V S Pritchett: 21 books

The essays in Lasting Impressions have never before appeared in book form and together they make up, in the author's own words, a journey through different countries and different generations. The subjects range from Bruce Chatwin and Salmon Rushdie to Simon de Beauvoir and Bernard Shaw, from Lorca...

First published in 1937, this thrilling novel tells the story of an expedition by three Englishmen into the Brazilian jungle; a journey which turns into an obsessive quest for the truth behind a missionary's disappearance seventeen years earlier. The three men are each linked in different ways...

A favourite collection of short stories from the revered V. S. Pritchett

VS. Pritchett, master of the short story, is also the most evocative of travel writers. First published in 1967, his portrait of Dublin - its past, politics and people, its grand mansions and curious corners - is as beguiling and eloquent as the city itself, as he writes of the Dublin he knew in the...

The Camberwell Beauty is a collection of short stories which explore the close-knit world of antique dealers, their obsessions and suspicions, their hatred of customers and the fantasy lives that grow out of the objects they collect. The Lady from Guatemala tells of a celebrated progressive...

'In our town, if you cough in the High Street the chemist up at the Town Hall has got the bottle of cough mixture wrapped up and waiting for you.' And nobody in the town provides such a wealth of delicious gossip as 'Noisy' Brackett and his wife Sally. Refusing to pay her bills, chasing her errant...

'A gentle giant', as the Goncourts called him, Turgenev emerged from the barbarous yet doting rules of a terrible mother, whose cruelties to her serfs are at the heart of his hatred of serfdom. He was saturated in femininity and could not write unless he was in love. When he freed himself from his...