saigon; marrying a pretty and personable young woman whose booby-trapped genes a re-primed to fire her off into insanity; becoming a respected teacher of the terminally ineducable pupils of Tarkington College; remarking innocently that the dollar no longer ranks as a basic works currency, having been supplanted by the Japanese Yen and fellatio - these things may, or may not, have had something to do with it...With Swiftian satire and gonzo wit, Kurt Vonnegut juggles his favourite themes in a novel as fresh and brilliantly off-beat as anything he's written. Hocus Pocus is, quite simply, vintage Vonnegut.
2298. Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse 5 or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death
Published by Jonathan Cape, London. 1986
Reissued hardback in very good condition. Dust wrapper is also very good being only very slightly sunned at the spine and unclipped. There are no previous owner names or other marks. Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse 5 is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
Published by Cannongate, Edinburgh. 2004
1st edition paperback original in fine condition. Yellow card boards with dust wrapper. Author's debut novel, nineteen-year-old Millie O'Reilly is clever, spiky and adored by men yet utterly forlorn. Increasingly disillusioned, she seeks an escape in the underbelly of Liverpool... Shockingly candid and brutally poetic, Helen Walsh has created a portrait of a city and a generation that offers a female perspective on the harsh truth of growing up in today's Britain. Brass is an unsettling but ultimately compassionate account of the possibilities of identity and the desirability of love.
982. Walters, Minette: The Dark Room
Published by Macmillan, 1995
1st edition hardback in fine condition with a fine dust wrapper. Jinx Kingsley, fashion photographer and heiress, tried to kill herself after being jilted by her fiancé, who has since disappeared. When she wakes from her coma, she recalls nothing about the suicide attempt. Then the memories begin to surface, memories of utter desperation and absolute terror.
2384. Waterhouse, Keith: Billy Liar on the Moon
Published by Michael Joseph, London. 1975
1st edition UK hardback in near fine condition. There are no previous owner names or marks. The dust wrapper is not price clipped. This brilliantly funny novel is the sequel to the enormously successful Billy Liar. Sixteen years on and William Fisher still hasn't reached London, but he's not far off.
983. Waters, Sarah: Fingersmith
Published by Virago, London. 2002
1st edition hardback in fine, as new condition. The book has no previous owner names or inscriptions. The dust wrapper has not been price clipped and still retains the original £15.99 net price. Set in a den of thieves in 1860's London, this novel focuses on Susan, a pickpocket, who is persuaded by her cohorts to pose as a lady's maid and infiltrate the household of Maud, a young heiress in possession of a large inheritance.
400. Watson, Peter: Landscape of Lies
Published by Hutchinson, London, 1989
This scarce hardback book is in near fine condition. There are no previous owners name or inscriptions. The unclipped dustwrapper is in very good+ condition with some wear to the edges and also a crease to the back bottom edge.A gripping novel of romance and suspense, Landscape of Lies has all the elements of a typical Hitchcock adventure. Peter Watson, artsroom correspondent of The Observer, is also the author of the international bestseller, Crusade.Fold-out, full colour puzzle painting present in the book.
427. Watson, Peter: The Nazi's Wife
Published by Grafton Books, London, 1986
1st UK edition hardback book is in near fine condition, it has general shelfwear, the book has no previous owner names or inscriptions. The dust wrapper is in very good+ condition, it has a small scuff on the rear edge flap, it has not been price clipped.From stark military offices to lush European landscapes and isolated mountain retreats, The Nazi's Wife is high-powered espionage fiction at its best, filled with suspense, adventure and the moving drama of wartime relationships.
984. Waugh, Alec: Island in the Sun
Published by Cassell, 1956
Hardback in dust wrapper, 2nd edition in very good condition. The story is set on the imaginary British-ruled Caribbean island of Santa Marta in the mid 1950s.
985. Waugh, Evelyn: Mr. Loveday's Little Outing and Other Sad Stories
Published by Chapman & Hall, 1936
1st edition hardback in very good condition, no dust wrapper. 'Mr Loveday's Little Outing' is a blackly comic tale of a mental asylum and its favourite resident.
986. Waugh, Evelyn: The Loved One: An Anglo-American tragedy
Published by Chapman & Hall, 1948
Hardback 3rd impression. Unclipped d/w worn at edges & a little grubby. Blue cloth boards leaning slightly, otherwise vg. illustrated by Stuart Boyle. The more startling for the economy of its prose and plot, this novel's story, set among the manicured lawns and euphemisms of Whispering Glades Memorial Park in Hollywood, satirizes the American way of death and offers Waugh's memento mori. Following the death of a friend, poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering into the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday. There, Dennis enters the fragile and bizarre world of Aimée, the naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr Joyboy, the master of the embalmer's art... A dark and savage satire on the Anglo-American cultural divide, The Loved One depicts a world where love, reputation and death cost a very great deal.
450. Webb, Geoffrey and Edward J. Mason: The Archers of Ambridge
Published by George Newnes, London, 1954
Hardback, 4th impression in very good condition in a very good unclipped dustwrapper. Green cloth binding with gilt titles to spine and upper board, corners sharp. There is a tidy inscription at the front pastedown hidden by the jacket flap. The dustwrapper is a little rubbed at the edges and tips with some very small tears but no real loss. there is an ink name at the rear panel. Overall a very good copy of a quite scarce title. From the blurb, "The Archers" listeners will want this book.
987. Webb, Mary: Precious Bane
Published by Jonathan Cape, 1963
Hardback re-issue of the 1st illustrated edition of 1929. But for a previous owner name tippexed out under front unclipped flap the book and wrapper are fine. With colour & b+w drawings by Rowland Hilder. And introduced by Stanley Baldwin. Born at the time of Waterloo in the wild country of Shropshire, Prudence Sarn is a wild, passionate girl, cursed with a hare lip -- her 'precious bane'. Cursed for it, too, by the superstitious people amongst whom she lives. Prue loves two things: the remote countryside of her birth and, hopelessly, Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. The tale of how Woodseaves gradually discerns Prue's true beauty is set against the tragic drama of Prue's brother, Gideon, a driven man who is out of harmony with the natural world.
1288. Westbrook, Kate: Secret Servant: The Moneypenny Diaries
Published by John Murray, London. 2007
1st edition paperback in near fine condition and signed by the author. Front cover corners very slightly curled otherwise fine and signed at the title page by Westbrook AKA Miss Moneypenny.Jane Moneypenny may project a cool, calm and collected image but her secret diaries reveal a rather different story. In the grip of an uncertain love affair and haunted by a dark family secret, the last thing she needs is a crisis at work. But the Secret Intelligence Service is in chaos. One senior officer is on trial for treason, another has defected to Moscow and her beloved James Bond has been brainwashed by the KGB. Only a woman's touch can save them. Moneypenny soon finds herself embroiled in a highly-charged adventure infused with the glamour of the Cold War espionage game. Alone on a dangerous Russian mission she turns, with breathless intimacy, to writing a truly explosive private diary.
1290. Wilden, Theodore: The Exchange
Published by Collins, 1981
1st edition hardback, near fine unclipped d/w. Book is fine. Therrick is a loner, and summoned by the British Intelligence to go to West Germany to retrieve a British diplomat from the West Germans who think he is a spy....but he smells trouble, and finds he is working on his own and fighting against time...
988. Williams, Nigel: East of Wimbledon
Published by Faber & Faber, 1993
A fine 1st edition hardback book in a very good dust wrapper. Robert Wilson is aimless and feckless, and has passed himself off as a Muslim in order to get a job at the Wimbledon Independent Islamic Boys Day School. His decline and fall is as inevitable as it is hilarious, as everything Islamic baffles him.