books in order

Paul Theroux Books In Order

Spencer Monroe Savage Books In Order

  1. The Consul’s File (1972)
  2. London Embassy (1982)

Novels

  1. Fong and the Indians (1968)
  2. Waldo (1968)
  3. Girls At Play (1969)
  4. Murder in Mount Holly (1969)
  5. Jungle Lovers (1971)
  6. Saint Jack (1973)
  7. The Black House (1974)
  8. The Family Arsenal (1976)
  9. Picture Palace (1978)
  10. The Mosquito Coast (1981)
  11. Doctor Slaughter (1984)
  12. O-Zone (1986)
  13. My Secret History (1989)
  14. Chicago Loop (1990)
  15. Millroy the Magician (1993)
  16. My Other Life (1996)
  17. Kowloon Tong (1997)
  18. Hotel Honolulu (2001)
  19. Blinding Light (2005)
  20. A Dead Hand (2009)
  21. The Lower River (2012)
  22. Mother Land (2017)
  23. Under the Wave at Waimea (2021)
  24. The Belanger Brotherhood (2022)

Omnibus

  1. Half Moon Street (1984)
  2. On the Edge of the Great Rift (1996)
  3. The Collected Short Novels (1998)

Collections

  1. Sinning with Annie (1972)
  2. World’s End (1980)
  3. Collected Stories (1997)
  4. The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro (2003)
  5. The Elephanta Suite (2007)
  6. Mr. Bones (2014)
  7. The New Abject (2020)

Chapbooks

  1. Dr. Demarr (1988)

Plays

  1. The White Man’s Burden (1987)

Novellas

  1. Siamese Nights (2012)

Anthologies edited

Non fiction

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Paul Theroux Books Overview

Murder in Mount Holly

Paul Theroux, one of the world’s most popular authors, both for his travel books and his fiction, has produced an off beat story of 1960s weirdos unlike anything he has ever written. During the time of Lyndon Johnson s presidency, Herbie Gneiss is forced to leave college to get a job. His income from the Kant Brake toy factory, which manufactures military toys for children, keeps his chocolate loving mother from starvation. Mr. Gibbon, a patriotic veteran of three wars, also works at Kant Brake. When Herbie is drafted, Mr. Gibbon falls in love with Herbie s mother and they move in together at Miss Ball s rooming house. Since Herbie is fighting for his country, Mr. Gibbon feels that he, too, should do something for his country and convinces Miss Ball and Mrs. Gneiss to join him in the venture. They decide to rob the Mount Holly Trust Company because it is managed by a small dark man who is probably a communist. There are some complications. Combine Donald E. Westlake with Abby Hoffman, add a bit of Gore Vidal at his most vitriolic, and you will have Murder in Mount Holly.

Saint Jack

At one time, expatriate Jack Flowers was the youngest drinker at Singapore’s Bandung Club. Now, at 53, he is a fixture. But he is beginning to fear death, alone and vulnerable in the alien tropics. And Jack still dreams of success. How can he convert his ‘perfect dream of magic’ into reality, away from the seamy waterfront that has become his home? A funny and sophisticated novel from an acclaimed and popular writer.

The Black House

A reign of terror begins for Alfred and Emma Munday when they take their failing marriage to the solace of an old country house.

The Family Arsenal

Hood, a renegade American diplomat, envisions a new urban order through the opium fog of his room. His sometimes bedmate, Mayo, has stolen a Flemish painting and is negotiating for publicity with ‘The Times’. Murf the bomb maker leaves his mark in red whilst his girlfriend Brodie bombs Euston.

Picture Palace

World famous photographer Maude Coffin Pratt has pointed her lens at the beautiful, obscure, and obscene, and at the private places and public parts of the famous, from Gertrude Stein to Graham Greene. When the seventy year old Maude rummages through her archives in preparation for a triumphant retrospective, the resurrected images unleash a flood of suppressed memories of her extraordinary life, her celebrated subjects, and the dark, painful secret at the core of her existence. Theroux’s ‘superbly crafted, elegantly controlled novel’ Washington Post Book Review’Vibrant and compelling…
Paul Theroux at his satirical best.’ Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review’Profound and effective, not to mention entertaining…
. For all the peculiar brilliance of its surface, Picture Palace is a novel whose depths you can drown in…
. Absolutely brilliant.’ Christopher Lehmann Haupt, The New York Times’Dazzling…
audacious…
altogether captivating.’ The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Mosquito Coast

Allie Fox hates America and everything about the 20th century, so he decides to take his wife and two sons to live a better and simpler life in the Honduran jungle. However, when he starts to go mad, life for his family becomes much more frightening than ever before. ‘Penguin Readers’ is a series of simplified novels, film novelizations and original titles that introduce students at all levels to the pleasures of reading in English. Originally designed for teaching English as a foreign language, the series’ combination of high interest level and low reading age makes it suitable for both English speaking teenagers with limited reading skills and students of English as a second language. Many titles in the series also provide access to the pre 20th century literature strands of the National Curriculum English Orders. ‘Penguin Readers’ are graded at seven levels of difficulty, from ‘Easystarts’ with a 200 word vocabulary, to Level 6 Advanced with a 3000 word vocabulary. In addition, titles fall into one of three sub categories: ‘Contemporary’, ‘Classics’ or ‘Originals’. At the end of each book there is a section of enjoyable exercises focusing on vocabulary building, comprehension, discussion and writing. Some titles in the series are available with an accompanying audio cassette, or in a book and cassette pack. Additionally, selected titles have free accompanying ‘Penguin Readers Factsheets’ which provide stimulating exercise material for students, as well as suggestions for teachers on how to exploit the Readers in class.

O-Zone

‘Remarkable…
Powerful…
Mesmerizing…
Lyrical.’Susan CheeverWelcome to the America of the 21st century. The O Zone is a forbidding land of nuclear waste, mutants, and aliens. Except for one place that is a beautiful oasis amidst the destruction. When two aliens are shot that look suspiciously human, Hooper Allbright, disurbed by the memories of those he once loved, goes back down into the O Zone to try to reach the people he lost, though they may be unreachable by now…
.’Smart, witty, grotesque, and brutal.’THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

My Secret History

Brilliantly written, erotically charged, My Secret History is Paul Theroux’s tour de force. It is the story of Andre Parent, a writer, a world traveller, a lover of every kind of woman he chances to meet in a life as varied as a man can lead. It begins with his days as a Massachusetts altar boy, when his first furtive sexual encounter introduces him to the thrills of leading a double life. As a teenaged lifeguard, Andre finds himself caught between the attentions of a beautiful young student and an amorous older woman. Soon he is in Africa, where the local women are numerous, easy, and free. And as the boy becomes a man he turns his attention to writing, which brings him fame, and a wife, who may finally cause him to know himself. But not before he sets up his most dangerous secret life, one that any man might envy, but that could cost Andre Parent the delicate balance that makes him who he is.

Millroy the Magician

‘Brilliant…
Wonderful…
Millroy’s magic pops out at the reader from the first page.’ John Updike The New Yorker’PICARESQUE…
ENCHANTING…
Theroux is a gifted and versatile tale spinner.’ TimeFourteen year old Jilly Farina was mesmerized by Millroy the Magician at the Barnstable County Fair. After all, he once turned a girl from the audience into a glass of milk and drank her. But when Jilly stepped into the wickerwork coffin during a performance, she had no idea he would transform her dreary life into something truly magical, and a touch bizarre. For Millroy was no ordinary magician. He could smell the future, and Jilly was going to be part of it. Yet not even Millroy could foresee how far determination and a dream could take him, as he and his new young assistant hit the road and the airwaves to save America’s unhealthy appetite and floundering soul…
.’MAGICAL…
A funny, dark satire of America’s obsessions.’ The New York Times Book Review’AMAZING…
A STARTLINGLY ORIGINAL TALE OF PURE MAGIC…
that amuses, unnerves, and captivates the reader in a spell of bewilderment, danger and awe…
. The reader will be enthralled.’ The Boston Sunday Herald

My Other Life

In the Washington Post Book World, Sven Birkerts called this exuberant novel ‘a complex and gripping work of invention and confession…
I understood again how the prose of a true writer can bring us to a world beyond.’ The book spans almost thirty years in the life of a fictional ‘Paul Theroux,’ who moves through young bachelorhood in Africa, in and out of marriage, affairs, and employment, and between continents. It’s a wry, worldly, erotic, and deeply moving account of one man’s first half century ‘among the strongest things Theroux has ever written’ New York Times Book Review.

Kowloon Tong

Ninety nine years of colonial rule are ending as the British prepare to hand over Hong Kong to China. For Betty Mullard and her son, Bunt, it doesn’t concern them until the mysterious Mr. Hung from the mainland offers them a large sum for their family business. They refuse, yet fail to realize Mr. Hung is unlike the Chinese they’ve known: he will accept no refusals. When a young female employee whom Bunt has been dating vanishes, he is forced to make important decisions for the first time in his life but his good intentions are pitted against the will of Mr. Hung and the threat of the ultimate betrayal.

Hotel Honolulu

Welcome to the Hotel Honolulu, a down at the heels tourist place that’s two blocks from the beach on a back street in Waikiki, where middle America stays and dreams. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest in this eighty room hotel has come in search of something sun, love, happiness, unnamable longing and everyone has a story. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all land at the Hotel Honolulu. But the hotel is as suited to being a crime scene as a love nest. Fortunately, our keen eyed narrator, a writer down on his luck, is there to relate all the comings and goings. He s lost money, friends, house, and family, and he has no experience running a hotel. But all that doesn t stop Buddy, the bloated, boozy hotel owner the last of a dying breed from signing him on as manager. It isn t long before the hotel expands to encompass the narrator s whole world. His original plan of escape from a life of the mind becomes something altogether different: a way to return to the world he left, the world of imagined life. No one but Paul Theroux could write this romp of a book, with its acutely drawn characters and canny insights into a place that is often viewed as a simple island paradise. In this unforgettable novel, Theroux shows us a funny, languid, louche floating world, island style. This is the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted, and it is also the heart of America.

Blinding Light

Slade Steadman’s lone opus, published twenty years ago, was Trespassing, a cult classic about his travels through dozens of countries without benefit of passport. With his soon to be ex girlfriend Ava in tow, Steadman sets out for Ecuador’s jungle in search of a rare hallucinogenic drug and the cure for his writer s block. Amid a gang of thrill seeking tourists, he finds his drug and his inspiration but is beset with an unnerving side effect periodic blindness. His world is altered profoundly: Ava stays by his side, he writes an erotic, autobiographical novel with the drug serving as muse, and he returns to stardom. Steadman becomes addicted to the drug and the insights it provides, only to have them desert him, along with his sight. Will he regain his vision? His visions? Or will he forgo the world of his imagining and his ambition? As Theroux leads us toward the answers, he makes fresh magic out of the venerable intertwined themes of sight and insight. He also offers incisive, sometimes hilarious takes on the manifold ironies of travel, of trespass and trangession, and of the trappings of the writer s life from the fear of the blank page to the unexpected challenges of the book tour.

A Dead Hand

Jerry Delfont leads an aimless life in Calcutta, struggling in vain against his writer’s block, or ‘dead hand,’ and flitting around the edges of a half hearted romance. Then he receives a mysterious letter asking for his help. The story it tells is disturbing: A dead boy found on the floor of a cheap hotel, a seemingly innocent man in flight and fearing for reputation as well as his life. Before long, Delfont finds himself lured into the company of the letter’s author, the wealthy and charming Merrill Unger, and is intrigued enough to pursue both the mystery and the woman. A devotee of the goddess Kali, Unger introduces Delfont to a strange underworld where tantric sex and religious fervor lead to obsession, philanthropy and exploitation walk hand in hand, and, unless he can act in time, violence against the most vulnerable in society goes unnoticed and unpunished. An atmospheric and masterful thriller from ‘the most gifted, the most prodigal writer of his generation’ Jonathan Raban.

Collected Stories

Written over a period of twenty five years, the more than sixty stories in this volume are funny and sardonic, sensuous and evocative, streaked with terror and cruelty. Richly varied in tone and subject ghost story, murder mystery, sexual farce, political satire, culture clash parable all glow with Paul Theroux’s intelligence, elegance, and ironic wit; with his marvelous sense of place; with his ear for dialogue; and with his tragicomic vision. Theroux’s canvas stretches from London to South east Asia, Boston to Paris, Africa to Eastern Europe, Moscow to the tropics. He portrays colonials, migrs, diplomats, students, would be writers, academics, and children. Many are trapped in alien situations or loveless relationships, or are overwhelmed by larger cultural tremors. Full of suspense and the unexpected, this first major retrospective of Theroux’s short fiction is ‘a welcomed second chance to read some of his best work’ and confirms his reputation as ‘an irresistible storyteller’ Chicago Tribune.

The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro

‘This is my only story. Now that I am sixty I can tell it.’ He, the narrator, was a twenty one year old art student traveling the world. She was a countess apparently cold, haughty, and inaccessible traveling with Haroun, her ambiguous companion. When the young man makes their acquaintance at a hotel in Sicily, he finds himself filled with unexpected lust and playing a part in something he doesn’t quite understand. Filled with Theroux’s typically effortless but devastating descriptions of people and places, The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro is a brilliant portrayal of aging and decay, a shocking tale of sensuality in a golden age. The thrill and risk of pursuit and desire mark the accompanying stories of the sexual awakening and rites of passage of a Boston boyhood, the ruin of a writer in Africa, and the bewitchment of a retiree in Hawaii. This is Paul Theroux at his most allusive and wise, writing with a deep understanding of the frailties of men and boys.

The Elephanta Suite

A master of the travel narrative gives us three intertwined novellas of Westerners transformed by their sojourns in India. This startling and satisfying book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Paul Theroux s characters risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent s well worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A middle aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned up Boston lawyer finds succour in Mumbai s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore. In these pages, we also meet Indian characters as singular as they are indicative of the country s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle working guru, and more. As ever, Theroux s portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect. The Elephanta Suite urges us toward a fresh, compelling, and often inspiring notion of what India is, and what it can do to those who try to lose or find themselves there. From the Hardcover edition.

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