The Red House Mark Haddon Jonathan Cape, London, 2012 This is the advance readers edition of Mark Haddon’s most recent novel. These proof copies are sent to reviewers and book stores prior to the release of the true first editions. For a number of reasons, there are many collectors of these uncorrected proofs. Uncorrected proofs [...]
The Sea, The Sea Iris Murdoch Chatto and Windus, U.K. 1978 This novel, to my mind, is Iris Murdoch’s masterpiece. The cover art is called The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a famous woodblock print done in 1831 by Japanese artist Hokusai. The Sea, The Sea, which won the 1978 Booker Prize, is the story of [...]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Michael Chabon Random House, New York, 2000 The New York Review of Books called The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay Chabon’s magnum opus. It won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for several other major awards, including the Pen/Faulkner Award and The National Book Critics Circle [...]
The Swimming Pool Library Alan Hollinghurst Chatto and Windus, London, 1988 This novel, with its many references to the early twentieth century gay English writer Ronald Firbank, won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award and was nominated for the Booker Prize. Edmund White called it ‘…surely the best book about gay life yet written by an [...]
The Frost Fairs John McCullough Salt Publishing, Cromer, England, 2010 The Frost Fairs, a remarkably diverse collection from the Salt Modern Poets collection, won the 2012 Polari Prize. Taken from the Polari Prize website: “The Polari Prize is awarded to a first book which explores the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender experience and is open [...]
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union Michael Chabon Harper Collins, U.S.A. 2007 The cover of this alternative history novel is an eclectic mixture of imagery from pulp detective novels of the 1940′s, Jewish art, and Native art of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Chabon’s fifth novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won three major science fiction prizes including the [...]
The Empty Family Colm Toibin Penguin, London, 2011 The Empty Family, Toibin’s latest collection of short stories, recently won the Lambda Literary Award for best gay fiction. It was an Amazon Book of the Month and was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short story Award. It garnered starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, [...]
The Piano Man’s Daughter Timothy Findley Harper Collins, Canada, 1995 Openly gay Canadian writer Timothy Findley was nominated for the Giller Prize for this novel, which was adapted into a made-for-TV movie in 2003. Ten years before this book was published, he was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada. He was a founding [...]
The Folding Star Alan Hollinghurst Pantheon Books, New York, 1994 In this story of obsessions, a disaffected gay man moves from England to a country town in Flanders to tutor two boys. The Folding Star won the James Tait Black Memorial prize for fiction in 1994 and it was shortlisted for the Booker. The New York [...]
The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst Picador, U.K. 2011 This is another brilliant work of fiction by Hollinghurst, who won the Booker Prize for his previous novel The Line of Beauty. The Stranger’s Child is written in five novella length sections which focus on the life and evolving history of a famous gay World War 1 poet. [...]