This Week's Acquisitions
- T. T. Haverfield, The Old Oak Farm: Or Robert Selbourne's Ordeal (Sunday School Union, c. 1870). Protestant boy finds himself under the control of Roman Catholic relative, bad things happen. (Abebooks)
- Frances Taylor, Gertrude Parsons, Cecilia Mary Caddell, and Herman Geiger, Tyborne and Other Stories (Hickey and Co., n.d.). Part of the Vatican Library of Cheap Catholic Books. Four novels: Taylor's Tyborne, Parsons' Wrecked and Saved, Caddell's Blind Agnese, and Geiger's Lydia. (eBay)
- David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (Vintage, 1996). Exiled Ovid deals with feral child. (Amazon [secondhand])
- Jean Devanny, Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (Virago, 1986). Servant in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia deals with jealousy, politics, business. (Houghton Book Shop)
- Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl (Vintage, 1990). Two linked tales about the Holocaust and its shattering effect on a survivor. (Houghton Book Shop)
- Colum McCann, This Side of Brightness (Picador, 2003). Two men and Manhattan tunnels during the early twentieth century. (Amazon [secondhand])
- Benjamin Black, Elegy for April (Holt, 2010). Most recent entry in Black's (i.e., John Banville's) neo-noir series about Irish detective (really, pathologist) Quirke. (eBay)
- John Plotz, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton, 2009). Objects, selves, nation, empire. (Greenwood Books)
- Nicholas Daly, Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s (Cambridge, 2009). Another plunge into the problem of mass culture at mid-century. I'm reviewing this for Choice. (Review copy)