Recommendations based on "Testament of Experience An Autobiographical Story of the Years 1925-1950"

An astonishingly frank and deeply autobiographical account of homosexual relationships in an era when love between men was not only stigmatised, but also illegal, E.M. Forster's Maurice is edited by P.N. Furbank with an introduction by David Leavitt in Penguin Classics. Maurice Hall is a young man who grows up confident in his privileged status and well aware of his role in society. Modest and generally conformist, he nevertheless finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, whom he encounters at Cambridge, and through Alec, the gamekeeper on Clive's country estate, Maurice gradually experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening. A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster's death in 1970. Compellingly honest and beautifully written, it offers a powerful condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society, and is at once a moving love story and an intimate tale of one man's erotic and political self-discovery. In his introduction, David Leavitt explores the significance of the novel in relation to Forster's own life and as a founding work of modern gay literature. This edition reproduces the Abinger text of the novel, and includes new notes, a chronology and further reading. E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was a noted English author and critic and a member of the Bloomsbury group. His first novel, Where Angels Fear To Tread appeared in 1905. The Longest Journey appeared in 1907, followed by A Room With A View (1908), based partly on the material from extended holidays in Italy with his mother. Howards End (1910) was a story that centred on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. Maurice was revised several times during his life, and finally published posthumously in 1971. If you enjoyed Maurice, you might like Forster's A Room With a View, also available in Penguin Classics.

A sensitive portrayal of the healing process that took place in the aftermath of the First World War, J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country includes an introduction by Penelope Fitzgerald, author of Offshore, in Penguin Modern Classics. A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years. Adapted into a 1987 film starring Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh, A Month in the Country traces the slow revival of the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War Joseph Lloyd Carr (1912-1994) attended the village school at Carlton Miniott in the North Riding and Castleford Secondary School. A head teacher, publisher and novelist, his books include A Day in Summer (1964); The Harpole Report (1972); A Month in the Country (1980), which won the Guardian Fiction prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Battle of Pollock's Crossing (1985), which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; What Hetty Did (1988) and Harpole and Foxberrow, General Publishers (1992). If you enjoyed A Month in the Country, you might like Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Unlike anything else in modern English literature' D.J. Taylor, Spectator

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERIlja Leonard Pfeijffer’s moving and addictive masterpiece of European identity, nostalgia and the end of an era.‘A masterpiece: grandiose style, brilliant and rich. It will defy the ages’ Trouw (The Netherlands)‘The love of my life lives in my past. That is, despite the alliteration, a terrible sentence to write. I do not want to come to the conclusion that, as it is the case for the hotel where I am staying and the continent after which it is named, the best time is behind me and that I have little more to expect from the future than to live on my past.’A writer takes residence in the illustrious but decaying Grand Hotel Europa, to think about where things went wrong with Clio, with whom he fell in love in Genoa and moved to Venice. He reconstructs a compelling story of love in times of mass tourism, about their trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere and the Cinque Terre and their thrilling search for the last painting of Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Grand Hotel Europe and gets more and more involved with the memorable characters who inhabit it, and who seem to come from a more elegant time. All the while, globalisation seems to be grabbing hold even on this place frozen in time.Grand Hotel Europa is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s masterly novel on the old continent, where so much history resides that there is no place left for a future and where the most realistic future perspectives are offered in the form of exploiting the past in the shape of tourism.

FROM THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE OLIVE TREE AND THE SHADOW SISTER A heart-rending page turner which sweeps from war-torn Europe to Thailand and back again . . . As a child, Julia Forrester would linger in the hothouse of Wharton Park estate, where exotic flowers tended by her grandfather blossomed and faded with the seasons. Now, recovering from a family tragedy, she once more seeks comfort at Wharton Park, newly inherited by Kit Crawford, a charismatic man with a sad story of his own. But when a years-old diary is found during renovation work, the pair turn to Julia's grandmother to hear the truth about the love affair that turned Wharton Park's fortunes sour . . . And so Julia is plunged back in time, to the world of Olivia and Harry Crawford, a young couple torn apart by the Second World War - and whose fragile marriage is destined to affect the happiness of generations to come, including Julia's own. Outside the UK, this book is published under the title The Orchid House 'Atmospheric, heart-rending and multi-layered' Grazia

Completed in 1914, this novel is a condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society and a plea for emotional and sexual honesty. Aware that its publication would cause a furore, Forster ensured that it did not appear until after his death in 1970.

The magnificent final volume of one of the most widely acclaimed fictional masterpieces of the postwar era.Few books have been awaited as eagerly as Clea, the sensuous and electrically suspenseful novel that resolves the enigmas of the Alexandria Quartet. Some years and one world war was after his bizarre liaisons with Melissa and Justine, the Irish émigré Darley becomes enmeshed with the bisexual artist Clea. That affair not only changes the lovers, it transforms the dead as well, revealing new layers of duplicity and desire, perversity and pathos in Lawrence Durrell’s masterly construction.“A massive, marvelously concrete, deeply felt statement of faith. . . . His style glows with the mineral deposits of many cultures. One of the most important works of our time has come to an end.”—The New York Times Book Review“Clea rounds out the tetralogy with grace, beauty, and stunning impact. . . . This rich, exciting fare is Durrell’s finest writing style, a manner of writing few living authors can equal. . . . A magnificent achievement.”—The Detriot News“The reader is carried along on a current of superbly accomplished prose, as flexible and colorful as that of any contemporary writer. . . . What Durrell has given us is well worth having.”—San Francisco Chronicle

"There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world."—Wall Street Journal Twelve remarkable stories by the master storyteller William Trevor. In this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, William Trevor plumbs the depths of the human heart. Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation. Trevor is, in his own words, "a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so." Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try. Trevor wrote eighteen novels and novellas, and hundreds of short stories, for which he has won a number of prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement. In 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature.

After a lonely boyhood, and the painful ordeal of his schooldays, Philip's yearning for adventure takes him to Germany and later Paris where he tries to make his mark as an artist before returning to London to study medicine. Here, a tortured and one-sided love affair with Mildred, a vulgar yet irresistible waitress, changes the course of his life for ever. Commenting later on the novel's autobiographical aspects, Maugham recalled how in writing the book he mingled fact and fiction and 'found myself free from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me'.However, like Dickens' David Copperfield to which it is often compared, Of Human Bondage goes far beyond autobiography, and is Maugham's most ambitious and unsparing novel, revealing the author's undoubted gift for storytelling as he explores the timeless theme of human freedom - freedom to act, to think and to love.

A striking novel of truth and soul-searching. Returning from a visit to her daughter in Iraq, Joan Scudamore finds herself unexpectedly alone and stranded in an isolated rest house by flooding of the railway tracks. Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her... Famous for her ingenious crime books and plays, Agatha Christie also wrote about crimes of the heart, six bittersweet and very personal novels, as compelling and memorable as the best of her work.

The Second Son is a powerful drama, taut with international intrigue that reaches from the Vatican to the White House. But The Second Son also tells a story of passionate love between both a man and a woman, and between man and God. It offers entertainment as unforgettable as it is provocative.