Books & Authors: Award-Winning Fiction (Ke-Ma)
Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
Keneally, Thomas
(Australian, 1935– ) Keneally is a prolific and versatile novelist who has fictionalized a number of key historical moments. Begin with his Booker Prize-winning Schindler's Ark (1982), which was filmed by Spielberg as Schindler's List. The real Oskar Schindler saved a number of Jews from the Nazi death camps by employing them in his Polish factory; Keneally researched the stor…
Kennedy, A(lison) L(ouise)
(British, 1965– ) Kennedy writes with immediacy and power; begin with her short-story collection Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990) which offers vivid glimpses into the lives of apparently ordinary people. So I am Glad (1995, Encore award) is an extraordinary novel, narrated by a woman with a fine line in irony, who has been abused by her parents and whose relationship with her…
Kerouac, Jack
(US, 1922–69) Coming to prominence at the time of James Dean and Elvis Presley, it probably did Kerouac's literary career no harm that he possessed the dark rugged looks of a screen idol. He coined the term Beat Generation, whose creed Dig Everything! was an outright rejection of the Squares stuck in the rat race with their phoney American Dream and their decent moral values. The bib…
Kesey, Ken
(US, 1935–2001) Kesey came to notoriety as a fugitive from drugs charges and leader of the anarchistic ‘Merry Pranksters’ during their bus trips of the mid-1960s, but he had already written two major novels. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), an allegory of American society set in a mental hospital, tells a story of the clash between individualism and authority. As…
Kincaid, Jamaica
(Antiguan/US, 1949– ) Kincaid was born in Antigua and emigrated to the United States in 1966. She is (with Erna Brodber) the most original and controversial of the younger writers from the Caribbean. Her 1983 book of stories, At the Bottom of the River, excites with its mixture of apocalyptic imagery drawn from the Bible with snatches of folk-tale thrown in. The effect is often that …
King, Stephen
(US, 1947– ) Born in Portland, Maine, Stephen King taught English before turning to writing full-time. The immediate success of Carrie (1974), a revenge drama about a disturbed girl who develops telekinetic powers at the onset of puberty, helped to create the template for much of King's writing. The idyllic small town invaded by inexplicable supernatural forces has been a persistent …
Kingsolver, Barbara
(US, 1955– ) Like her spirited heroine, Taylor Greer, Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky, and settled in Tucson, Arizona. A long-term human rights activist, Kingsolver has a keen ear for the speech of the poor whites, Mexicans, and Native Americans of the southern states. Begin with The Bean Trees (1988), in which the plucky Taylor has only two goals: to escape Kentucky and avoid getting pregna…
Kipling, Rudyard
(British, 1865–1936) Kipling, in his lifetime one of the best known and most popular writers in the world, was born in Bombay into an Anglo-Indian family. He was educated in England and spent most of his life in the west, but his work is generally associated with the assumptions of the British Raj. Some critics believe this association to be misleading, pointing out that he energetically an…
Klima, Ivan
(Czech, 1931– ) A popular playwright and novelist, active in the Prague Spring of 1968 during which his country challenged Soviet domination, Klima's works were published worldwide, but not in Czechoslovakia until Communism fell. In Love and Garbage (1986) a Kafka-obsessed writer wanders the streets of Prague as a binman, tormented by his adulterous love of Daria, helplessly musing o…
Kneale, Matthew
(British, 1960– ) For an author with as yet only three novels in print, Matthew Kneale has already made a name for himself as a writer with a breathtakingly exciting approach to the past, and nabbed himself two prestigious literary prizes as well. Sweet Thames was published in 1992, and the next year it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It is a fast-paced, gripping and utterly believable a…
Koestler, Arthur
(British, 1905–83) Koestler, a Hungarian journalist who acquired British citizenship after fighting for Britain in the Second World War, was a political writer with a major interest in philosophy and psychiatry. His first book, Spanish Testament (1937), was an autobiographical account of his imprisonment during the Spanish Civil War, when he narrowly escaped being shot as a spy. Begin with …
Koontz, Dean R.
(US, 1945– ) Koontz paid his dues as a writer, graduating from pulp science fiction paperbacks to the hardback best-seller lists with a string of ingeniously plotted thrillers veering towards the supernatural. The hero of Cold Fire (1991) is driven by his intuitive gift to rescue complete strangers from danger, but then has to confront the dark side of his own powers. Mr Murder (1993) is a …
Kundera, Milan
(Czech, 1929– ) Born in Brno, Kundera taught at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague, before losing the post and emigrating after the Russian invasion of 1968. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is an evocation of the cultural, political, and sexual life of post-war Europe, seen partly through Kundera's own eyes, partly through those of his fictional i…
Kureishi, Hanif
(British, 1954– ) Kureishi writes plays, screenplays, short stories, and novels. The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) is set in 1970s’ Bromley, Kent, where Kureishi grew up. Karim is the son of an English mother and Indian father. When his father becomes a spiritual guru to white middle-class suburbanites, Karim embarks on a series of erotic teenage adventures. Kureishi explores the racial …
Laclos, Choderlos de
(French, 1741–1803) Laclos served in the army for twenty years without seeing battle, entered politics in 1788, and was imprisoned, then served as a general under Napoleon. His writings range from light verse to a treatise on the education of women. His novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) is written in letters, and concerns a plot hatched by a couple of aristocrats to engineer the seducti…
Laker, Rosalind
(British, 1925– ) Laker lives with her Norwegian husband in Sussex and became a full-time writer of historical fiction in the 1980s. Begin with To Dance with Kings (1988), set at Versailles during the French Revolution. It follows the lives and loves of four women who have risen to Marie Antoinette's private circle. An unsuccessful painter's daughter is apprenticed to Jan Verm…
Lamming, George
(Barbadian, 1927– ) Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin (1953) united all strands of critical taste in pronouncing it the authentic novel about growing up in the West Indies. Set in the 1930s this accurately observed narrative transcends the ‘realist’ genre; stylish without being precious. Lamming's novels explore the grand themes—freedom, independence, nat…
Lavin, Mary
(Irish, 1912–96) Mary Lavin moved in the opposite direction to most Irish emigrants, having been born in Massachusetts and moving back to Ireland with her parents when she was nine. She lived in Ireland until her death. Her greatest achievement were her short stories, which won her the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Gregory Medal, founded by W. B. Yeats as ‘the supreme award of th…
Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert)
(British, 1885–1930) The son of a miner, Lawrence won a scholarship to Nottingham High School and his first novel was published while he was training for his teacher's certificate. He and his German wife Frieda travelled widely in Europe, Australia, and America, and towards the end of his life lived in New Mexico. In his writing he sought to strip away convention and inhibition, and …
Laxness, Halldór
(Icelandic, 1902–98) Novelist Laxness, born near Reykjavik, is not the most approachable of writers. His masterpiece, Independent People (1934–5; English translation 1946) is massive and cold and bare, and events in the narrative are scarce. There's a great deal of sheep-farming and crags and winter. But it is also an immensely rewarding read if you take the trouble. Laxness&#…
Leacock, Stephen
(Canadian, 1869–1944) Born in Hampshire, Leacock went to Ontario as a child and subsequently became Professor of Political Economy at McGill University. By retirement, he enjoyed the status of Canada's finest humorist, somewhat akin to Mark Twain and James Thurber, and his collections of sketches sold widely. His first success, Literary Lapses (1910), was actually self-published; the…
Le Carré, John
(British, 1931– ) Le Carré (real name David Cornwell) was a master at Eton and a British diplomat before publishing his first novel in 1961. He is generally regarded as the finest living writer of the espionage novel and also as a significant literary figure. His themes are the pull of conflicting loyalties, the tension between the individual and the state, and the often corrupting s…
Lee, Laurie
(British, 1914–96) Gloucestershire born, and educated locally, Lee is best known for his autobiographical writing, although he also wrote poetry, screenplays, and travel books. Start with Cider with Rosie (1959), his most popular work, a rich, lyrical evocation of his childhood after the First World War. In sensuous detail he conjures this secluded Cotswold valley and a lost world. Movingly…
Le Fanu, J(oseph) Sheridan
(Irish, 1814–1873) Le Fanu was a Dubliner of Huguenot descent, and a grandnephew of the dramatist, Sheridan. After the death of his beloved young wife he withdrew into a profoundly melancholy existence, spending much of his time reading mystical texts about life after death. The emotional intensity which Le Fanu invested in his ghost stories makes them uniquely memorable. One can never be s…
Le Guin, Ursula
(US, 1929– ) Born in Berkeley, California, the daughter of anthropologists, whose work clearly enriched her own vivid concepts of alien worlds, Le Guin is one of the few women to have made a lasting and honourable place for herself in science fiction. A prolific writer, Le Guin is famous for her books for children as well as for her adult novels. She published the Earthsea quartet for child…
Lehmann, Rosamond (Nina)
(British, 1901–90) Lehmann was born and brought up in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire. Her first novel, Dusty Answer (1927), was published just after she left Cambridge, and was hugely popular. The novel follows the developing relationship between a girl and her cousins next door. Her most famous work, Invitation to the Waltz (1932), concerns two sisters, Olivia and Kate Curtis. It opens on the…
Leiber, Fritz
(US, 1910–92) Fritz Leiber is best known for his sequence of fantasy stories set on the world of ‘Nehwon’, and featuring the paired heroes Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. This began in 1939, but has now been extended to six volumes of collected stories, the latest being The Knight and Knave of Swords (1988), and one novel, The Swords of Lankhmar (1968): all volumes in the series have …
Leonard, Elmore
(US, 1925– ) Elmore Leonard had already established himself as a notable writer of Westerns, including Valdez is Coming (1969), which was filmed with Burt Lancaster, before he decided to concentrate on crime fiction. His interest lies in the behaviour and personalities of the people who commit crimes, rather than in the unravelling of whodunit puzzles. His books feature a wide range of crim…
Lessing, Doris
(British, 1919– ) Lessing was brought up in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), is a brilliant depiction of the way racial segregation poisoned the lives of both black and white people. Her politics and beliefs fire her writing but never cause her to toe a line—whatever comfortable beliefs you hold, Lessing asks the questions that make you squirm. Sh…
Levi, Primo
(Italian, 1919–87) Levi worked as an industrial chemist before and after the war. In 1943 he joined a partisan group in northern Italy, was arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Of the 650 Jews who entered the camp with him, 525 went to the gas chamber. In his novel If Not Now, When (1982) Levi describes a group of Russian and Polish Jews stranded in occupied territory and offering resistance…
Levy, Andrea
(Jamaican/British, 1956– ) Levy's 2004 novel Small Island won the Orange Prize. It is a big ambitious book, set in derelict war-scarred London of 1948, but also tracing past lives in England and Jamaica. The central characters are Jamaican RAF man Gilbert, whose humanity and wit in the face of prejudice are utterly endearing; his proud, prudish, baffled wife, Hortense; and the…
Lewis, C(live) S(taples)
(British, 1898–1963) The best known of C. S. Lewis's fiction is his seven-volume sequence for children, The Chronicles of Narnia, begun with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). These are (with one exception) ‘gateway’ stories in which modern children find themselves in a fantasy world of talking animals, ruled by the divine lion, Aslan. Lewis is surprisingly su…
Lewis, Sinclair
(US, 1885–1951) Lewis, a best-selling satirist of Middle American values between the wars, was the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1930. In a series of novels, the best known of which are Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), he portrayed the split in America between idealism and materialism, criticizing small-town narrow-mindedness, the business and medical pr…
Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham
(US, 1882–1957) Lewis was born in the United States but spent most of his life in Britain. He was a brilliant polymath and founder of the Vorticist art movement, who deliberately stoked up dissent and controversy between the wars in London artistic and literary circles. Always a prickly character and never an easy writer, his most accessible novel is The Revenge for Love (1937), about an ar…
Linklater, Eric
(British, 1899–1974) Linklater wrote over twenty novels, plus histories, poetry, radio plays, autobiography, and journalism. His fiction is entertaining, serious, and difficult to categorize; inevitably therefore he is underrated critically. Born in Wales but brought up in the Orkneys (where a number of his novels are set), Linklater read medicine at Aberdeen before serving as a sniper in t…
Lively, Penelope
(British, 1933– ) Penelope Lively was born in Egypt, married a don, and lives in a sixteenth-century farmhouse. In those three details one has something of an insight into her writing concerns as a whole: a sense of other cultures and other places, an academic setting for several of her novels, and her intense consciousness of the presence of the past. Her Booker Prize-winning Moon Tiger (1…
Llewellyn, Richard
(British, 1906–83) Born in St David's, Llewellyn wrote film-scripts and stage-plays after army service and working in film studios. A Welsh environment in childhood, and his research, including several months as a collier, contributed to the authenticity of his best-selling novel How Green was My Valley (1939), made into a popular film. Llewellyn depicts, with lyricism, realism, and …
Locklin, Gerald
(US, 1941– ) Born at Rochester in New York, Locklin moved to the West Coast during the mid-1960s, becoming Professor of English at Long Beach. His stories and novellas mix social satire with literary joking, autobiography with fabulatory elements; they are usually Bacchanalian, politically incorrect, and often really funny. The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen (1984) is a spoof detective…
Lodge, David
(British, 1935– ) Born in London and educated at the universities of London and Birmingham, David Lodge was for many years Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham University. His early novels, Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984), are set in a fictional university, and are high-spirited comedies of campus life. They work by contrasting the life of British provincial un…
Lofts, Norah
(British, 1904–83) The books of Norah Lofts are scarce now and mostly out of print. This is a pity. Generally filed under historical/romance, there is a seriousness about her work that sets it slightly apart. If you can get it, begin with Jassy (1944), a dark, very moving tale about an ugly girl, the perpetual outcast, who loves unrequitedly and is eventually unjustly hanged. The pla…
London, Jack
(US, 1876–1916) Born in San Francisco, London's tough early experiences as an oyster pirate, seal-hunter, hobo, and gold prospector gave him a wealth of material for his fiction. He was an overtly commercial and prolific writer, becoming one of America's first celebrity authors. The Son of the Wolf (1900), with its stories of men and animals in Alaska and the Yukon, lyrical de…
Loos, Anita
(US, 1888–1981) Loos was something of a prodigy, working as a screenwriter in Hollywood in her teens. She numbered D. W. Griffith and the iconic Louise Brooks amongst her friends. Her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) is the fictitious diary of Lorelei Lee, a not-so-dumb blonde who certainly believes that diamonds are a girl's best friend. In a thinly veiled satire of the Lost Ge…
Lovelace, Earl
(Trinidadian, 1935– ) In his novels, plays, and stories, Lovelace's subject matter is often the after-effects of colonialism, and the quest for regeneration. The Dragon Can't Dance (1979), his widely popular masterpiece, dramatizes through carnival—music, dance, colour; a magnificent portrait of the Calypsonian—the confusions of a folk community in transition. Fr…
Lowry, Malcolm
(British, 1909–57) Lowry came from a well-to-do family in New Brighton, Cheshire, and before going to university signed on as deckhand on a voyage to the Far East, an experience he used in his first novel, Ultramarine (1933). Thereafter he lived in the United States, Mexico, and for several years in a squatter's beach shack in Dollarton, Canada. During his lifetime he published only …
Lurie, Alison
(US, 1926– ) Lurie's subject matter, portrayed with humane irony, is the ways in which people fool themselves and each other. The amused detachment with which she writes about her deluded characters has led to her being likened to Jane Austen. An academic herself, she has set most of her novels in academic communities. Possibly her best-known work is The War Between the Tates (1974),…
Lyall, Gavin
(British, 1932– ) A former RAF pilot and journalist on aviation matters, Lyall began his fiction-writing career with adventure-thrillers, drawing extensively on his flying experience and characterized by sharp, wisecracking dialogue, dramatic set pieces, and a wide range of exotic locales, from Arctic Finland to tropical Jamaica. The Most Dangerous Game (1964) and Judas Country (1975) are a…
Maalouf, Amin
(Lebanese, 1949– ) Maalouf was born in Beirut, and has lived in Paris since 1976. Begin with Leo the African (1986). Maalouf characteristically fuses history and a richly exotic imagination in this expansive account of Leo Africanus, the sixteenth-century chronicler of Africa. Samarkand (1988) follows the fortunes of the manuscript of Omar Khayyám's rubáiyát, whi…
Macaulay, Rose
(British, 1881–1958) Macaulay was a popular author of travel books, biographies, and satirical novels with a liberal social ethos and ironic tone. Potterism (1920), for instance, deals with the excesses of newspaper-journalists, and Crewe Train (1926) takes a flippant view of London literati and society life. Her most interesting works tend to fall outside these categories, notably They Wer…
Mackay, Shena
(British, 1944– ) Some of Mackay's novels and stories are domestic comedies, with sharp observations of the British class system, in which women typically battle the odds. Others have an elegiac dimension in which the past is viewed critically, expressed in richly evocative prose. Redhill Rococo (1986) is of the first type: a woman struggles to keep her family together while her husb…
MacLaverty, Bernard
(British, 1942– ) MacLaverty was born and brought up in Belfast. He worked as a lab technician for ten years before reading English at university and becoming a teacher. He moved to Glasgow after graduation. In his novel Lamb (1980) he deals with the consequences of Ulster's sectarian violence. Brother Sebastian, né Michael Lamb, runs away from a reformatory with a 12-year-old…
Mahfouz, Naguib
(Egyptian, 1911– ) Naguib Mahfouz is one of the giants of world literature, both in status and output. He was born in Cairo, the youngest of seven children, and graduated in philosophy from the University of Cairo, choosing to spend his working career as a civil servant. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the Swedish academy writing that ‘through works rich in nua…
Mahy, Margaret
(NZ, 1936– ) Margaret Mahy, who spent many years working as a librarian, has won the Carnegie Medal twice: in 1982 for The Haunting and in 1984 for The Changeover. She is an original and somewhat eccentric writer whose work could never be mistaken for anyone else's. She has been writing for many years and for all age groups, and her work for younger children, like The Man Whose Mothe…
Mailer, Norman
(US, 1923– ) Mailer became a celebrity author with his first book, and a public personality shortly afterwards; he has since been vastly prolific, with several landmark achievements in non-fiction. The ambitious scope of Mailer's cultural reportage has tended to overshadow his novels, but they remain fascinating. Some are huge panoramas, such as Harlot's Ghost (1991), a grand …
Maitland, Sara
(British, 1950– ) Maitland grew up in a large family in south-west Scotland, then read English at Oxford, where she discovered socialism and Christianity. A feminist theologian, she explores maternity, spirituality, and female friendship in her fiction and non-fiction alike. Begin with Virgin Territory (1984), a powerful novel exploring sex and violence. Its heroine is Sister Anna, a troubl…
Malamud, Bernard
(US, 1914–86) Born in Brooklyn to a Russian immigrant family who kept a shop, Malamud spent most of his writing life as a teacher. Influenced by the Yiddish tradition, his stories and novels tend to be moral fables, combining realism with fabulous or allegorical characters and events. His first novel, The Natural (1952), however, concerns the fall, rise, and subsequent failure of Roy Hobbs,…
Malouf, David
(Australian, 1934– ) Malouf often writes on Australian subjects, although his powerful second novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), is about the poet Ovid in exile on the Black Sea. Begin with the award-winning Remembering Babylon (1993). Set in the 1850s, in a remote settlement in Queensland, the story centres on a creature ('hopping and flapping towards them out of a world over there, t…
Malraux, André
(French, 1901–76) Malraux was a prominent anti-fascist during the 1930s, and active in the wartime Resistance. As a close ally of de Gaulle, he later became a Government minister. His novels combine action with philosophy, and are usually set in political hot spots like Shanghai, Germany, or Civil War Spain. They also anticipated existentialism, with figures finding authenticity through pol…
Mann, Thomas
(German, 1875–1955) Born in Lübeck, Mann achieved renown with Buddenbrooks (1901), his first novel. Its lengthy treatment of the decline of a merchant family, which draws on his own privileged background, is not, however, a good introduction. Begin with Death in Venice (1912), a masterpiece of the novella form, in which an exhausted writer is spiritually rejuvenated through his obses…
Manning, Olivia
(British, 1908–80) Manning led a precarious existence in 1930s’ London, writing romantic magazine fiction, before publishing her first novel in 1937. She married a British Council lecturer in 1939 who whirled her off to Bucharest. Her experiences there, and subsequent wartime wanderings, form the basis of her six most famous novels. The Balkan Trilogy (1960–5) is a portrait of…
Mansfield, Katherine
(NZ, 1888–1923) Mansfield (whose full name was Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp) moved to Europe from New Zealand when she was 20, and after living in England and Germany was diagnosed with tuberculosis while still in her twenties, and spent her last few years travelling in search of a cure. Her short stories are among the most perfect in English; typically, she will take one incident in the li…
Mantel, Hilary
(British 1952– ) One of the most versatile of British novelists, Hilary Mantel was born in the north of England, but has lived in London, Africa, and Saudi Arabia. Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) gives in exquisite and painful detail the reactions of one woman to living in a Middle Eastern country with all the cultural alienation and darkness that lie beneath the surface of expatriate…
Mark, Jan
(British, 1943– ) Jan Mark has won the Carnegie Medal twice: in 1977 for her first book Thunder and Lightnings (1976) and in 1984 for Handles (1983). The first is a moving novel with an unusual friendship between two boys at its heart, and the second is more picaresque, but is basically about families. Mark is good at families. She is good at a great many things: animals, science fiction, s…
Marsh, Ngaio
(NZ 1899–1982) Marsh went to art school and became an actress before turning to detective fiction in the 1930s. She was created a Dame for her contribution to the theatre, and her knowledge of that world informs several of her novels, such as Opening Night (1951) or Enter a Murderer (1935), in which theatrical intrigue plays as great a part as the murder mystery. Her detective Roderick Alle…
Mars-Jones, Adam
(British, 1954– ) Born in London, son of a High Court judge, Mars-Jones has worked as an arts journalist and established a reputation for subtly satirical, carefully nuanced fiction. His first collection of stories, Lantern Lecture (1981), was acclaimed for its witty observation and coolly descriptive prose, recreating the life of an eccentric aristocrat, and, more seriously, the criminal c…
Martell, Yann
(Canadian, 1963– ) Martell's first novel Self (1996) seems at first to be a meticulous autobiography, unusual only in that some passages are written in another language with the English translation printed alongside, revealing both the difficulty of understanding others, and the schizophrenia of being bilingual. But Martell's exploration of identity goes on to transform his bo…
Martin, Valerie
(US, 1948– ) Valerie Martin lives in upstate New York, and has spent three years in Rome. Her seventh novel, Property (2003) deservedly won the Orange Prize. Set in early nineteenth-century Louisiana, the novel is narrated by one of the most intriguing characters in recent fiction. Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to a sugar plantation owner, who has fathered the children of Manon's…
Mason, Anita
(British, 1942– ) Mason is a novelist who deserves more recognition. Her books combine great intelligence with readability and she has explored new territory with each work, even though she returns to such themes as power, and the way we are manipulated both personally and politically. Her first novel, Bethany (1981), is about an experiment in communal living, told in the first person by a …
Matthiessen, Peter
(US, 1927– ) Born in New York City and educated at Yale University and the Sorbonne, Matthiessen worked for three years as a commercial fisherman and as a captain of a charter fishing boat. His many expeditions to the wilderness areas of the world have provided the colour for his nine novels, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), nominated for the National Book Award. His fift…
Maugham, W(illiam) Somerset
(British, 1874–1965) A very prolific writer over a career that spanned fifty years, Maugham achieved prominence as a playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and critic. His simple aim was to tell a good story in a straightforward manner and uncluttered style. He liked a beginning, a middle, and an end. His short stories (collected in four volumes) are the best introduction. Maugham travel…
Maupassant, Guy de
(French, 1850–93) During his brief life Maupassant, a pupil of Flaubert, produced novels, plays, and journalism, but it is for his short stories that he is remembered. ‘Boule-de-Suif’ (1880) was his first success, about a patriotic prostitute betrayed by snobbery and hypocrisy during the Franco-Prussian war. Prostitution was a favourite subject, but he also wrote about aristoc…
Mauriac, François
(French, 1885–1970) Mauriac, first published as a poet, was a devout Catholic whose elegantly written novels are acute psychological studies of human morality and need. Tending to centre on crises in which worldly and emotional impulses are set against spiritual and religious demands, they are powerful, observant portraits of internal conflict. Begin with Thérèse Desqueyroux (…