It took Nige years to find this brilliant novel in a secondhand bookshop. If only he'd known you can buy it for a penny online... The novels of Muriel Spark that most frequently turn up in charity shops are The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, A ... Read More...
The 1p Book Review
Books for a penny
The strange ways of internet commerce mean that countless secondhand books can be bought online for £0.01 plus postage. Today ZMKC turns up an interesting title. A Fairly Honourable Defeat (available here for a penny) is the first Iris Murdoch I'd read. It was published in 1970 (and yet, amazingly, contains a ... Read More...
This highly entertaining 1p review comes from guest Mike Petty... Unlike other Saturday-afternoon staples like The Dam Busters and Reach for the Sky, the film of Ice Cold in Alex is based on a novel. I simply can't remember if I've read it before, so comprehensively has it been elbowed out ... Read More...
Today's 1p (or in this case, 1 cent) book is recommended by guest reviewer Michael Schauerte... Tomorrow I must begin a new life. How could I do it, with nothing but death behind me? Wladyslaw Szpilman’s new life began in January 1945. More than five years of death were behind him, stretching ... Read More...
This 1p Book Review comes from Simon Thomas of the popular Stuck in a Book blog... Those who don't like Jansson call her books boring - and if you read books primarily for plot, then she won't be the author for you. But if you choose your books for character, writing style, ... Read More...
The Rings Of Saturn (available for 1p here) is a strange book, not in any conventional sense a novel. It has affinities with the kind of thing the great psychogeographer Iain Sinclair writes - if less convivial and fantastical than Sinclair. Dispensing with what he called the 'grinding noises' of the ... Read More...
Dabbler reader Steve Buckley recommends a cricket classic, sometimes described as "the greatest sports book ever written"... In his 1965 article ‘How to Build a Cricket Library’, John Arlott had Beyond a Boundary by CLR James as one of his essential twenty books on the game. Does anyone read it anymore? You ... Read More...
After years – no, decades – of meaning to (and at least once beginning to), I finally got round to reading Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (available for 1p here). Though it has the ultimately elating quality of all really good art, it is a bleak and dejecting ... Read More...
W.G. Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape, first published in 1955, has in many ways been overtaken by later studies, but is still the classic of its subject – and is undoubtedly the best written. Hoskins is animated by a love and deep, intimate knowledge of certain local landscapes - ... Read More...
Tender is the Night (available for a penny here) opens on the French Riviera in 1919. Through the eyes of a young film actress called Rosemary – the ‘new cardboard paper doll’ the film world has cut ‘to pass before its empty harlot’s mind’- we observe the apparently charmed lives ... Read More...