The most under-rated books you have read - recommendations please

[TondelayoSchwarzkopf]

OK - they are doing overrated books over in AIBU - let's do under-rated because I'm bored of being negative.

These are my favourites that need dusting off and distributing to everyone instead of the usual McEwan / Franzen / Orange / Booker / TV adaptations snooze-fests.

Main Street - Sinclair Lewis.
Beautiful book about a young woman's growing disillusion with suburban life in the midwest.

Angel - Elizabeth Taylor
I know she is raved about by those who know but it's time for her to be famous and exalted. Amazing book about an Edwardian romantic novelist who is totally deluded.

Damon Runyan short stories - hilarious vivid and brilliant - set in the New York of the 1920s and full of gangsters and molls.

The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
Frankly weird but engrossing tale of travellers crossing the Sahara.

Please dig out all of the above and let me know your secret favourites.

Penelope1980 - nice to hear a rec for Fevre Dream - I thought this one of the better vampire novels written, pre all the hype and ubiquitous vamp-stories of nowadays. Not many people have heard of it though.

A book I found in a secondhand shop:

Emma who Saved my Life by Wilton Barnhardt. Absolutely brilliant - about a bloke who tries to make it as an actor in New York. Written with such humour and pathos.

Another off the wall choice is Janet Street Porter's first autobiography. It's very down-to-earth and paints such a good picture of lower-middle-class life.

Paul Auster, anything by.

I just love Paul Auster. My favourites are Moon Palace and The Book of Illusions

Paul Auster is about as starry and famous as modern US authors get, so hardly what you'd call underrated.

I like him too, but his most recent have left me cold.

Oooh, some good books - I agree with Angel by Elizabeth Taylor and with Barbara Pym. Also a big fan of the Lucia books by E. F. Benson.

Fainthearted Feminist is great - a 1940s version is E. M. Delafield's "Diary of a Provincial Lady". Oh, and Thank Heaven Fasting by the same author is brilliant too.

I think Lolita is under-estimated perhaps, rather than underrated. It's underestimated by people who haven't read it and make assumptions about it based on hysteria, perhaps.

I have to say that I've seen Lolita underestimated only on MN

I never see Patricia Highsmith mentioned on here, and I think some of her novels are beautiful, my fav being Edith's diary.

I also recently enjoyed Memoirs of an ex prom queen by Alix Shulman.

Paul Bowles 'Let it Come Down' - not as famous as 'Sheltering Sky' I suspect because of the film, but a very good book.

Not underrated, but forgotten these days, but anything by Dorothy L Sayers.

Quarantine - Jim Crace

The man who ate everything - Jeffery Steingarten (I think!) - I loved this book!

Oh yes; I liked The Man Who Ate Everything.

"A Lost Lady" by Willa Cather: just fabulous, read it recently and can't believe not better known.

I like this thread, but it's a bit hard to say that Gogol and Nabokov are underrated! Love them. One day last year ds1 said, apropos of nothing, 'mummy, imagine if a man woke up one day and found for no reason that his nose had disappeared'. He regretted it when I went off on one about a whole literary canon!!

I particularly love 'A Hero of Our Time' by Lermontov, at least partly because he managed to be so fabulous before dying in a duel when he was about 23.

Talking of classics - I'm really up for recommendations for things more than however many - 50? - years old that you can get for free from ibooks. Off to look for Saki now...

There's a wonderful Lermontov (he was descended from Scots, called Learmont) poem called 'In a Valley in Daghestan I Lay ...' (apols translation) where it presages his death in a duel. Quite spooky.

Stuff that's 50 year's old? Erm, perhaps Master & Magherita, White Guard (if you like Russian lit), Bely's 'Petersburg'

Another lesser known Burgess novel (I had the pleasure of meeting him and being invited to his house) is 'The Long Day Wanes - semi autobiographical set in post-war Malaysia

A House for Mr Biswas by Naipaul (ok, not underrated)

Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Kobo Abe's Woman of the Dunes

I'm a massive Saki fan too. Seek out Beachcomber.

There's a good sequel (well, not strictly a sequel) to 'The Man who Ate Everything', called 'It Must've Been Something I Ate'.

I think I have all of those Otchayaniye - you have good taste! A Man of the People, by Achebe, is also brilliant.

I agree with whoever mentioned Barbara Comyns, and also Naipaul, House for Mr Biswas is wonderful, also The Suffrage of Elvira.

Pamela Hansford Johnson has written some interesting novels, ( she was married to C.P Snow - does anyone read him nowadays? I know my parents really rated him)

I also enjoyed Colette's Claudine stories when I was younger, again she is probably out of fashion now.

OK this thread is affecting popular culture. Sinclair Lewis's Main Street was the first question in the Metro quiz today! It is hard to say if he is strictly under-rated as he did win Nobel Prize in his lifetime but is forgotten now compared to his contemporaries.

@Otchay. Don't know what Ephebopilia means but when I look on dictionary.com lots of child safety links come up and denies all knowledge so definitely not one to Google. I assume it's a synonym for the more popular word beginning with P.

Have you also read the one by Bowles' wife Jane. Two Serious Ladies? Very strange yet compelling.

Yay to Colette. Love Gigi (and the film)

A vote for Skallagrig by William Horwood of Duncton Wood fame. Not about animals this time and very different from anything else he's written. I defy anybody not to read the first few chapters and not be moved to tears.

i LOVE skallagrigg! and no-one else has ever heard of it :(

anything by erich segal (author of love story). i think he is actually out of print in the UK but he is marvellous, i want everybody to read him (yes fish if you can tear your peepers away from twitter this means you )

Anything by Robertson Davies. Just 'cos he's Canadian doesn't mean he isn't worth it!

Bit late coming to this but I too have read 'I'll Go to Bed at Noon' and loved it. As I did the whole trilogy. A friend was reading it and I asked her what it was like - she said 'oh, not very interesting, really'. Then I read it and was that she could think that. Beautifully written.

I picked up Wallace Stegner's "Crossing to Safety" at a yard sale a few years ago and have reread it several times since.

Don't know if he was over- or under-rated in his time, but I had never heard of him.

otchayaniye - yy to Dorothy L Sayers (obviously ). And Josephine Tey.

Does anyone read John Wyndham anymore? And has anyone heard of the Rabbi Small detective novels?

I was lent a collection of Damon Runyon when I was ill at university and it made me feel better almost at once. And I have just had the pleasure of reading Saki to DS1 and think I have converted him.