New York: Free Press / Simon & Schuster, (2008). First edition - The author's first novel, winner of the Man-Booker award (only the fourth Indian writer to receive this), and basis of the 1921 film of the same name. "Halwai, the narrator, is a modern Indian hero. In a nation proudly shedding a history of poverty and underdevelopment, he represents, as he himself says, tomorrow but it's a more complicated story than Balram initially lets on. Before moving to Bangalore, he was a driver for the son of a feudal landlord. One rainy day in Delhi, he crushed the skull of his employer and stole a bag containing a large amount of money, capital that financed his Bangalore taxi business. That business ferrying technology workers to and from their jobs depends, in turn, on keeping the police happy with the occasional bribe. As a parable of the new India, then, his tale has a distinctly macabre twist. He is not only an entrepreneur but a roguish criminal with a remarkable capacity for self-justification, and the background against which he operates is not just a resurgent economy and nation but a landscape of corruption, inequality and poverty." Promotional material laid in. 276 pp.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - Author's first book, a novel set in a small town on the Carquinez Straits of the San Francisco Bay, a story of a woman's vengeance on the man who abandoned her decades before. "The cumulative force and the pure suspense of 'Mrs. Munck' is considerable. The device of turning the tables and making the old man completely dependent on Rose - of making him in turn the victim of a society that refuses to take its women and its old people seriously - works perfectly" (NY Times) .Basis for the rather unsuccessful film adapted, directed, and starring Diane Ladd. SIGNED by the author on the title page and also SIGNED on the title page by Diane and Leo Dillon, the artists who painted the striking illustration on the dustjacket. Possibly a unique copy with these 3 signatures. 336 pp.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (1972) dj. Hardcover first edition - The third of five novels by this Canadian writer and professor. In discussing the continuing relevance of Buell's work to today's circumstances, author Michael Watson described this as "a gripping and harrowing account of a biker gang's murder of the wife and daughter of an honest man, John Grant, and the retribution that follows. After training himself to use a pistol and fending off a new attack by the bikers, it is Grant, not the bikers, who ends up in jail. . .. Under the twisted logic of a progressive legal system, a law-abiding man who has suffered unspeakable loss and who resorts to self-defense ends up in jail while his attackers go free. His style is an agile, nimble wonder that renders complex action and layered thoughts and emotions vividly, with never a wasted word. He captures the plight of a civilized man faced with utter barbarity and no good options, and conveys the legitimacy and necessity of fighting back against predators." Basis for the 1975 French film " L'Agression." 279 pp. ISBN: 0-374263426.

New York: Delacorte, (1998) dj. SIGNED hardcover - Memoir of a boy growing up in Appalachia who became an engineer at NASA. "In a town where the only things that mattered were coal-mining and high-school football, a young man watched the Soviet satellite Sputnik race across the West Virginia sky - and found his future in the stars. In 1957, Homer H. 'Sonny' Hickam, Jr., and a handful of his friends were inspired to start designing and launching the home-made rockets that would change their lives and their town forever. Looking back after a distinguished NASA career, Hickam shares the story of his youth, taking readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood and the boys who would come to embody its dreams." Basis for the award-winning film 'October Sky' featuring Jake Gyllenhaal. INSCRIBED on the title page. xii, 368 pp. ISBN: 0-38533320X.

New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, (1934, 1935) dj. Hardcover first edition - The first two books in Traver's series of eight books featuring the Banks children and their plain, no-nonsense nanny with magical powers. Basis for the Oscar award-winning Disney film featuring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, although Travers disliked both the film and the depiction of Mary Poppins, feeling that the harsher aspects were diluted (the movie was primarily based on the first book, but it incorporated some elements from the second in the series). Author Jerry Griswold commented that Mary Poppins is "a modernized collection of ancient fables and teaching stories. That's what makes it an extraordinary children's book" - and not just a children's book. Illustrated throughout with drawings by Mary Shepard. Illustrated endpapers. 206 pp. and 268 pp. respectively.

New York: Ecco Press, (2020) dj. Hardcover first edition - The author's disturbing third novel - the title ostensibly refers to a comment in an airbnb rental on Long Island, but of course it also refers to facing a post-apocalyptic world - with some insights into racial attitudes, class and family life thrown in along the way. Whole lives are encapsulated in single sentences. Basis for the very good 2023 film starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Myha'la, and Mahershala Ali, but far more subtle and thought-provoking. Finalist for the National Book Award - the judges' citation called it "elegant, sensuous, thrilling, taut. It is an incisive examination of race and class, an absorbing story about what the beginning of the end of the world might look like. This novel is a towering achievement. Rumaan Alams prose is precise, pointed, gorgeous. The characters he brings to life and their humanity are so finely observed. Leave the World Behind will want you to do anything but that." 341 pp. ISBN: 97-0062667632.

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1939. Hardcover - Foreword by Whit Burnett,the editor of Story Magazine, who describes this as the most popular story ever published in the then 8 year old history of that magazine. It is a story written as a series of letters, from November 1932 to March 1934, between a Jewish art dealer, living in San Francisco, and his business partner, who had returned with his family to Germany in 1932. This, the first separate edition, reportedly sold 50,000 copies, it was translated into many languages, although the edition in German was published in Moscow and banned in Germany, and the basis for a 1944 film of the same name. A 1995 re-issue was translated into 20 languages and sold millions of copies. A 2019 review in The Guardian comments that this story, "distils the essence of the ideology that cast a deathly shadow over the 20th century. Across a few economic pages it touches the heart of the Nazi darkness. . . it illuminates not just the specific texture of the early Nazi period, but something more timeless. It serves as a guide to the way any politics of identity especially one that invokes the people, rooting that idea in blood and soil eventually, and often very rapidly, divides and polarises. Max and Martin [had found] 'warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence'. But even the very best of friends can be rent apart. . . We tell ourselves, as these characters do, that friendship is eternal, that some bonds will never be broken. This short story warns us that ideology, once it has turned to fever, is stronger than friendship.. That this short, fleeting story has lasted so long is not only because of its artistic achievement, and not only because, written in 1938, it astonishingly anticipated the horror that was yet to come. It is because its prescience is not confined to its time. It saw into our own future too." An appealing small volume, uncommon in all printings of the original edition. Unpaginated (61 pp)

New York: Viking, (1993) dj. Hardcover first edition - The first novel by one of China's most innovative writers, and his first book to appear in English, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (with a note that, at the request of the author, this is based on the 1988 Tapei Hongfan Chinese edition which restored some of the deletions made in the 1987 Mainland Chinese edition). Mo Yan is a pseudonymic phrase meaning 'Don't speak.' Over more than 30 years, Mo Yan has been writing brutally vibrant stories about rural life in China that flout official Party ideology and celebrate individualism over conformity. He also flouts literary conformity, spiking his earthy realism with fantasy, hallucination and metafiction. The story in this book revolves around three generations of the Shandong family between 1923 and 1976 as the narrator tells the story of his family's struggles, first as distillery owners making sorghum wine and then as resistance fighters during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The first parts were the basis of the award-winning 1987 film of the same name. 359 pp. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. In 2012 Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. 387 pp. ISBN: -670844020.

New York: The Mystery League, 1930. dj. Hardcover first edition - Eight guests have been invited to a party in a penthouse 19 stories above the street, only to discover that the other guests include a bitter enemy. Suddenly, a voice from the radio tells them that they will all be dead by morning, unless they can avoid the traps which have been set for them. A plot somewhat similar to Christie's 'Ten Little Indians', but published 10 years earlier. The first collaboration between these authors, and the basis of the 1934 film 'The Ninth Guest.' The sixth title (and one of the better stories) published by the rather short-lived Mystery League (1930-1933). Their books were unique in that they were sold through United Cigar Stores and Drug Stores, instead of bookstores, and despite the low price of 50c each, they were attractively bound in black silk with green lettering. They were also notable for the striking art nouveau dust jacket art (many, like this one, by Gene) 286 pp plus 1 p ad.

New York: William H. Morrow, (1997) dj. Hardcover first edition - A novel set in the rural South in the 1940s, right after World War II, a story which explores the earliest beginnings of desegregation in the South. Two boys - one black and the other white - "spend their days daydreaming, fishing, and trying to escape work. But their fun abruptly comes to a halt when they discover a bone during a fanciful runaway. The bone turns out to be part of the skeletal remains of Son Jesus' long-missing father, and leads to an investigation by Sheriff Frank Rucker, a World War II hero, that unmasks the racially motivated killer known only as Pegleg. The sheriff's findings divide the people of Overton County, forcing a surprising conclusion - or beginning - of justice." Basis for the 2000 film starring Dean Cain and Maya Angelou. 406 pp. ISBN: 0-688150330.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. dj. Hardcover first edition - Granta 20 author's very highly praised first novel - "Set on a luxuriously appointed and hopelessly corrupt Army base in Mannheim, Germany, where the soldiers prefer real-life race riots to mock combat, [this] viciously funny novel is conclusive proof that peace is hell and the U.S. Army is its ninth circle. Specialist Ray Elwood is the ultimate survivor: a high-stakes drug dealer, bureaucratic con artist, and shrewd collector of other people's secrets. . . With its impeccably rendered cast of sycophants, drug burn-outs, and uniformed sociopaths, [this is] a scabrous, haunting vision of a military idled by the New World Order and at all-out war with itself." Basis for the 2001 film starring Ed Harris, Joaquin Phoenix, and Anna Paquin. Cover praise from J. G. Ballard, James Ellroy and more. 324 pp. ISBN: 0-67941508.

New York: Random House, (1968) dj. Hardcover first edition - The author's first novel, a story of two professional soldiers, Ansell and MacConnachie, who have escaped from a column of POWs in an unnamed country in the tropics. They must make their way through 400 miles of alien territory, battling the climate and the terrain as well as the enemy's soldiers and helicopters. The Times review noted "The speed of the narrative is impeccably controlled - long slogs over country, moments of blind panic, passages of demoralizing inactivity, hair-raising evasions, all building up to a central set-piece in a burning field.. . a brilliant achievement." Nominated for the first Booker Prize and winner of the Author's Club First Novel Award. Basis for the 1970 film directed Joseph Losey in 1970, and featured Robert Shaw and Malcolm McDowell. 215 pp.