The novelist lists his selections of the ninety-nine best novels written in the past forty-five years and discusses each novel in a short essay that explains why he has chosen to include it

An exploration of the very essence of power centers on two men who represent different types of earthly power--one an eminent novelist and well-known homosexual, the other a man of God who rises through the Vatican hierarchy

Brothers and Strangers, Volume 1 contains the first 4 books of C.P. Snow's incredible 11 book series. Volume 1 contains: 'Time of Hope', 'George Passant', "The Conscience of the Rich', and 'The Light and the Dark' (1071 pages)

Turning upon the smallest of hints, and taking the detritus of modern life - offhand diary entries, discarded cigarette ends, casual glances - as a series of clues, a London barber becomes obsessed with the idea of his wife's infidelity. In this masterfully told tale, jealousy, hatred and nostalgia stir uneasily in the quiet of London's post-war suburbia. First published in 1949, The Body is an excellent example of William Sansom's ability to suspend and play out momentary fears, building up to an altered vision where even the most familiar things are uncertain.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)This trilogy of novels about World War II, largely based on his own experiences as an army officer, is the crowning achievement of Evelyn Waugh’s career. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war too much for him. Yet, though often somber, the Sword of Honour trilogy is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh’s early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric.

'You'll never be happy until you can think and feel and look like other people . . .' Jael 97 is an Alpha. Deemed over-privileged for her beauty, she is compelled to report to the Ministry of Facial Justice, where her face will be reconstructed. For Jael lives in the New State, created out of the devastation of the Third World War. Under the rule of the Darling Dictator, citizens must wear sackcloth and ashes, and only a 17.5% quotum of personality is permitted to each. Anything that inspires envy is forbidden. But Jael cannot suppress her rebellious spirit. Secretly, she starts to reassert the rights of the individual, and decides to hunt down the faceless Dictator. 'An exquisitely entertaining fantasy' Observer

Setter, an eminent Harley Street consultant, is trusted and admired by his circle of friends, devoting himself to the rehabilitation of the lonely and the misunderstood. But deep within himself Setter recognizes a latent streak of sadistic cruelty which enables him to perceive the truth about a delinquent youth whom he suspects of having taken part in a particularly repellent and senseless crime. It is for Setter to choose a punishment—and enforce it. An Error of Judgement is a subtle study of human weakness and conflict. Partly a wry social comedy and partly a study in good and evil, it is brilliantly written and observed, assured and skillful, and a truly modern work.

This visionary novel follows the inner journey of Zechariah Stevenson, the son of a wealthy Georgetown businessman, while he works as the watchman at a timber depot deep within the interior. Isolated in the forest and having endured the suspicion of a fraud scandal, the mysterious death of his father, and the disappearance of his mistress, Zechariah begins a journey of self-discovery as he deconstructs previously held certainties about life by losing himself in nature. An immensely sensuous evocation of Guyanese flora and fauna and its potential impact on the imagination, this classic novel, first published in 1964, is a profound plea for an ecological vision of mankind's relationship to nature.

In this surreal comedy of soldiers and spies, Lieutenant James Churchill and his colleagues find themselves questioning their purpose. Are they for death or against it? These men of action will travel between the barracks, the lunatic asylum and the house of an aristocratic nymphomaniac in search of answers. For while few know the awful truth about Operation Apollo, the mission they are being trained for, fewer still understand the motives of the powerful psychiatrist Dr Best, who thinks he is surrounded by repressed homosexuals, and none know the identity of the secret agent among them. When the Anti-Death League is founded they are at last offered the chance to rebel and perhaps escape ...

When her ex-husband commits suicide after the failure of his anti-government activities, Liz Van Den Sandt struggles to decide whether to become involved in the South African Black nationalist movement

The apple of his eye is his son Mali, for whom he feels a deep but absurdly embarrassed affection, which appears to go unrequited. When Mali coolly announces that he is abandoning school to go to America to become a writer, Jagan's fatherly feelings are thrown into still greater confusion. And when, a year or two later, Mali returns with a half-Korean, half-American wife and a grandiose scheme for marketing a novel-writing machine, Jagan is utterly at sea. He is confronted by the new world shockingly personified - a world where his cherished notions of marriage and morals seem to count for nothing. The tragicomic clash of the generations deepens with every chapter. Jagan's final escape from the galling chains of paternal love comes as unexpectedly as every other twist in this delicious story.

V. 1. Out Of Town.--v. 2. London End. By J. B. Priestley.

James Plunkett's long-awaited second novel is, like his widely acclaimed Strwnpet City, a rich and intricate tapestry of Irish life, this time of the period from the 1914 war to the ending of World : War II. Like many other great novels it Is basically about growing up. We watch Tim McDonagh : and his two close friends moving through childhood and adolescence to early manhood, adapting each in his own-way to the varied and complex strands of the Irish heritage. A powerful influence, of course, is the Church, But there is. also the strong blood-myth of race and an equally pervasive nostalgia for a lost, golden age of the Gael, that mysterious groping back to a crowded, mythological world of gods, warriors and hero-poets. There are, too, , the passionate antagonisms of the Civil War .which had so. recently marked the setting-up of the new State and turned the triumph of the uprising to dust and ashes. Rich and highly articulate characters personify . these influences - O'Sheehan, the eccentric old librarian and Celtic scholar who believes he is Oisin, - son of Finn, MacCumhaill and hero-poet of Gaelic mythology and so about 2,000 years old Cornelius Moloney publican-politician, who hopes to make his fortune by training, greyhounds; and petty politicians and feuding Treatyites and Anti-Treatyites who were at one time brothers-in-arms.

The Coup describes violent events in the imaginary African nation of Kush, a large, landlocked, drought-ridden, sub-Saharan country led by Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû. (“A leader,” writes Colonel Ellelloû, “is one who, out of madness or goodness, takes upon himself the woe of a people. There are few men so foolish.”) Colonel Ellelloû has four wives, a silver Mercedes, and a fanatic aversion—cultural, ideological, and personal—to the United States. But the U.S. keeps creeping into Kush, and the repercussions of this incursion constitute the events of the novel. Colonel Ellelloû tells his own story—always elegantly, and often in the third person—from an undisclosed location in the South of France.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The conflicts between love and hate, good and evil, and life and art are explored in a portrait of Alaric Darconville, a twenty-nine-year-old professor at Quinsy College--a women's college in Virginia--who falls in love with and is jilted by one of his students