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20th Century Classics

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Happy Valley – Patrick White

Nobel Laureate Patrick White had Happy Valley published in the UK in 1939. During his life he refused to allow the book to be re-published. So, it took to this issue published by the unusual Text Publishing of Melbourne in 2012 for it to appear as a second edition.

Octavo, 407 pages plus catalogue, decorative endpapers. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket.

White had spent time at a station in New South Wales as a jackaroo. He was not cut out for it. Nevertheless, the experience provided rather useful in writing this book … he had lived a colourful life to that stage and that would continue. Drawing on writers he had met and admired – Joyce, Woolf, DHL etc this is a complex novel of an exceptional standard.

Patrick White and his Happy Valley full of character and intrigue.

$40.00

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The Twyborn Affair – Patrick White – First edition 1979

A particularly good copy of this first edition published by Jonathan Cape, London in 1979. Octavo, 432 pages, clean as a whistle throughout.

A novel in three parts based first in the French Riviera before WWI: then a Sheep Station in the Snowy Mountain area of New South Wales after the war and finally in London in the lead up to WWII.

The protagonist although connected changes gender and more in each part, and the whole is a complex novel, challenging conventions as well as being wickedly humorous.

Patrick White at his best in the Twyborn Affair

$35.00

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The Secret Pilgrim – John le Carre – First Edition 1991

A very nice first edition published by Hodder, London in 1991.

Follows the Russia House and the Karla trilogy and despite the whole of Smiley, some believe, and we do, that this was his best book to date.

Octavo, 335 pages a better than very good copy.

Smiley and Ned in their final years up in Scotland at the training college for spies. The format of the book uses a simple ploy “reminiscences” to produce in effect a book of perfectly connected short stories. The language and plot exceptional from the beginning to the gracious end.

John le Carre – hard for us to say but this one puts him ahead of Greene – his template so to speak = wonderful reading

$40.00

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James Joyce’s Ulysses – Clive Hart

We doubt if there is any book ever published that requires more explanation and assistance on reading than Ulysses. Deliberately so. Joyce himself struggled with the corrections and many errors still remain – dependent what an error is in the context of Ulysses. Note that that should put anyone off reading the best mots confusing book of at least the 20th Century.

Octavo, 186 pages, very good condition Expert, Clive Hart published his work in 1968 through the Sydney University Press – part of their Sydney Studies in Literature series.

Ulysses by Hart – get it and understand it better

$30.00

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Absalom, Absalom – William Faulkner

One of the great Modern Library Editions. Pretty good condition in slightly chipped dust jacket with slight age marks to back.

Nobel Prize winning author whose incredible narratives centred on the American South … Superb work and includes the longest grammatically correct sentence in literature at page 181 (1292 words … phew)

Unsurpassed Faulkner

$30.00

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In the Great White Land (A Tale of the Antarctic Ocean) – Gordan Stables

Published by Blackie, London in the early 1930’s.

Octavo, 288 pages thick spongy paper and despite the spongy quite clean with some marks to the extreme per edge. Coloured frontispiece and three full page illustrations. Prize label on front end papers. Rare in the striking illustrated dust jacket.

Three stories and despite the subtitle starts with … “Far Away in the Frozen North” an Arctic adventure on the good barque Walrus and the oft frozen Captain Mayne Brace (great pun). Story two “Under the Southern Cross” requires no clue as to the general location with many icy encounters. Finally “On the Great Antarctic Continent” and the beauty and marvel of the Ice-Cave. The sledging journey across the tableland and the dash for the pole takes its lead from the great Heroic Era accounts.

Adventure in the frozen South – very South.

$80.00

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