Reading The Decades 1970s
The 1970s were an unsettled decade that began with the waning of the hippy movement and ended with the Iranian Revolution and the election of Margaret Thatcher. In between came the death of Mao Zedong, the oil crisis and the birth of punk. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow defied all literary conventions, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist depicted the increased isolation of apartheid South Africa and Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden reflected the repercussions of a fractured society.
Showing 1-16 of 29 Results.
E. M. Forster; Steven D. Levitt Written during 1913 and 1914, Maurice deals with the then unmentionable subject of homosexuality. More unusual, it concerns a relationship that ends happily. | Angela Carter; Helen Simpson From familiar fairy tales and legends - "Red Riding Hood", "Bluebeard", "Puss in Boots", "Beauty and the Beast", vampires and werewolves, the author has created a collection of dark, sensual... |
Primo Levi; Raymond Rosenthal A chemist by training, the author became one of the witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In these haunting reflections inspired by the elements of the periodic table, he ranges from young... | Saul Bellow; Stanley Crouch Mr Artur Sammler, intellectual and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a registrar of madness, a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with... |
John Irving Focuses on the life and times of T S Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields - a feminist leader ahead of her times. This title also focuses on the... | Beryl Bainbridge Paranoid, wilful, lazy, the young Adolf Hitler turns up in Liverpool to stay with his brother Alois and sister-in-law Bridget. Hailed by Alois as a student and an artist, Adolf... |
Iris Murdoch; John Burnside When Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous... | Thomas Pynchon Tyrone Slothrop, a GI in London in 1944, has a big problem. Whenever he gets an erection, a Blitz bomb hits. Slothrop gets excited, and then, "a screaming comes across... |
Michael Ondaatje A novel of the Jazz Age. | Martin Amis Charles Highway, a precociously intelligent and highly sexed teenager, is determined to sleep with an older woman before he turns twenty. Rachel fits the bill perfectly and Charles plans his... |
Penelope Fitzgerald Penelope Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-winning novel set among the houseboat community of the Thames. | Nadine Gordimer Nadine Gordimer's Booker Prize-winning story of the forces and relationships seething in the South Africa of the day |
Ian McEwan In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves. | Graham Greene; Nicholas Shakespeare Graham Greene's gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinian town is considered one of his finest. It tells of Charley Fortnum, the 'Honorary Consul', a whisky-sodden figure... |
A. S. Byatt A novel which combines enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy. It is a tale of a brilliant and eccentric family, fatefully divided. The author won the Booker Prize... | Tom Sharpe Porterhouse is a backwoods institution which is supported by fee-paying students who buy their degrees. Sir Godber Evans, the new Master, is determined to make radical changes, provoking the wrath... |