This novel is a study of the savage warfare between Henrietta and her husband Sam, an impractical idealist who has nearly brought his family to ruin. It also tells the story of the children who, growing up in an increasingly bizarre household, try to escape damage.

Man Who Loved Children Uk

Literature & Fiction

Stead, Christina

Contemporary

Flamingo

For money, wrote Balzac, "people fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot." In House of All Nations, the pot is an exclusive private European bank, and the spiders are a rich mixture of high-stakes gamblers, tax evaders, and shady speculators, all united by their love of money. They burn for it, hunger for it, and indeed would sell their souls for it had they souls to sell. Leading them on the chase is the cynical and mercurial director of the bank, Jules Bertillon, for whom every political or natural disaster is a potential shower of gold. Bertillon is a master of the devious maneuver, and his clients trust and even love him for it. In the end, he is the duper duped, but it is the clients who pay: for Jules, unprincipled to the last, has not been so foolish as to believe in himself. Set in the Paris of the interwar period, House of All Nations is a vast panoramic novel that explores the intrigues, swindles, and manipulations of international finance, exposing themes that are as relevant today as when first published in 1939. 'Combined with her Hogarthian humor, brilliant vocabulary, high-keyed imagination, the result is one of the most savage satires on 'the principle of money' since Balzac.' Time 'Full of rich comedy, crowded with Balzacian characters...a work of extraordinary talent.' The New Yorker

House of all nations

Literary

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

In a small European hotel in the late 1940s a bizarre group of characters, who all seem to be on the run from some past financial, personal or political horror, come together.

The Little Hotel: A Novel

Henry Holt Co.

The Man Who Loved Children

Holt; Rinehart; Winston

Man Who Loved Children

Henry Holt Company

NEAR THE BONE

RANDOM HOUSE UK

High-minded, independent, imaginative, Teresa Hawkins knows only one commandment 'Thou shalt love'. Emotionally starved by her ramshackle family, Teresa searches for fulfillment outside her stultifying life as a working girl in a large city. Obsessed with love and sex she pins her affection on the first possible object, the egotistical Jonathon Crow, a poverty-stricken tutor who coaches her in Latin. Teresa preserves this love in the face of his indifference, contempt and ill-usage, imprisoned by her belief that 'to love is to give for ever without stint, and not to ask for the slightest thing'. It is only through another man - her ebullient and warmhearted employer James Quick - that Teresa comes to understand her power as a woman, and emerges from obsession to a real consciousness of sexuality and love. Set in Sydney and London, FOR LOVE ALONE, first published in 1945, is one of Christina Stead's finest novels. This powerful and penetrating exploration of a woman in love is now a major Australian film.

For Love Alone

Harcourt, Brace. Jovanovich

Eleanor Herbert Brent is a beautiful English woman who believes in respectability and nurtures a desire to be a wife and mother in the 'dear old fashioned way'. But sexuality too forms her personality, and as a young graduate on the loose in London she explores it with every man she meets. She experiences everything: a restless, promiscuous youth, a wholesome suburban marriage, life on the fringes of literary London. Only one thing remains beyond her reach: the experience of real love; this and this only could transform Miss Herbert into the passionate woman she really is.

Miss Herbert (the suburban wife) (A Harvest/HBJ book)

From London's East End to Newcastle, this novel draws a picture of oppresssion, betrayal in the trade unions and Labour party and of hope deferred, through the lives of the working-class Cotter family. It also deals with the different kinds of love and sexuality banned from society's norms.

Cotters' England (A & R classics)

Angus&Robertson

Originally published in 1934, Seven Poor Men of Sydney is Christina Stead's first novel, a brilliant portrayal of a group of men and women living in Sydney in the 1920s amid conditions of poverty and social turmoil.Set against the vividly drawn backgrounds of Fisherman's (Watson's) Bay and the innercity slums, the various characters seek to resolve their individual spiritual dilemmas through politics, religion and philosophy.Their struggles, their pain and their frustrations are portrayed with consummate skill in this memorable evocation of a city and an era.

Seven Poor Men of Sydney

Genre Fiction

Angus and Robertson

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Books by Stead, Christina