Christina Stead: 10 books

‘I hate and despise business and anything to do with making money.’ ‘Do you think it’s wrong?’ ‘It is the enemy of art.’ Eighteen-year-old Honor Lawrence is out of place at the bank where she works. When she refuses to accept a promotion, despite her obvious poverty,...

It is 1934, and Elvira Western has left London and her dull marriage to Paul, a doctor, for Paris and her waiting lover, Oliver, a student radical. But drab hotels and interminable discussions of politics are not her idea of romance, and soon Elvira is wishing she could leave the city of ‘many beauties—and...

‘One of Australia’s greatest novelists puts together…a crew as sad, funny and perverse as any ever gathered.’ Time After the Second World War, bizarre characters from across the ruined continent have gathered at the ‘fourth-rate’ Hotel Swiss-Touring by Lake Geneva. Some are residents,...

New York, on the cusp of World War II. Robert Grant, a middle-aged businessman, lives life by his own rules. His chief hobbies are moneymaking and seduction; he is always on the hunt for the next woman to beguile and betray. That is, until he meets his match: Barbara, the ‘blondine’, a woman he...

The devious world of international finance comes alive in Christina Stead’s enthralling epic about a ruthless bank director in 1930s Paris Praised as “a work of extraordinary talent” by the New York Times, Christina Stead’s ambitiously layered House of All Nations is an engrossing satire...

Christina Stead’s unforgettable final novel—a profound examination of love and radicalism during the McCarthy era In the wake of the Great Depression, Emily Wilkes, a young American journalist, travels to a Europe still scarred by World War I. During her crossing, she meets Stephen Howard,...

“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen, The New York Times). First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet...

From Paris to London to wartime New York, a young woman comes of age—and comes apart—in this witty novel by the author of The Man Who Loved Children. When Letty Fox first arrives in Manhattan, her goal is to escape her chaotic upbringing in London and Paris and the cynicism of her family,...

At the Hotel Swiss-Touring, both the guests and the staff get tangled in intrigues and veiled confessions “If you knew what happens in the hotel every day!” Madame Bonnard, the eccentric and inquisitive owner of the Hotel Swiss-Touring—a third-rate Swiss hotel—knows her guests’ many...

One woman’s obsession with love and fate leads her to unexpected truths about passion, sexuality, and power in 1930s London Driven by a belief in love above all else, Teresa Hawkins leaves her life in Australia and moves to London in search of her destiny. After years of emotional distance...