Charles Palliser's Top Ten List

Author Photo And Bio
Photo of Charles Palliser

Charles Palliser (born 1947) is a best-selling American-born but British-based novelist known for using modern literary techniques to tell intricate, Victorian tales. His first novel, the international bestseller The Quincunx (1989, Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction), is a Dickensian mystery set in 19th century England rich with family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of London itself. His other novels include The Sensationist (1991), Betrayals (1993), The Unburied (1999), about an unworldly academic who becomes involved in three mysteries – one current two ancient – in the eerie English town of Thurchester; and Rustication (2013), which begins in 1863 and involves a dilapidated old mansion, a student who has left Cambridge under a cloud and a series of threatening letters sent to the townspeople of Thurchester.

1. Adolphe by Benjamin Constant (1816).
2. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939).
3. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824).
4. Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz (1785-90).
5. The Golovlyev Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1876).
6. The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton (1947).
7. The Tale of Genji by Shikibu Murasaki (c. 1001–1010 c.e.).
8. The Dukays by Lajos Zilahy. (1949)
9. Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane (1896).
10. The Maias by Eca de Queiroz (1888).