General Fiction – Lawrence Norfolk, Robert Nye, Robert C. O’Brien, Charles Palliser, Mervyn Peake, Juan Perucho , Jayne Anne Phillips, Popol Vuh & Amanda Prantera

Lemprière's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk is an unusual and complicated historical novel described in Wikipedia as “starting out as a detective story and mixing historical elements with steampunk-style fiction It imagines the writing of Lemprière's dictionary as tied to the founding of the British East India Company and the Siege of La Rochelle generations before”.

Robert Nye’s imaginative and clever The Memoirs of Lord Byron is quite a wonderful confection, written in a style that one imagines would be Byron’s had his memoirs not been destroyed on his death.

Robert C. O’Brien is the author of several award winning children’s books, his best known being Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

The Quincunx by Charles Palliser is a Dickensian mystery set in Victorian times. A best seller in its day, it is a complex sprawling monster of a book.

Look what I found lurking in the general fiction shelves – Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor by Mervyn Peake. This is a 1973 edition published by Academy Editions.

An unusual magic realist vampire novel - Natural History by Catalan author Juan Perucho.

Jayne Anne Phillips book of short stories Black Tickets, won her the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, awarded by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and has since become a classic. This King Pengiun edition has a rather classy cover by Russell Mills.

I seem to have this edition of Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Ancient Maya, no doubt acquired during my New Age phase in the 1970s.

And finally for this post, the novels of Amanda Prantera. The first of her books that I read was Strange Loop, an elegant and haunting gothic tale of a werewolf . The Cabalist, a spooky metaphysical thriller is her second novel and well worth the effort to seek out and read. All Prantera’s early books are interesting and unusual novels, (and I dare say her later ones too) but my favourite still is Conversations with Lord Byron on Perversion 163 years after His Lordship’s Death.

Next - “R” to “S” writers

A Miscellany

This entry marks the end of the books I will display from the small bookshelf. From here on I will move onto bigger, and hopefully, better things on the other two bookcases.

First off, two hard cover copies of famous books, which I basically purchased to fill a gap when the paperback copies disappeared.

The Enormous Room I first read way back in the 1960s when my sister in law recommended it to me. It was her favourite book. It is an oddity, a memoir by ee cummings on his experience when he was detained as a suspected spy in France during the first world war. It is written in the idiosyncratic style Cummings later developed in his poetry.

The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien is one of the great absurdist novels and probably O’Brien’s best known novel. I do have a first edition copy of The Dalkey Archive on another bookshelf, but alas this edition of The Third Policeman is a later edition.

Janwillem Van De Wetering wrote a series of detective novels set in Amsterdam featuring Police Officers Grijpstra and de Geir, two very engaging characters. The novels are laid back and gently humorous with ingenious plots. The following two novels, The Mind Murders and The Streetbird were published in 1981 and 1983.

I am saddened to see, on his Wikipedia page, that Van de Wetering died early this month on July 4^th which coincidentally is the day the remarkable Thomas Disch chose to end his life.

Another pair of oddities – Azazel by Isaac Asimov and The Kingdom Fanes, are respectively, a collection of short stories featuring the two centimetre tall demon Azazel published in one volume in 1988, and the other is an unusual fairy tale by Amanda Prantera. As a physical object, The Kingdom of Fanes is a lovely little hard cover. Amanda Prantera wrote several metaphysical novels early in her career – Strange Loop and The Cabalist to name a few, and also wrote a sort of tribute to Lord Byron in her novel Conversations with Lord Byron on perversion, 163 years after His Lordship’s death. She is an interesting writer and deserves to be better known.

Lastly, two unusual Faber publications – The Mystery of the Sardine by Stefan Themerson and The Pearl Killers by Rachel Ingalls. These books were part of the haul given me by my Faber rep friend.

Oh, I almost forgot – Billion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss – a respected history of Science Fiction, a bit out of date these days, but still valid.

There may be a short hiatus in postings as I scan books for the next stage of bookcase revelations - art books, science fiction and fantasy.