This thick, well‐designed but weakly bound reference guide is aimed at readers who want new ideas for furthering their reading. It will sit comfortably with more literary reference works such as the Oxford Companion to English Literature and The Reader’s Companion to Twentieth Century Writers. The scope of the Good Fiction Guide is broad and eclectic and any criticism one may have of the choices and currency is recognized by the editor in her introduction. This is not a definitive guide, nor, by its nature, completely up to date. Some of the choices in the first part of the book, in which 34 well‐recognized authors and critics write an essay and choose 12 titles on a theme or genre, are provocative and will generate debate, but this is the nature of any “best of” lists and arguably none the worse for that. The prose is easy reading ‐ an important point for what could have been a mundane reference book, though it should have had an index of all the titles mentioned.
The subject essays range from adventure to westerns, taking in countries and continents such as Africa and Ireland, as well as genre fiction such as crime, family saga, fantasy, and the less usual glamour, sexual politics, and teens. Authors who contribute their essays include Michael Dibdin (crime);Val McDermid (thrillers); Michèle Roberts (France); and Lesley Glaister (short stories). As well as giving their “Top Ten”, the essays are wide‐ranging and include many other authors who still have titles in print or can be obtained from libraries. In truth, writing as a librarian, it would be wonderful to have borrowers reading some of the “must have but hardly read” authors such as Patrick White, Radcliffe Hall, Walter Scott, Gunter Grass, Nevil Shute and John Galsworthy.
The bulk of the Good Fiction Guide is made up of over 1,000 individual author entries, which aim to give a flavour of each work, recommendations of which books to read, and suggestions of other writers whose work is similar. As with the essays the range of authors is impressive and wide. A random selection from the “P”s includes Dorothy Parker, Boris Pasternak,Alan Paton, Thomas Love Peacock,Mervyn Peake, Ellis Peters, Robert Pirsig, Jean Plaidy, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, John Cooper Powys, Terry Pratchett, J.B.Priestley, Marcel Proust and Thomas Pynchon ‐ some collection! As editor Jane Rogers says in her introduction, “We are attempting to cover the full range of fiction, because most readers love different kinds of books at different times. Or at the same time, come to that. A bag of holiday reading might happily contain Tolstoy, Georgette Heyer, Elmore Leonard,Frank Herbert and Nadine Gordimer. Snobbery in reading is the most pointless thing.” Most readers who love books will agree.
Rummaging around on the back of the title page, as we librarians do, I see that“Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship and education by publishing world‐wide.” Although a worthy addition to this publisher’s list (pity about the binding and lack of title index), this is no dry academic contribution to the “Canon of good literature”. As befits an award‐winning novelist and TV dramatist, Jane Rogers has produced a stimulating and instructive guide to further reading. My holiday bag will be getting heavier by the minute as I add Terra Nostra (Carlos Fuentes), Ossian’s Ride (Fred Hoyle), Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne), etc. to my list. “Can my library cope?”. I wonder. Can yours? Serious point that!
