James P Reynolds

The English Patient Michael Ondaatje McClelland and Stewart, Canada, 1992 The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje’s most famous novel, won the 1992 Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Canada Australia Award, and the 1992 Booker Prize. The 1996 film, on which Ondaatje worked closely, won nine Academy Awards, including best picture. This novel can be considered a [...]

Martin Chuzzlewit Charles Dickens New Century Library, London, 1904 This edition is part of a seventeen volume complete set of Dickens’ work which came out between 1900 and 1912. They are very unusual in that they are leather-bound paperbacks. The pages are printed on India paper, also known as bible paper, a very thin, almost [...]

The Handmaids Tale Margaret Atwood Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1986 The true first edition of this dystopian speculative fiction classic is the Canadian McClelland and Stewart first printing which came out one year before this U.S. first edition. This signed Houghton Mifflin publication is in fine/near fine condition. The book is in perfect, unread condition. [...]

A Boy in France J.D. Salinger Saturday Evening Post, U.S.A. March 31, 1945 This is the only legal appearance of this short story. It was never re-issued, except in a couple of quickly shut-down pirate collections that came out in the 1970′s. This Saturday Evening Post, with its Norman Rockwell cover art, is in unbelievable [...]

Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2002 HBO recently announced that Middlesex would be made into a mini-series. About the trials of growing up a hermaphrodite, it came out to mixed reviews and slow initial sales. Perhaps the subject matter was too liberal for some. It was to become a bestseller, however, [...]

The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie Viking, U.K. 1988 The Satanic Verses came out in Britain to mixed reviews, but ended up a finalist for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Award for novel of the year. In the Muslim community, The Satanic Verses started a major controversy. Ultimately, it was judged as blasphemous, and [...]

What is the What Dave Eggers McSweeney’s, U.S.A. 2006 What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng is a fictionalized biography about one of the ‘lost boys of Sudan’. This novel won Eggers the 2009 Prix Medicis Etranger, an annual French award for a writer whose “fame does not yet match their talent.” This is [...]

Three Day Road Joseph Boyden Viking, Canada, 2005 This incredible First World War novel was inspired by the life of Canada’s most decorated Native soldier, Francis Pegahmagabow. It won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Rogers Writer’s Trust Fiction Award in 2006, and was nominated for the 2005 Governor General’s Award for [...]

Mister Pip Lloyd Jones Penguin, New Zealand, 2006 At the height of civil war on the small copper mining island of Bougainville, the last remaining white teacher reads Great Expectations to the indigenous children. Mister Pip is, of course, named after the main character from the Charles Dickens classic. This sixth printing is, in reality, the first hardcover [...]

Adventures in the Skin Trade Dylan Thomas Signet, U.S.A. 1956 In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms [...]