Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart from a line in W.B. Yeats's The Second Coming.

I just finished Barbara Pym's Some Tame Gazelle. You really know your 19th century poets if you know that one. I'm getting ready to read A Glass of Blessings, which I did recognize.

Good one that Michael, my own personal favorite is The Quiet Woman

Ah, another Barbara Pym fan in the making!
I've read them all, but "Gazelle" is still my favorite.

(and don't forget her other title/quotation: "The Sweet Dove Died.")

Book titles
 

Further on this topic, I've always fancied calling a book "Little Nourishment" in tribute to Elinor Wylie:

Let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle or of antelope:
I am by nature none of these.

I was, being human, born alone.
I am, being woman, hard beset.
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file,
But none has merited my sneer,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

John wrote:

Michael Innes actually did do The Bloody Wood - and in very Michael Innes fashion the characters in the opening pages engage in a battle of quotations about nightingales (they also prove central to the plot). Stain the Stiff is great. Somebody should use it (maybe I will).

And yes, There Came Both Mist and Snow is another Michael Innes - and a very good one.

The British/Canadian Sara Woods wrote 48 legal whodunits, almost all with titles from Shakespeare.

Esther Murer