1924
14 books
- You feel the friendship between Dr Aziz and Cyril Fielding strain under the absurd pressures of colonial India, while the Marabar Caves leave everything morally unsettled. It’s thoughtful, occasionally slow and prickly, but rewarding if you like novels that refuse easy judgments about people or cultures.
- You get a wonderfully odd Oz adventure led by Grampa, a boastful old sailor whose sea stories and stubbornness make him as entertaining as the magical trouble around him. The book has Thompson’s brisk, punny energy, though its strange transformations and episodic wandering suit you better than a tightly plotted quest.
- If you loved Sir Percy, know this is his descendant Peter in post-war Transylvania, and the swashbuckling stays offstage for long stretches. What carries it is Rosemary's awful bargain, write propaganda or two young people die, which Orczy squeezes for every drop of melodrama.
- These are quick little puzzles, perfect for reading one at bedtime, with Poirot at his most vain (fussing over his moustache, scolding poor Hastings for guessing wrong again). Slighter than the novels, sure, but watching Hastings confidently misread every clue never stops being funny.
- Shaw does the sneaky thing of making Joan's judges thoughtful, almost kind, which is far more unsettling than villains. Joan herself is blunt, funny, impossible to manage.
- You follow Selina DeJong from an Illinois schoolhouse into onion fields, as she raises Dirk and tries to protect his imagination from the narrow life around them. Warm, sharp, and openly sentimental, it suits you if novels about art, money, and ambition appeal.
- You’ll appreciate its cool, intricate look at Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant, maddeningly self-controlled man caught between an unfaithful wife and the changing world before the First World War. The prose can feel deliberately oblique, but its intelligence and moral unease keep deepening after you’ve put it down.
- You get Tarzan miniaturized in the country of the Minunians, where rival city-states wage war and he has to survive as an unwilling pawn. It’s gloriously odd, pulpy, and more interested in invention than plausibility, so you’ll enjoy it most with your appetite for strange detours switched on.
- You’ll like this for its strange, moonlit beauty and its sadness about wanting two worlds at once. Alveric’s journey into Elfland, where time barely behaves and Lirazel cannot quite belong to the human world, feels more like an old ballad than a modern fantasy novel.
- Hans Castorp goes up to a Davos sanatorium for three weeks and stays seven years, and somehow you feel time warp right along with him. It's slow and talky (Settembrini's arguments go on for pages), but if you like ideas as drama, it rewards patience.
- You follow Anne Beddingfeld from a London Underground death to the Kilmorden Castle, where she throws herself into danger with more nerve than caution. It’s a brisk, romantic adventure rather than a pure drawing-room puzzle, with disguises, diamonds, and South African landscapes giving it a pleasantly scruffy, escapist feel.
- You get a more tired, thoughtful Richard Hannay here, moving through a postwar Europe where political idealism shades into manipulation. His decision to pose as a shell-shocked man gives the adventure an eerie psychological edge, though the pace is more deliberate than in The Thirty-Nine Steps.
- You watch D-503, a true believer engineer in a city of glass walls and scheduled hours, come undone in his own diary as a woman named I-330 wrecks his tidy math. It's strange, feverish, sometimes hard to follow, and it got to Orwell before Orwell got to you.