Books & Authors: Award-Winning Fiction (Fl-Ha)
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
Flaubert, Gustave
(French, 1821–80) Born in Rouen, Flaubert abandoned his law studies at L'École de Droit, Paris, in 1845 and returned to his birthplace to devote himself to writing. He had a major influence on nineteenth-century fiction through his rejection of romantic conventions in favour of a rigorous realism. The technical advances produced by his exacting concern with style and form were…
Fleming, Ian
(British, 1908–64) More than half the total population of the globe, so it is estimated, has seen a James Bond film. His fourteen adventures in print have sold over forty million copies. Yet Bond was created by Ian Fleming in a moment, he professed, of intense boredom. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, Fleming served in naval intelligence during the war, and he was 42 when he wrote Casino Roy…
Flusfeder, David
(British, 1960– ) Flusfeder lives in London and has worked as a reviewer. He writes with black humour and great inventiveness. Like Plastic (1997), his second novel, is a tale of Jewish family life as you have never read it before; brothers Howard and Charlie jointly own the family firm (plastics). They hate each other, and Howard does a bunk from his responsibilities both at work and at ho…
Foden, Giles
(British, 1967– ) Foden is both novelist and journalist. His first novel, The Last King of Scotland (Whitbread First Novel Award, 1998), tells the story of an English doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, living in Uganda in the 1970s, who is engaged rather against his will to be private physician to larger-than-life President Idi Amin. Though Amin himself appears relatively little in the novel, his p…
Ford, Ford Madox
(British, 1873–1939) Ford was the grandson of the artist Ford Madox Brown and grew up among artists and musicians. His best books are difficult but very rewarding. Ford was a leading practitioner of modernist fiction and an influential editor who discovered, among others, D. H. Lawrence and Jean Rhys. As a young man he collaborated with Conrad, who recognized Ford as a marvellous stylist. L…
Forester, C(ecil) S(cott)
(British, 1899–1966) Born in Cairo, C. S. Forester grew up in London and studied medicine before becoming a writer in the mid-1920s. Begin with Mr Midshipman Hornblower (1950), dealing with the start of Horatio Hornblower's naval career during the Napoleonic wars. In the course of eleven novels, the conscientious and resourceful Hornblower rises to the rank of Admiral. The books are …
Forster, E(dward) M(organ)
(British, 1879–1970) Born in London, E. M. Forster was educated at King's College, Cambridge, of which he became an honorary fellow in 1946. Eminent for over fifty years among the liberal intellectuals of his day, he received the Order of Merit in 1966. Begin with his first novel, the tragi-comic Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Set largely in Tuscany, the book centres on tensions …
Forster, Margaret
(British, 1938– ) Born in Carlisle, Forster is an acclaimed and distinguished biographer, but it is as a writer of fiction that she deserves greater recognition. Her first novel, Georgy Girl (1965), was made into a successful film, but since Mother, Can You Hear Me? (1979) she has examined the complicated relationships within families, especially between mothers and daughters. Have the Men …
Fowles, John
(British, 1926– ) Fowles has lived for many years in the English seaside resort of Lyme Regis, the location for The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969). In 1867 respectable and wealthy amateur palaeontologist Charles Smithson falls under the spell of a strange, ‘fallen’ woman, Sarah Woodruff. Smithson's pursuit of Sarah wrecks his engagement to a respectable young w…
Frame, Janet
(NZ, 1924–2004) Janet Frame's unhappy early life led to her repeated incarceration in mental hospitals from 1947 to 1955, and her writing is preoccupied with the themes of madness, sanity, and creativity. Start with Faces in the Water (1961), a harrowing and funny account of the narrator's stay in a mental hospital, with piercing insights into her own imagination, the lives of…
Frame, Ronald
(British, 1953– ) Frame was born in Glasgow, where he attended university before studying at Oxford. He became a full-time writer in 1981. Begin with the entertaining Sandmouth People (1987), which presents a day in the life of a genteel seaside town. Deft social comedy highlights behaviour ranging from the neurotic to the downright illegal beneath the rigid surfaces of 1950s respectability…
Francis, Dick
(British, 1920– ) A former bomber pilot and champion steeplechase jockey, Francis became a racing journalist after retiring from the saddle in 1957. His first adventure thriller appeared in 1962. Francis has published a book a year since, winning lifetime achievement awards from his peers on both sides of the Atlantic. A typical Francis novel is set against a racing background and features …
Franklin, Miles
(Australian, 1879–1954) Franklin's family were pioneers, mountain squatters in New South Wales, and she wrote her famous first novel, My Brilliant Career (1901), at the age of 16. This was inspired by Franklin's own frustration at the tedium and poverty of her family's life in the bush, and takes the heroine to her grandmother's beautiful farm where she is wooed …
Franzen, Jonathan
(US, 1959– ) Franzen's big, ambitious, and extremely funny novel The Corrections (2001) explores the life of the Lamberts; father Alfred, losing his mind to Parkinson's; mother Enid, determined to preserve appearances and have one last happy family Christmas in their mid-western home; daughter Denise, brilliant chef and lover to both her employer and his wife; uxorious, money-…
Fraser, George MacDonald
(British, 1925– ) A writer of meticulously researched historical adventure novels whose subjects range from piracy to a black American prize-fighter in nineteenth-century Britain and the adventures during the Second World War of Private McAuslin, ‘The dirtiest soldier in the world’. But posterity will surely remember MacDonald Fraser for one glorious comic creation: Harry Flas…
Frayn, Michael
(British, 1933– ) Born in London, Frayn was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is a prolific playwright and journalist, and his fiction is notable for its witty treatments of contemporary social and cultural preoccupations. Begin with The Tin Men (1965), his first novel, which is set in a research institute dedicated to achieving automation of all everyday tasks. As a visit from th…
French, Marilyn
(US, 1929– ) Marilyn French, feminist philosopher and theorist, is best known as the author of The Women's Room (1977), a landmark in feminist writing which encapsulated the rise of the women's movement. Set in 1968 it tells the story of Mira Ward, suburban wife and mother, lonely and depressed, who returns to school and begins to re-examine her life. The novel depicts the rea…
Fyfield, Frances
(British, 1948– ) Solicitor Frances Fyfield writes a series of books featuring Crown Prosecutor Helen West and Detective Superintendent Geoffrey Bailey. The novels are skilfully plotted, the characters complex and believable, and the central relationship between West and Bailey, which needs constant negotiation, is powerfully drawn. Trial by Fire (1990) sees the pair moving to the country a…
Gaddis, William
(US 1922–98) Gaddis graduated from Harvard University, where he developed his satirical eye by writing for the college magazine, Lampoon. His work is generally concerned with revealing fakery, pomposity, and self-deception. Largely self-exiled from the world of commercial publishing, Gaddis enjoyed an underground reputation as a reclusive genius. His most accessible book is Carpenter'…
Gaines, Ernest J.
(US, 1933– ) Gaines was born on a plantation in Louisiana, the state which serves as the setting for his work. His writing is based in the African-American oral tradition and centres on issues of community, history, and black masculinity. Like Hemingway, Gaines captures the regional speech of the southern United States in simple yet memorable prose. Through his characters, Gaines gives voic…
Galsworthy, John
(British, 1867–1933) Galsworthy studied law and travelled widely before beginning to write. He was prolific, but his best-known work is The Forsyte Saga (1906–21). The sequence, made up of three semi-autobiographical novels linked by two shorter ‘interludes’, is a satirical exposure of the greed and hypocrisy of upper-middle-class London in the early years of the twenti…
Gao Xingjian
(Chinese, 1940– ) Although this dissident writer was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world before 2000, he was certainly notorious in his native China, in part because his views (modernist in art, radical in politics) were usually violently at odds with those of the authorities. Eventually he left for Europe, carrying with him the manuscript of his novel Soul Mountain, which was p…
García Márquez, Gabriel
(Colombian, 1928– ) Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, a small town in Colombia, and educated at a Jesuit college in Bogotá. He became a journalist at the age of 18, writing for liberal papers in South America, and moved to Europe seven years later in order to work for the Liberal El Espectador. Here he rose to controversy and fame with the exposé of a…
Gardam, Jane
(British, 1928– ) Born and brought up in Yorkshire, Gardam has lived in the south since 1946. She writes particularly well about women's lives. Start with the beautifully crafted, linked short stories Black Faces White Faces (1975), set in Jamaica, where repressed English holidaymakers find themselves astonishingly liberated. Move on to God on the Rocks (1978, Booker shortlisted), se…
Gardner, John Champlin
(US, 1933–82) Gardner was a distinguished scholar in Old and Middle English, a Professor at New York State University, Binghamton, before his death in a motorcycle accident. The cult novel Grendel (1971) is a witty re-imagining of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf from the monster's viewpoint; its reverse view of humankind invites readers to identify with the narrator, whose bloodthirsty …
Garner, Alan
(British, 1934– ) Garner is quoted as saying that his novels resemble onions. In other words, his work has many layers: a topmost narrative layer, which is the obviously visible story, to be enjoyed by young readers; within that, networks of imagery, and at the core a deep structure put together with meticulous intelligence. All of this should not put readers off. His early novels, such as …
Garner, Helen
(Australian, 1942– ) Garner has worked as a journalist and written non-fiction and scripts alongside her fiction. Begin with The Children's Bach (1984) a novel about a happy couple and their children living in Melbourne, whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a woman from the husband's past. Elizabeth has a daughter and an estranged partner; all three of them c…
Gaskell, Elizabeth
(British, 1810–65) Elizabeth Gaskell was brought up by her aunt in the Cheshire village of Knutsford, later marrying William Gaskell, a Unitarian minister like her father. Her life with her husband brought her into close contact with the poor of Manchester, and it is her sympathy for them that inspired her first novel, Mary Barton (1848). The heroine is the daughter of a trade union activis…
Gee, Maggie
(British, 1948– ) Gee's first, vividly written experimental novel, Dying in Other Words (1981), made a strong impression. It combines elements of thriller (the heroine is discovered naked and murdered at the start) with blackly comic insights and hypnotically poetic language. Themes of family and romantic love loom large in her more conventional later novels, though these themes are …
Gellhorn, Martha
(US, 1908–98) Martha Gellhorn, one of the first female war correspondents, reported from the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and covered many of the twentieth century's major stories, continuing to write and travel until 1996. Her second husband was Ernest Hemingway, who features in Travels with Myself and Another (1978) as U.C.—‘unwilling companion’. Her detailed, evo…
George, Elizabeth
(US, 1949– ) Elizabeth George has written some dozen bestselling crime novels in the English tradition featuring Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers of New Scotland Yard. The early books dwelt upon the contrast between the downmarket, chain-smoking Havers and the elegant Lynley (an earl, no less). Their slightly anachronistic flavour was only enhanced by the fact t…
Geras, Adèle
(British, 1944– ) Geras was born in Jerusalem and has lived in Manchester for over thirty years. She has written more than sixty books for children of all ages. Of her teenage fiction, start with Voyage (1983), set on a ship bearing emigrants (many of them Jewish) from Eastern Europe to America in 1904. The book explores the growing friendship and love between four young people, set against…
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic
(British, 1901–35) D. H. Lawrence, Naomi Mitchison, James Kelman JS …
Gibson, William
(US, 1948– ) Born in the United States, though he now lives in Vancouver, Gibson became the leading explorer of the conceptual possibilities of contemporary technology. His first novel, Neuromancer (1984), pre-empted a whole raft of computer and business innovations, and single-handedly coined the concept of ‘cyberspace’—the virtual landscape of computer-aided experienc…
Gide, André
(French, 1869–1951) Born in Paris, the son of a Sorbonne law professor who died when he was 11, Gide had an irregular and lonely upbringing before entering into the coterie surrounding Oscar Wilde. Beginning as an essayist, Gide had emerged by 1917 as a prophet for French youth, an object of endless debate and attack. His first novel, Strait is the Gate (La Porte étroite; 1909), tell…
Gilchrist, Ellen
(US, 1935– ) Ellen Gilchrist grew up in Mississippi. Her first book of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), introduces Rhoda Manning and Nora Jane Whittington, two of her favourite heroines, both of whom have fraught, ambivalent relationships with the legacy of southern womanhood. They grow up and continue to struggle in their different ways with family, sex, ambition, and ad…
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
(US, 1860–1935) Gilman was known in her lifetime for her feminism and journalism, but it is mainly through one short story that she is remembered. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1891) is about a woman who suffers postnatal depression. Her doctor recommends that she avoid all mental stimulation (no reading, writing, or conversation). Her husband enforces the doctor's regime, so…
Gissing, George (Robert)
(British, 1857–1903) George Gissing was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and educated at Owen's College, Manchester. He was imprisoned for stealing money to assist a prostitute whom he later married. Then he travelled to America, living in extreme poverty. His early novels, such as Workers in the Dawn (1880), reflect his experience of living on the breadline. New Grub Street (1891) expo…
Glaister, Lesley
(British, 1956– ) Glaister often writes about women whose experience has pushed them outside conventional life, towards horrific destinations. Begin with Trick or Treat (1991), which deals with three sets of neighbours, most memorably the aged couple Olive (too fat now to go out) and her skinny partner Arthur, still together and still socialist after fifty years. Move on to Digging to Austr…
Glasgow, Ellen
(US, 1873–1945) Glasgow's popular family saga novels were informed by the history, mentality, and social codes of the deep South of the United States, where she was brought up. They reflect especially on women's roles, and challenge the Southern romantic tradition; some are in the vein of social realism, others are comedies of manners. Barren Ground (1925) features a strong wo…
Gogol, Nikolai
(Russian, 1809–52) Born at Sorochintsy in the Ukraine, Gogol worked as a civil servant and lecturer in St Petersburg before devoting himself to writing. His work's ethical seriousness, together with its stark realism and imaginative power, made a major contribution to the nineteenth-century renaissance in Russian literature. Begin with Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (2 vols., 1831&#…
Golding, William
(British, 1911–93) Golding served in the Navy during the Second World War, then worked as a schoolmaster for some years. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. His novels have very diverse settings, but are often moral dramas depicting mankind's capacity for good or evil. This is certainly true of Lord of the Flies (1954), still his most widely read work. When a group of scho…
Gordimer, Nadine
(South African, 1923– ) Gordimer's first stories were published in 1949 and, since then, she has written over 200 short stories and eleven novels. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is a shrewd and elegant commentator on racial injustice, consistently and intelligently opposing the apartheid regime. One of her earlier novels, A World of Strangers (1958), foll…
Gordon, Mary
(US, 1949– ) From her writer-father Gordon learned the value of ideas and ambitions, while her mother taught her how to remember jokes and dinner-table conversations. Both thoughtful and domestic, Gordon's honest, inventive novels examine the demands of desire versus duty, and the pain of family loyalties that divide and bind its members across the generations. Begin with Final Payme…
Goudge, Elizabeth
(British, 1900–84) Elizabeth Goudge lived in Wells, Ely, and Oxford as a child, and became a full-time writer in 1938. She wrote ten children's books, which were among her best work. The Little White Horse (1947) is a tale about Maria Merryweather's adventures at Moonacre Manor. Like many children's novels written after the Second World War, it believes in the restorati…
Gower, Iris
(British, 1939– ) Destiny's Child (1999; previously published as Bride of the Thirteenth Summer, 1975), is set during the Wars of the Roses. Little Margaret Beaufort, sent to the court of Henry VI under the guardianship of the Duke of Suffolk, is married against her will to Suffolk's son. When the Duke is accused of treason the King declares her marriage null and void. At 13, …
Grafton, Sue
(US, 1940– ) Sue Grafton is author of the alphabet series which began with A is for Alibi (1986), charting the adventures of female private investigator Kinsey Millhone. Kinsey is a sassy, diligent, and independent character with a wry wit and a keen eye. Her home town of Santa Teresa in California is a fictional re-creation of Santa Monica where Grafton lives. Kinsey's neighbour, re…
Graham, Laurie
(British, 1947– ) Graham writes journalism and non-fiction as well as novels. Her novels are funny and direct, dealing with ordinary lives. Begin with The Ten O'Clock Horses (1996), which is set in 1962 and describes the life crisis of housepainter Ronnie, as he realizes that the swinging sixties are dawning all around him, and that his wife (and life) are boring. He imagines becomin…
Grass, Günter
(German, 1927– ) Born in Danzig, Grass has published poetry, plays, and essays, and has been a popular and controversial public figure in Germany throughout the post-war period. The Tin Drum (1959) is Grass's masterpiece, the story of the dwarf, Oskar, whose refusal to grow is a response to the guilt of Germany after the Second World War. A dark and disturbing political fantasy, the …
Graves, Robert
(British, 1895–1985) Mary Renault, Allan Massie, …
Gray, Alasdair
(British, 1934– ) Gray has lived and worked in Glasgow, his complementary careers as an artist and a writer producing flamboyant-looking books. Visual imagination and authorial playfulness characterize his work, expressed through his own illustrations, mock reviews and blurbs, and unorthodox typography. Gray's stories and novels deal with politics, fantasy, Scottish social history, a…
Green, Henry
(British, 1905–73) Henry Green was rather deaf, and conversations often seemed rather surreal to him as he half-heard much of what people said. This delighted him, and he uses a similar effect in his writing. Things do not quite connect; his dialogue is full of near-misses as people misunderstand, mishear, or simply do not listen. Many of his novels are satires and they are full of small ga…
Greene, Graham
(British, 1904–91) As a young man of 19 Greene took a revolver onto Berkhamsted Common and played Russian roulette, in order, he professed, to escape boredom. It was this same impulse, perhaps, that led him to scour the world restlessly in search of excitement and danger, and which provided material for over thirty novels and travel books. He was educated at Berkhamsted School (where his fa…
Gregory, Philippa
(British, 1949– ) Philippa Gregory is best known for Earthly Joys (1998) and Virgin Earth (1999), her novels about the Tradescants (father and son), pioneers of gardening in the seventeenth century. Her career as a writer of (mainly) historical fiction had already encompassed some half dozen novels when she put her doctorate in eighteenth-century literature to the service of A Respectable T…
Grenville, Kate
(Australian, 1950– ) Sydney-born Grenville won the Orange Prize in 2001 with her fifth novel, The Idea of Perfection. This charming, funny book tells the story of a quite unexpected romance between awkward, timid engineer Douglas Cheeseman and thrice-married Harley Savage, an unnervingly abrupt Heritage worker with ‘a dangerous streak’. Without ever sinking into sentimentality…
Grisham, John
(US, 1955– ) Grisham studied law in Mississippi and practised as a lawyer for nine years; his phenomenally popular fiction owes a good deal to his legal knowledge. The Rainmaker (1995) is as good a place to start as any. The young, wet-behind-the-ears lawyer takes on the might of corporate America and, with the help of a seedy ambulance chaser, and a somewhat biased judge, wins the day. Gri…
Gunesekera, Romesh
(Sri Lankan, 1954– ) Arriving in England in 1972, Gunesekera started publishing poetry and prose in newspapers and magazines. His lyrical debut, Monkfish Moon (1992), contained short stories handling the troubled lives of Sri Lankans amidst the political turmoil of their divided island paradise, or else surviving as exiles in London. His first novel, Reef (1994), was nominated for the Booke…
Haddon, Mark
(British, 1962– ) Haddon has written fifteen children's books and won two BAFTAs, but he is best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Whitbread winner, 2003), originally marketed as a book for teens, and swiftly taken up by adults. Fifteen-year-old Chris has Asperger's Syndrome: he excels at Maths and science, refuses to speak all day if he sees four ye…
Haggard, Henry Rider
(British, 1856–1925) Haggard's adventure romances are set in Iceland, Mexico, and Constantinople, but his best-known depict bellicose Victorians travelling to the heart of Africa, defeating evil witch doctors and ‘heathen’ sorcery. Christianity and scientific progress inevitably triumph. In King Solomon's Mines (1886) British men take an expedition to Africa wher…
Hamilton, Patrick
(British, 1904–62) Fame came early to Hamilton, with the success of his stage play Rope, later filmed by Hitchcock. His real and lasting achievements, however, are his novels, which are wonderfully comic, sad, touching, and very readable. Hangover Square (1941) is his masterpiece. Set in the squalid bedsitland of Earls Court prior to the outbreak of war, it charts the hero's vain inf…
Hammett, Dashiell
(US, 1894–1961) Hammett was a tough left-wing radical who left school at 13 for a string of unremarkable jobs that led to eight years as an operative for the Pinkerton detective agency, a career move that provided him with unrivalled knowledge of criminal investigation. Hammett, like Chandler, began writing pulp magazine stories, but his greatest achievement is his five novels. Stylisticall…
Hamsun, Knut
(Norwegian, 1859–1952) For his seventieth birthday Hamsun received written tributes from, amongst many others, Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorky, André Gide, Arnold Schoenberg, and Albert Einstein. Writers as diverse as James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Isaac Bashevis Singer have cited his work as hugely influential on their own. Yet Hamsun is comparatively unfamiliar to modern readers. The …
Hardy, Thomas
(British, 1840–1928) Most of Hardy's novels and stories are set in Wessex, a fictional county largely based upon Dorset where he was born. His descriptions of the landscape are detailed and vivid. These, and his dramatic plots, have inspired repeated screen adaptations of his novels. Many of Hardy's characters are driven by inner passions they cannot control, often leading the…
Hašek, Jaroslav
(Czech, 1883–1923) Born in Prague, Hašek gained a reputation as a satirist before being conscripted into the Austrian army in 1915. Captured by the Russians, he produced propaganda for the cause of Czechoslovakian independence from Austria. His sprawling comic masterpiece and only novel, The Good Soldier Švejk (four vols., 1921–3) draws on his wartime experiences in rel…
Høeg, Peter
(Danish, 1957– ) Peter Høeg was a dancer, actor, fencer, sailor, and mountaineer before turning to writing. Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1992) catapulted him into the ranks of the best-sellers. It tells the story of Smilla Jaspersen, a Greenlander living in Copenhagen, who is moved to investigate the sudden death of her neighbour's 6-year-old son. Smilla is a compell…