40 1960 British novels

The Bachelors is a novel written in 1960 by the Scottish author Muriel Spark, referred to by The New York Times as "the most gifted and innovative British novelist". It follows a group of British bachelors whose misogynistic world is shattered when they suddenly find themselves the target of blackmail and fraud.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is a novel written in 1960 by the British author Muriel Spark.

Bill Badger and the Pirates is a children's novel with a canal-side setting, written and illustrated in 1960 by the prolific author Denys Watkins-Pitchford, who wrote under the pseudonym "BB".

Border Country is a novel by Raymond Williams. The book was re-published in December 2005 as one of the first group of titles in the Library of Wales series, having been out of print for several years. Written in English, the novel was first published in 1960.

A Burnt-Out Case (1960) is a novel by English author Graham Greene, set in a Leper colony on the upper reaches of a tributary of the Congo River in Africa.

Cain's Book is a 1960 novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi. A roman à clef, it details the life of Joe Necchi, a heroin addict and writer, who is living and working on a scow on the Hudson River in New York.

Calculated Risk is a 1960 science fiction novel – specifically, a time travel story – by Charles Eric Maine. It was first published in the U. K. by Hodder & Stoughton; a paperback version by Corgi Books appeared in 1962.

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant is a novel by Anthony Powell (ISBN 0-09-947244-9). It forms the fifth volume of the twelve-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, and was originally published in 1960. Many of the events of the novel were included in the television adaptation broadcast on the United Kingdom's Channel 4 in 1997, comprising part of the second of four episodes. There was also an earlier, more comprehensive, BBC Radio adaptation.

Clea, published in 1960, is the fourth volume in The Alexandria Quartet series by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt, around World War II, the first three volumes tell the same story from different points of view, and Clea relates subsequent events.

The Country Girls is a trilogy by Irish author Edna O'Brien. It consists of three novels: The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). The trilogy was re-released in 1986 in a single volume with a revised ending to Girls in Their Married Bliss and addition of an epilogue. The Country Girls, both the trilogy and the novel, is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II and was adapted into a 1983 film. All three novels were banned by the Irish censorship board and faced significant public disdain in Ireland. O'Brien won the Kingsley Amis Award in 1962 for The Country Girls.

The Custard Boys is a 1960 British novel by John Rae, focusing on the lives of children in a small village in World War II Norfolk dealing with an influx of war refugees. It is sometimes compared to Lord of the Flies, and was adapted to make the film Reach for Glory in 1962, and again for a second film carrying the original name in 1979, directed by Colin Finbow.

The Divided Lady is a 1960 novel by Scottish writer Bruce Marshall.

The Doctor Is Sick is a 1960 novel by Anthony Burgess.

Don't Tell Alfred is a novel by Nancy Mitford, first published in 1960 by Hamish Hamilton. It is the third in a trilogy centered on an upper-class English family, and takes place twenty years after the events of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. It was Mitford's final novel, though she continued to produce works of biography for a number of years before her death in 1973.

The Doomed Oasis is a 1960 thriller novel by the British writer Hammond Innes. A solicitor helps a young man to travel to the Arabian peninsula to find his father, a famous oil prospector Colonel Charles Whitaker.

Facial Justice is a dystopian novel by L. P. Hartley, published in 1960. The novel depicts a post-apocalyptic society that has sought to banish privilege and envy, to the extent that people will even have their faces surgically altered in order to appear neither too beautiful nor too ugly. The novel was included in Anthony Burgess' essay Ninety-nine Novels.

False Scent is a detective novel by Ngaio Marsh; it is the twenty-first novel to feature Roderick Alleyn, and was first published in 1960, by Collins in the UK and Little, Brown in the USA. The plot concerns the murder of a West End stage actress during her 50th birthday party, and continues Marsh's fascination with the theatre and with acting.

Five on Finniston Farm is the eighteenth novel in the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton. It was first published in 1960.

The General is a 1960 novel by the British writer Alan Sillitoe. Unlike his previous realist works, the novel relies heavily on abstract symbolism.

The Great Fortune is a novel by English writer Olivia Manning first published in 1960. It forms the opening part of a six-part novel series called Fortunes Of War. The Fortunes Of War series itself is split into two trilogies, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. The novels tell an unfolding story of how the Second World War impacts on the lives of a group of British expatriates.

The Householder is a 1960 English language novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It is about a young man named Prem who has recently moved from the first stage of his life, a student, to the second stage of his life, a householder. The book is a bildungsroman, which is a story where the protagonist develops mind and character as he passes from childhood (innocence) through various experiences usually through a spiritual crisis into maturity.

A Kind of Loving is a novel by the English novelist Stan Barstow. It has also been translated into a film of the same name, a television series, a radio play and a stage play.

The L-Shaped Room is a 1960 British novel by Lynne Reid Banks which tells the story of a young woman, unmarried and pregnant, who moves into a London boarding house, befriending a young man in the building. It was adapted into a film, with significant differences from the novel, by Bryan Forbes.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey, a novel by Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore, was published in 1960, in the United States by The Atlantic Monthly and in the United Kingdom by Andre Deutsch. In Canada, it received a Governor General's Award. The book was made into a film, directed by Irvin Kershner, and released in 1964. Robert Shaw starred in the title role.

Marianne and Mark (1960) by Catherine Storr is a sequel to Marianne Dreams (1958). It and continues the story of the eponymous characters. The novel has far less basis in fantasy than the first book with Storr focusing on the trials of growing up rather than magical happenings, although there is arguably a fantastic subtext in Marianne and Mark.

Mistress of Mellyn was the first Gothic romance novel written by Eleanor Hibbert under the pen name Victoria Holt.

Moon Base One is a young adult science fiction novel, the fourth in Hugh Walters' Chris Godfrey of U.N.E.X.A. series. It was published in the UK by Faber in 1960, in the US by Criterion Books in 1962 under the title Outpost on the Moon.

More Than Friendship is a contemporary romance novel by Mary Howard, published in 1960 by Collins. The novel won the 1960s Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.

The Night of Wenceslas is the debut novel of British thriller and crime writer Lionel Davidson. This Bildungsroman describes the reluctant adventures of Nicolas Whistler, a dissolute young man of mixed English and Czech parentage who finds himself caught up against his will in Cold War espionage. The novel won the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award in 1960 and the Author's Club First Novel Award. It was filmed in 1964 under the title Hot Enough for June.

The Picturegoers (1960) is the first novel by British writer David Lodge.

The Right to an Answer is a darkly comic 1960 novel by Anthony Burgess, the first of his repatriate years (1960–69). One of its themes is the disillusionment of the returning exile. The critic William H. Pritchard described the novel in a 1966 publication as "surely Burgess's most engaging novel".

The Satanist is a black magic/horror novel by Dennis Wheatley. Published in 1960, it is characterized by an anti-communist spy theme. The novel was one of the popular novels of the 1960s popularizing the tabloid notion of a black mass.

Take a Girl Like You is a comic novel by Kingsley Amis. The narrative follows the progress of twenty-year-old Jenny Bunn, who has moved from her family home in the North of England to a small town not far from London to teach primary school children. Jenny is a 'traditional' Northern working-class girl whose dusky beauty strikes people as being at odds with the old-fashioned values she has gained from her upbringing, not least the conviction of 'no sex before marriage'. A thread of the novel concerns the frustrations of the morally dubious Patrick Standish, a 30-year-old teacher at a local private secondary school and his attempts to seduce Jenny; all this occurs against a backdrop of Jenny's new teaching job, Patrick's work and his leisure time with flatmate and colleague Graham and their new acquaintance, the well-off and somewhat older man-about-town, Julian Ormerod.

This Sporting Life is a 1960 novel by the English writer David Storey. It is set in Northern England and follows a man who tries to make it as a professional rugby league footballer. It was the debut novel of Storey, himself a former player for Leeds.

Trouble with Lichen is a science fiction novel by British writer John Wyndham.

Trustee from the Toolroom is a novel written by Nevil Shute. Shute died in January 1960; Trustee was published posthumously later that year.

The Venus of Konpara (1960) is a novel by John Masters which draws on an extreme version of the "Aryan Invasion Theory" model of ancient Indian history, according to which invading Aryan barbarians ruthlessly crushed underfoot the indigenous Dravidian peoples of the country, forcing them into the position of an oppressed underclass.

Warriors for the Working Day is a novel written by Peter Elstob, published in 1960, with later translations into other languages. The novel is based on events from June 1944, during the Battle of Normandy, to the invasion of Germany in the Spring of 1945. The book describes fighting by the men of a small unit of British tanks during this period, with the focus on one tank crew. The novel is highly realistic, as it is based on Elstob's experience. The title is taken from Henry V, Act 4, Scene 3 (Shakespeare) before the Battle of Agincourt. King Henry replies to the French herald, Mountjoy,Let me speak proudly: tell the constable We are but warriors for the working-day; Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch'd With rainy marching in the painful field; There's not a piece of feather in our host-- Good argument, I hope, we will not fly-- And time hath worn us into slovenry: But, by the mass, our hearts are in the trim.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley is a children's fantasy novel written by the English author Alan Garner. Garner began work on the novel, his literary debut, in 1957 after he moved into the late medieval house Toad Hall, in Blackden, Cheshire. The story, which took the local legend of The Wizard of the Edge as a partial basis for the novel's plot, was influenced by the folklore and landscape of the neighbouring Alderley Edge where he had grown up. Upon completion the book was picked up by the publisher Sir William Collins who released it through his publishing company Collins in 1960.

The Worm and the Ring is a 1961 novel by English novelist Anthony Burgess, drawing on his time as a teacher at Banbury Grammar School, Oxfordshire, England, in the early 1950s.