Alms For Oblivion Volume I

Alms For Oblivion Volume I

Author: Simon Raven

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2021-08-26

Total Pages: 896

ISBN-13: 144818178X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Cracking entertainment... Dangerously, deliciously addictive' Daily Telegraph '[Raven is] a freak writer, he defies classification. In wilder moments he suggests a loose, lunatic collaboration of Trollope, Ouida and Waugh' Observer Enter Alms for Oblivion, Simon Raven's dazzling cycle of ten novels, all telling separate stories but at the same time linked together by the characters they have in common: schoolboys and businessmen, writers and soldiers, prostitutes and patient wives, actresses and models. In the first four novels Raven's wayward band of upper-class anti-heroes lurch from debauched parties to rehearsals for nuclear war; from blackmail to murder; from marriage to adultery and back again. Volume 1: The Rich Pay Late, Friends in Low Places, The Sabre Squadron and Fielding Gray 'There are some people who consider the greatest cycle of twentieth-century novels to be Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time. These people are wrong. Widmerpool and his joyless accomplices are as nothing compared to the characters in Simon Raven's majestic, scurrilous and scabrous Alms for Oblivion cycle' Guardian


Alms for Oblivion

Alms for Oblivion

Author: Peter Kemp

Publisher:

Published: 2020-08-28

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Asia, 1945. The War in Europe is over. Undeterred, the Japanese Empire fights on. With millions of loyal troops at its disposal and holdings that extend over thousands of miles, the Allies still have much intense fighting ahead. Freed from a Soviet dungeon by diplomatic happenstance as the European theatre closes is Peter Kemp. Kemp was a young law student who volunteered to fight for the Nationalists against the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Recruited by the elite British Special Operations Executive for his extensive irregular warfare experience and enormous bravery, Kemp was a commando raider then spy in the Balkans and Poland before being betrayed, along with his comrades, by the advancing Red Army. Recognizing him as one of their best operatives, the British redeploy Kemp to the South Pacific. Although initially tasked with mopping up the Japanese remnants, after the surrender Kemp finds himself struggling to bring order to the chaos as anti-colonial sentiment surges, first in French Indochina and then the Dutch East Indies. With the United States indifferent or hostile to its allies' extended empires, Kemp is forced to lead Japanese troops and a smattering of European holdouts against a phantom army of guerrillas. Kemp published his story in 1961, one of only a few to offer a first-hand look at the little-explored aftermath of World War Two in the Pacific. The book has been out-of-print for decades, but joins Kemp's first two books, Mine Were of Trouble (recounting his Spanish Civil War experiences) and No Colours or Crest (following him through Europe in WW2) back in wide release again.


The Rich Pay Late

The Rich Pay Late

Author: Simon Raven

Publisher:

Published: 1966

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines the lives of a group of upper and upper-middle class individuals in the mid-50s, on the eve of the Suez crisis.


Youngblood Hawke

Youngblood Hawke

Author: Herman Wouk

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2024-06-11

Total Pages: 1192

ISBN-13: 1504096584

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A writer finds wealth, fame, and sorrow in midcentury Manhattan in “a tremendous novel . . . full of wisdom and pain” by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author (Los Angeles Times). Arthur Youngblood Hawke, an ex-Navy man, moves from hardscrabble rural Kentucky to New York, hoping to make his mark on the literary world. His first novel becomes an instant hit, and he is toasted by critics and swept along on a tide of celebrity. But as Hawke gives himself over to the lush life that gilds artistic success—indulging in an affair with an older married woman and a flirtation with his editor, dabbling in real estate developments as his second novel brings him massive wealth and even bigger opportunities—he soon finds himself in a self-destructive downward spiral. Inspired by the life of Thomas Wolfe, and spanning from the Manhattan publishing world to Hollywood to Europe, Youngblood Hawke is both a riveting saga of postwar glamor and a poignant tale of one man’s rise and fall. “A big, powerful, exciting novel . . . Wouk has a tremendous narrative gift.” —San Francisco Chronicle “As searing and accurate a picture of New York in the late 1940s and 1950s as Bonfire of the Vanities was of its period. . . . And icing the cake are some marvelous Hollywood sections, including the best agent-in-action-on-two-telephones scenes ever captured in print.” —Los Angeles Times


The World of Simon Raven

The World of Simon Raven

Author: Simon Raven

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Although he gained fame with his classic novel series, Alms for Oblivion, which chronicled the misdeeds of English society in the 1950s and 60s, Simon Raven is also recognized as a brilliant travel writer, an unblinking reporter of the seamier side of English upper-class life, and a hilarious commentator on the sexual mores of gay London. His demise in 2001 robbed English letters of one of its most colorful characters. Expelled from Charterhouse “for the usual thing,” he was, for a time, an officer in the British Army. He gambled heavily on the horses for years, was often in debt, drank too much, and had a rich and uncommonly varied sex life. He was said to possess “the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel,” and this selection of his writing contains a magnificent array of pieces on army life, sex, school days, and travel. The quality of his writing and his fearless descriptions of the habits of the English, and indeed of all mankind, will come as a revelation.


Sound the Retreat

Sound the Retreat

Author: Simon Raven

Publisher:

Published: 1971

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780856349980

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Om engelske officerer iIndien lige efter 2. verdenskrig


The Fall Guy: A Novel

The Fall Guy: A Novel

Author: James Lasdun

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-10-18

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 0393292339

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this taut psychological thriller, a couple and their houseguest find themselves caught in a deadly web of secrets, obsession, and revenge. It is summer, 2012. Charlie, a wealthy banker with an uneasy conscience, invites his troubled cousin Matthew to visit him and his wife in their idyllic mountaintop house. As the days grow hotter, the friendship between the three begins to reveal its fault lines, and with the arrival of a fourth character, the household finds itself suddenly in the grip of uncontrollable passions. As readers of James Lasdun’s acclaimed fiction can expect, The Fall Guy is a complex moral tale as well as a gripping suspense story, probing questions of guilt and betrayal with ruthless incisiveness. Who is the real victim here? Who is the perpetrator? And who, ultimately, is the fall guy? Darkly vivid, with an atmosphere of erotic danger, The Fall Guy is Lasdun’s most entertaining novel yet.


Bring Forth the Body

Bring Forth the Body

Author: Simon Raven

Publisher: Blond & Briggs

Published: 1974

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Volume IX of the novel sequence Alms for Oblivion by Simon Raven, published in 1974. It was the ninth novel to be published in The Alms for Oblivion sequence and is also the ninth novel chronologically. The story takes place in England in 1972.


September Castle

September Castle

Author: Simon Raven

Publisher: House of Stratus

Published: 2001-01-15

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0755153979

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Basic human desires merge with the occult in a complex, erotic, tale of a hunt across Europe. Ptolemaeos Tunne is determined to discover a hoard of buried treasure. His only clue is a bizarre medieval legend about a possessed Greek princess. What he doesn’t know is that his mistress has unwittingly betrayed him to some very dangerous enemies.