Books you thought no one else has read

[tweetysylvester]

It's so fun to find rare books to read, or just look up or hear about less known books, so thought I'd start a thread about this. Nostalgic novels, YA books, current titles you discovered very randomly...

Hamlet, Bananas and All That Jazz by (I think) Alan Durrant. Brilliant book about navigating teen friendships, peer pressure and drugs, but more entertaining than that sounds!

I think The Water of the Hills is both Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources as a single volume, though I could be wrong.

If anyone has Lone Pine Books, some of them are worth a small fortune (says person who bought the gaps she had in the series in lockdown.)

I have Giggling in the Shrubbery somewhere- it was Granny's originally. Arthur Marshall.

I loved "Girl of the Limberlost" @ Barabajagal. Still can't see a butterfly without thinking of it. And I'm fascinated to hear there's a prequel. I'll see if I can find it. Unless it's not as good?

Frozen Summer by Crysse Morrison, about a woman suffering from amnesia who has to live with a husband and child she can’t remember. She thinks she’s a 20 year old student whereas she’s a married mum in her early thirties.

Ferney by James Long, timeslip novel about a couple that moves to the country and meet an old man who seems to know everything about them and there’s an immediate connection between him and the woman of the couple - almost as if they’ve known each other for years already…

Never met anyone else who’s read either of these.

I constantly reread ‘The Farthest Away Mountain’ by Lynne Reid Banks as a child and have recently been trying to find a copy to see if it matches up to my memories

My go to comfort book though is ‘The Cat Who Came In From The Cold’ by Deric Longden - a lighthearted narrative of Deric’s accidental acquirement of a kitten, just a real hug of a book

I found those at a secondhand book fair. I was doing a brutal book cull and sent them to the op shop. I told a friend who said she had been looking for them for years and had recently paid over a hundred for her copies. Ooooops.

My user name comes from Lymond, a conversation between Marthe and Sibylla.

Thank you so much for all your replies! I've read the Solitaire Mystery, and The House at World's End by Monica Dickens as a child. Will look more into several of these books.

Love Thomas Pynchon.

@maximist
thank you, I remember only the one, have you read them all? I’m debating looking for second hand copies.

Summer of my German soldier by Bette Green. I didn’t read a lot of teenage fiction but this one really touched me somehow. Don’t know anyone else who read it!

You can get her entire collected works on kindle for 99p!

@Livinggently I love Rebecca's World too and don't know anyone else who's read it. It's an amazing story and has a strong environmental message.

Sadly it's now out of print - I think there was a dispute about Terry Nation's estate which caused difficulties. However, I was lucky enough to find a copy of it in a charity shop about 15 years ago so I could read it again and share it with my children.

Not a book but a very useful website called fantasticfiction.com

I found some of the authors in some of the post, but not others

It’s handy because where books are written as a series it list the series in order and if you want to create a log on you can then tick off the book you’ve read.

It also enables you to look at authors that are similar, which is handy if you like a particular storyline.

The Tree That Sat Down by Beverley Nichols and Angela Brazil, generally - loved For the Sake of The School!

Giggling in the Shrubbery was wonderful! Lots here are republished now. Love Girls Gone By publishing for that.

Goodness, I'd forgotten that one too!

Starting to wonder if I shared a tiny niche library with half the people on this thread.

It was all about stencilling! 😀

A couple of years ago, I reread ballet shoes by Noel Streatfeild And on the cover it said she was also the author of a book called Apple Bough which is also called travelling shoes

It was about a family who was very musical if I remember rightly and I really enjoyed it at 58 years of age

@Terpsichore. I imagine that was a lovely exhibiton @Terpsichore . I'm sorry to have missed it.

@EBearhug would that be the Arthur Marshall from Call My Bluff? A real blast from the past if so!

I read it, as did a few of my friends at school - it went round our group.

@EBearhug would that be the Arthur Marshall from Call My Bluff? A real blast from the past if so!

Apparently so - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Marshall_(broadcaster)

@Ellabellahockney I was a big fan of Noel Streatfeild and read Apple Bough as a child. Also -The Growing Summer, where 4 children are sent to Ireland to stay with their Great Aunt Dymphna (fabulous name) while their parents dealt with some emergency (I forget what, now).

Mel, Easy Connections, and Easy Freedom by Liz Berry.
Read them while at school from the school library. Teenage books with adult themes. I always wondered why they were in a school library.
Never come across anyone who had read them.

Yes, I think I’ve read nearly everything on the thread, other than Donald Barthelme, and even then I’ve read some of his short stories — and disliked them —.

Two favourites of mine where I’ve never met anyone else who’s read them:

Hila Feil’s The Ghost Garden (1975) a very subtle, odd children’s novel about two girls living on Cape Cod who try to see ghosts. Brilliantly atmospheric on the contrast between tourist-crammed CC in summer, and eerie quiet off-season.

Margaret Gillard’s The Spires As They Are Seen From the Railway (1987), which DH found in an Oxfam when we were students in Oxford. I think it was the author’s only novel. It’s about an affair between two married teachers in a north of England comprehensive, and very affecting, but it’s also about the demise of grammars, changes in education, about Oxford, about failure.

Another Lone Pine fan here.
Loved them as a child.

It’s a lovely feeling finding other people who have read the same books and not just ‘bestsellers’. @Stormyinacoffeemug I remember Easy Connections and the sequel. They were gripping but oh my goodness, the story was shocking. The poor heroine.