★★★★★
166 pages • Chapman and Hall • 19 December, 1843 [HB]

A Christmas Carol is the definitive Christmas story, and a tale founded not on religious dogma but our common humanity.

“The only reference of Jesus is as “the mighty founder of Christmas”. Dickens was interested in the idea of Christmas as a time of reflection rather than its religious significance.”

★★★★★
176 pages & 256 pages • Penguin English Library • 31 May & 27 September, 2012 [PB]

E.M. Forster’s Italian novels are full of beauty and conflict, and the film versions are but pale shadow.

“A Room With A View is a romantic comedy, and a more conventional book than Where Angels Fear To Tread. Forster was apprehensive about it, and he fretted over the quality of the character’s inner lives.”

★★★★★
592 pages • Penguin • 26 April, 2012 [HB], originally Chapman & Hall • 1861

Great Expectations is a glorious, mesmerising book about hope, and how that hope is used against people by those who have been disappointed.

“This tale of great promise, and the disappointment of that promise, is extraordinarily powerful. Throughout his work, Dickens is interested in how people are created by circumstance, as well as the characters that wield circumstance to their own ends.”

★★★★★
368 pages • The Bodley Head • 1915 [HB]

With the renewed interest in Ford Madox Ford sparked by the BBC serialisation of Parade’s End, Tim Bennett-Goodman looks at The Good Soldier

“The story revolves around the relationship of two married couples, the American Dowells (John and Florence) and the English Ashburnhams (Edward and Leonora), who suck into their dark orbit various other doomed characters that they systematically destroy.”

★★★★★
275 pages • Anthony Blond • 1961 [PB]

A gay love story about young working-class men, for a change (or at least it was back in the ’60s.)

The Leather Boys is a 1961 London pulp novel by Gillian Freeman, and later made into a New Wave Brit flick in 1963 by the aptly named Sidney Furie. It is about two late-teen, working-class, south London ton-up biker boys who find themselves surprised, unnerved & ultimately confused to discover they’re in love with each other.

★★★★★
275 pages • Steerforth • 1938, 1998 [PB]

The Happy Island is a story of rich New York in the late 1930s, and work of genius from a master satirist.

It is the nightclub singer Prudence Bly who is Powell’s greatest performance. She should hold a high place in the literary hall of fame aside Ignatius J. Reilly and Bertie Wooster. The exchanges with her coeval and rival Jean Nelson are electric.

★★★★★
212 pages • Ward, Lock, and Company • 1891

This classic book starts out well enough but Wilde looses control of the plot as it meanders toward its conclusion.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is an acknowledged classic in the canon of English literature. Reading it through one has to wonder why. It is not so much the book itself but the associations with the book’s author, his history.

★★★★★
198 pages • Olympia Press • 1959

Weird and twisted, Naked Lunch is nevertheless a unique moment in American literature.

Naked Lunch is … well, it is hard to call it a novel, but that is only because the classification of the novel is one of those agreed upon definitions that the creators of the Syllabus go in for. Burroughs nevertheless called it a novel in his letters. That said, he was also off his head on junk when writing both the letters and the book itself.

★★★★★
198 pages • Penguin • 1971

This pre-WW1 novel, finished in 1914 yet not published until 1971, is a great work about the struggle of Maurice Hall to come to terms with his sexuality.

In 1911 Forster wrote in his diary of his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women and vice versa”. In Maurice Forster tackled the subject of homosexuality and assessed what it meant. Maurice is as pioneering a book now as it was then.

★★★★★
198 pages • Penguin • 1971

This pre-WW1 novel, finished in 1914 yet not published until 1971, is a great work about the struggle of Maurice Hall to come to terms with his sexuality.

In 1911 Forster wrote in his diary of his “weariness of the only subject that I both can and may treat – the love of men for women and vice versa”. In Maurice Forster tackled the subject of homosexuality and assessed what it meant. Maurice is as pioneering a book now as it was then.