Penguin

George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.

“The High Window”” is a classic novel by the master of hard-boiled crime. Philip Marlowe’s on a case: his client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband’s collection. That’s the simple part. It becomes more complicated when Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead. That’s also unlucky for a private investigator, because leaving a trail of corpses around LA gets cops’ noses out of joint. If Marlowe doesn’t wrap this one up fast, he’s going to end up in jail – or worse, in a box in the ground…””Anything Chandler writes about grips the mind from the first sentence””. (“”Daily Telegraph””). “”One of the greatest crime writers, who set standards others still try to attain””. (“”Sunday Times””). “”Chandler is an original stylist, creator of a character as immortal as Sherlock Holmes””

This is the story of K, his arrival in a village where he is never accepted, and his ensuing relentless struggle with authority in order to gain entrace to the castle that seems to rule it. K’s isolation and confusion, his desperation for the approval of elusive and anonymous powers, epitomises Kafka’s vision of twentieth-century alienation and anxiety.

At the centre of this novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them to his Islamic faith.

A searing account of George Orwell’s observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in Orwell’s later works and novels, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain.