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Tag: 1930s

  • Rebecca

    The unnamed narrator, a timid young woman working as a paid companion to a vulgar American in Monte Carlo, meets Maxim de Winter, a wealthy, brooding English widower. After a whirlwind courtship he marries her and brings her home to Manderley, his celebrated estate on the Cornish coast, where she feels gauche and out of place from the moment she arrives.

    Everywhere she turns she finds traces of Maxim's first wife Rebecca, who drowned in a sailing accident a year earlier and was, by every account, beautiful, accomplished and adored. The sinister housekeeper Mrs Danvers, devoted to Rebecca's memory, makes the new Mrs de Winter feel like an intruder, and the narrator becomes consumed by comparison and jealousy as secrets begin to surface.

    Du Maurier opens with one of the most famous first lines in English fiction and sustains an atmosphere of mounting dread. The novel blends romance, psychological suspense and gothic mystery, and explores class, identity and the power of the dead over the living. Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

    Book details

    AuthorDaphne du Maurier
    First published1938
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)410
    SettingMonte Carlo and the Manderley estate in Cornwall, England, 1930s
    AwardsNational Book Award for Favorite Novel 1938

    Themes

    • Jealousy
    • Identity
    • Class
    • Obsession
    • The past haunting the present

    Who should read it

    Readers who love atmospheric gothic suspense and psychological tension.

    If you liked this, try

    • Jane Eyre
    • My Cousin Rachel
    • The Thirteenth Tale

  • Murder on the Orient Express

    Hercule Poirot, the fastidious Belgian detective, boards the Orient Express in Istanbul, heading home after a case. The train is unusually full for winter. One passenger, an American businessman named Ratchett, asks Poirot to protect him from threats he has received; Poirot declines, finding the man distasteful. During the night the train is stopped by heavy snow in Yugoslavia.

    In the morning Ratchett is found dead in his compartment, stabbed repeatedly. With no way for anyone to have come or gone through the snow, the killer must be aboard. Poirot interviews a strikingly diverse set of passengers, from a Russian princess and a Hungarian count to an English colonel, a governess and a talkative American matron, and discovers a link to a notorious crime in the United States.

    Christie was inspired partly by the real Lindbergh kidnapping case and by her own experience of a train stranded by floods. The novel is a showcase for Poirot's method of sifting statements and psychology. Its solution is among the most famous in crime fiction, and it has been filmed several times, notably in 1974 and 2017.

    Book details

    AuthorAgatha Christie
    First published1934
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)256
    SettingThe Orient Express, snowbound in Yugoslavia, 1930s

    Themes

    • Justice versus law
    • Revenge
    • Deception
    • Morality
    • Logic

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a perfectly constructed puzzle and an introduction to Hercule Poirot.

    If you liked this, try

    • And Then There Were None
    • Death on the Nile
    • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

  • And Then There Were None

    Ten people, each invited under a different pretext by a host none of them has met, travel to a mansion on an island off the coast of Devon. They include a retired judge, a doctor, a former police officer, a young governess, a pious spinster, an ex-army general, a mercenary, a playboy and a married pair of servants. Their host never appears.

    After dinner on the first night, a gramophone record accuses each guest of having caused a death and escaped justice. Then the guests begin to die, in ways that echo a grim nursery rhyme framed in every bedroom, while china figurines vanish from the dining table one by one. Cut off from the mainland by a storm, the survivors realise the killer must be among them.

    Christie constructed the story with exceptional precision, building suspicion around every character and stripping away the comforts of a detective who arrives to explain everything. It is regarded as her masterpiece and one of the best-selling novels ever written, and its closed-circle formula has been imitated countless times in books, films and television.

    Book details

    AuthorAgatha Christie
    First published1939
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)272
    SettingSoldier Island, off the coast of Devon, England, late 1930s

    Themes

    • Guilt
    • Justice
    • Paranoia
    • Punishment
    • Isolation

    Who should read it

    Mystery lovers who want the classic locked-island puzzle that inspired a whole genre.

    If you liked this, try

    • Murder on the Orient Express
    • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
    • The Hunting Party

  • The Hobbit

    Bilbo Baggins lives a respectable, uneventful life in his hobbit-hole at Bag End until the wizard Gandalf arrives with thirteen dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield. They plan to reclaim their ancestral home under the Lonely Mountain and its treasure from the dragon Smaug, and Gandalf has decided Bilbo will be their burglar, whether he likes it or not.

    The journey east takes them through troll-infested woods, the elvish refuge of Rivendell, goblin tunnels under the Misty Mountains and the dark, spider-haunted forest of Mirkwood. Along the way Bilbo finds a mysterious ring in a cave and wins a riddle contest with the creature Gollum, gradually discovering resourcefulness and courage he never knew he had.

    Tolkien wrote the book for his own children, and its warm, chatty narrator makes it more playful than The Lord of the Rings, which grew out of it. Drawing on Norse myth and Old English literature, it helped define modern fantasy. It has never gone out of print and was adapted into a trilogy of films by Peter Jackson.

    Book details

    AuthorJ. R. R. Tolkien
    First published1937
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreFantasy
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)310
    SettingMiddle-earth, from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain

    Themes

    • Adventure
    • Courage
    • Greed
    • Home
    • Personal growth

    Who should read it

    Children and adults looking for a classic adventure and an easy entry point into Middle-earth.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Fellowship of the Ring
    • The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    • A Wizard of Earthsea

  • The Grapes of Wrath

    When dust storms and the banks push tenant farmers off the land in Oklahoma, the Joad family loads everything onto a battered truck and joins thousands heading west. Tom Joad, newly paroled from prison, returns home just in time to go with them, along with his resilient mother, his grandparents and a former preacher, Jim Casy, who has lost his faith but not his conscience.

    California turns out to be no promised land. Handbills advertising jobs have drawn far more workers than there is work, wages are pushed down, and migrants are herded into squalid camps and treated with suspicion by locals and police. The family's journey is a steady test of endurance and solidarity, and Ma Joad becomes its moral centre.

    Steinbeck alternates the family narrative with short interchapters that zoom out to the wider exodus, the car salesmen, the roadside diners and the tractors flattening farmhouses. The novel caused outrage when it appeared and was banned in places, but it won the Pulitzer Prize and helped shape national awareness of migrant labour, corporate farming and economic injustice.

    Book details

    AuthorJohn Steinbeck
    First published1939
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)464
    SettingOklahoma, Route 66 and California's farm valleys, 1930s
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for the Novel 1940, National Book Award 1939

    Themes

    • Poverty
    • Migration
    • Family
    • Labour exploitation
    • Collective solidarity

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a sweeping social novel about hardship, dignity and the human cost of economic collapse.

    If you liked this, try

    • Of Mice and Men
    • East of Eden
    • The Jungle

  • Of Mice and Men

    George Milton and Lennie Small travel together through California during the Great Depression, picking up work on farms and ranches. George is small, sharp and impatient; Lennie is enormously strong but has an intellectual disability and a childlike love of soft things. They arrive at a ranch near Soledad after trouble forced them out of their last job.

    What keeps them going is a dream they repeat like a bedtime story: a small farm of their own, with a few acres, a vegetable patch and rabbits for Lennie to tend. On the ranch they meet the ageing swamper Candy, the isolated stable hand Crooks, the boss's aggressive son Curley and Curley's restless young wife, each of them lonely in their own way.

    Steinbeck built the short novel almost like a play, with tight scenes, heavy dialogue and few settings, and he later adapted it for the stage. Its power lies in how much it compresses: friendship, loyalty, the precariousness of itinerant labour and the way hope sustains people with little else. It is one of the most widely read books in American schools.

    Book details

    AuthorJohn Steinbeck
    First published1937
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)107
    SettingA ranch near Soledad, Salinas Valley, California, 1930s

    Themes

    • Friendship
    • Loneliness
    • The American Dream
    • Disability
    • Powerlessness

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting a short, emotionally powerful classic that can be read in an afternoon and remembered for years.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Grapes of Wrath
    • To Kill a Mockingbird
    • Cannery Row

  • Brave New World

    Set six centuries ahead in a unified World State, the novel imagines a society that has abolished families, ageing and unhappiness. Babies are grown in bottles and sorted into castes from Alpha to Epsilon, then conditioned through sleep lessons to love their assigned work. Casual sex, synthetic entertainment and a tranquilliser called soma keep everyone docile, and history has been quietly erased.

    The story follows Bernard Marx, an Alpha who feels out of place, and Lenina Crowne, a cheerful product of the system. A trip to a reservation in New Mexico brings them into contact with John, a young man raised outside the World State who knows the world largely through a battered volume of Shakespeare. His arrival in London turns him into a curiosity and sets up a collision between two ways of living.

    Huxley writes with satirical bite, mocking mass production, consumerism and the worship of efficiency, with Henry Ford standing in for God. Where Orwell later imagined control through fear, Huxley suggested that comfort and distraction might do the job more smoothly. That idea has kept the book central to debates about technology, genetic engineering and the price of a frictionless life.

    Book details

    AuthorAldous Huxley
    First published1932
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreScience fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)288
    SettingLondon and a New Mexico reservation in the World State, year 632 After Ford

    Themes

    • Social conditioning
    • Consumerism
    • Loss of individuality
    • Technology and control
    • Happiness versus freedom

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in classic dystopias and in the question of whether pleasure can be a tool of control.

    If you liked this, try

    • Nineteen Eighty-Four
    • We
    • Fahrenheit 451

  • How to Win Friends and Influence People

    Dale Carnegie developed this book out of the public-speaking and human-relations courses he taught to business people in New York. Its central claim is simple: people are driven by emotion and a desire to feel important, so anyone who learns to show genuine interest and appreciation will find cooperation far easier to obtain than by argument or criticism.

    The book is organised as a series of short principles grouped into sections on handling people, making people like you, winning others to your way of thinking and leading change without giving offence. Each principle is backed by anecdotes about figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, along with stories from salesmen, managers and course participants.

    Its plain, conversational style made it one of the best-selling nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Critics have called some of its advice manipulative, yet Carnegie repeatedly insists that flattery fails and only sincere interest works. The book remains a staple of sales training, management courses and self-improvement reading lists.

    Book details

    AuthorDale Carnegie
    First published1936
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreSelf-help
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)288

    Themes

    • Communication
    • Persuasion
    • Empathy
    • Social skills
    • Leadership

    Who should read it

    Salespeople, managers and anyone who feels awkward in social situations and wants practical rules for dealing with people.

    If you liked this, try

    • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
    • Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
    • Never Split the Difference

  • Think and Grow Rich

    Napoleon Hill claimed that the industrialist Andrew Carnegie encouraged him to study hundreds of successful people and identify the shared philosophy behind their achievements. Published in 1937, in the middle of the Great Depression, the book presents that philosophy as a formula for acquiring wealth and achieving any goal.

    Hill sets out thirteen principles, including desire, faith, autosuggestion, specialised knowledge, imagination, organised planning, decision, persistence and the mastermind group of allies who pool their thinking. He insists that a clearly defined aim, written down and repeated daily, combined with unwavering belief, will lead the subconscious mind to find a path to it. Later chapters discuss fear, indecision and doubt as obstacles.

    Historians have questioned many of Hill's claims about his interviews and his own business record, and the book's mental techniques read as early versions of the positive-thinking and manifestation movements. Even so, it has sold tens of millions of copies and its ideas on goal setting and peer support remain influential in sales and entrepreneurial circles.

    Book details

    AuthorNapoleon Hill
    First published1937
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreSelf-help
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)238

    Themes

    • Goal setting
    • Persistence
    • Belief
    • Wealth creation
    • Mastermind groups

    Who should read it

    Readers curious about the roots of modern success and motivational literature who want its original, unvarnished form.

    If you liked this, try

    • How to Win Friends and Influence People
    • Rich Dad Poor Dad
    • The Power of Positive Thinking