Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers

George Orwell left post-war London for Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura, to write what became 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. He was driven by a passionate desire to undermine the enemies of democracy and make plain the dangers of dictatorship, surveillance, doublethink, and censorship. T...

This novel is part of Oxford University Press' World's Classics series whereby some of the best loved novels are reissued with special introductions by today's most distinguished writers. `I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD,' wrote Dickens of what is...

They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died. One afternoon, a mother opens her front door to find the length of her son's body stretched out on the veranda, swaddled in akwete material, his head on her welcome mat. 'The Death of Vivek Oji' transports us to the day of Vivek's birth, the ...

Vivek Oji: utterly captivating, complex, mercurial and profoundly connected to those who come to understand him. This novel unpicks Vivek's tale. It begins with his end, his body shrouded on his mother's doorstep, and moves backwards through time to tell us the story of Vivek's life and the myste...

Karl Braun is a slight, grey-haired man who lodges in West London and works as a tuner for a firm of piano makers who know little or nothing about him. His fellow lodgers believe that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. But the outwardly poised Herr Braun is inwardly a very anxious man...

Write this down: Cara Romero wants to work. When Cara left the Dominican Republic for America, she thought she would work at the factory of little lamps for the rest of her life. But when the Great Recession hits, she is left unemployed and struggling with the rising rent. To survive, Cara must s...

Lyle Hovde is at the onset of his golden years, living a mostly content life in rural Wisconsin with his wife, Peg, daughter, Shiloh, and six-year old grandson, Isaac. After a troubled adolescence and subsequent estrangement from her parents, Shiloh has finally come home. But, while away, she bec...

Meet Abbas. Woodcarver, toy maker, dreamer. Abbas is seventeen when he is whisked away to Tipu Sultan's glorious palace in Mysore. Apprenticed to the legendary clockmaker Monsieur Du Leze, he is ordered to create an ingenious musical tiger to delight Tipu's sons. In the eccentric Du Leze, Abbas f...

Ullis went to the bathroom and carefully unfolded the business card and placed it on the sink. Then he rolled up a note and snorted the last of his wife's ashes. Following the death of his wife, Dominic Ullis escapes to Bombay in search of oblivion and a dangerous new drug, Meow Meow. So begins a...

These three works of fiction are powerfully emotive stories that combine passion with forceful feminist argument. Janet Todd explores how these novels are linked, not only through the mother-daughter relationship of their authors, but also in their perceptions of feminism and female sexuality.