Cirrus@Austlit

'The Hotel Swiss-Touring is the refuge for a group of cosmopolitan characters who come together in Switzerland after the Second World War. Their object is to conceal themselves from money-hungry governments and hostile master races. But their common purpose doesn't prevent a microcosm of jealousies, spitefulness, vindictiveness and mistrust from developing among the small group, all under the relentless eye of Madame Bonnard. ' (Publication summary)

'Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of Stead's satirical and brilliantly observed novel about the relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children.

'Sam, a scientist, uses words as weapons of attack and control on his children and is prone to illusions of power and influence that fail to extend beyond his family. His wife Henny, who hails from a wealthy Baltimore family, is disastrously impractical and enmeshed in her own fantasies of romance and vengeance. Much of the care of their six children is left to Louisa, Sam's 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Within this psychological battleground, Louisa must attempt to make a life of her own.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (MUP).

'The idea of human cruelty to animals so consumes novelist Elizabeth Costello in her later years that she can no longer look another person in the eye: humans, especially meat-eating ones, seem to her to be conspirators in a crime of stupefying magnitude taking place on farms and in slaughterhouses, factories, and laboratories across the world. Here the internationally renowned writer J.M. Coetzee uses fiction to present a powerfully moving discussion of animal rights in all their complexity. He draws us into Elizabeth Costello's own sense of mortality, her compassion for animals, and her alienation from humans, even from her own family. In his fable, presented as a Tanner Lecture sponsored by the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, Coetzee immerses us in a drama reflecting the real-life situation at hand: a writer delivering a lecture on an emotionally charged issue at a prestigious university. ' (Publication summary)

'Living on the seamier side of New York in 1941, Robert Grant is a middle-aged man to whom life is a game in which he makes his own rules. This is no more evident than in the pursuit of his only hobby: the search for, seduction and betrayal of women. His targets are always 'easy', the cheaper the better. He is constantly on the lookout for a new face, a new phone number, 'a little tea, a little chat'. While Grant gets a certain thrill from his intrigues, he receives little pleasure - and gives none, until he meets Barbara, the 'blondine', a large, goodlooking but sluttish woman of thirty-two. In Barbara, he meets his match. First published in 1948, "A Little Tea, A Little Chat" provides an irresistible, sardonic commentary on men and women on the make whose sexual appetites wickedly mirror the materialism of twentieth-century America.' (Publication summary)