While visiting Tommy's Aunt Ada at Sunny Ridge Nursing Home, Tuppence encounters some odd residents including Mrs. Lancaster who mystifies her with talk about "your poor child" and "something behind the fireplace".
When Aunt Ada dies a few weeks later, she leaves Tommy and Tuppence a painting featuring a house, which Tuppence is sure she has seen before. This realization leads her on a dangerous adventure involving a missing tombstone, diamond smuggling and a horrible discovery of what Mrs. Lancaster was talking about. Views: 747
The Count of Monte-Cristo was inspired by an anecdote from the Parisian police archives, a pearl of a story, Dumas called it, 'A rough, shapeless pearl, of no value, waiting for its jeweller'. Edmond Dantè's betrayal, his incarceration in the fortress-prison of If, his search for Abbé Faria's hidden treasure, and his reappearance, now fabulously rich, as the brooding, Byronic and vengeful Count of Monte-Cristo - these are the bare outlines of a book which Thackeray, for one, found impossible to put down. Dumas set his magnificent novel of L'action et l'amour in nineteenth-century metropolitan Paris with interludes in Marseilles and Rome. In it he gave free rein to the sensational - hashish-smoking, vampirism and sex - and to his interest in travel, classical myth, the orient, human psychology and disguises. The Count of Monte-Cristo (1844-46) is one of the great popular novels of all time, and a landmark in the development of modern popular fiction. Views: 747
'The Gormenghast Trilogy is one of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced The Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, The Animal Farm and 1984.' - Anthony Burgess, Spectator
Gormenghast is the vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. Gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old ritual, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation and murder - a world suggested in a tour de force that ranks as one of this century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.
Now a major TV series - The Millenium Drama Views: 746
Finance, fashionable society, and the intrigues of the underworld and the police system form the heart of this powerful novel, which introduces the satanic genius Vautrin, one of the greatest villains in world literature. Views: 746
Thirteen-year-old Meg envies her sister's beauty and popularity. Her feelings don't make it any easier for her to cope with Molly's strange illness and eventual death. Views: 745
This volume contains a carefully chosen selection from the Grimms' Children's and Household Tales, the most famous and influential of all the great nineteenth-century folklore collections.
The fairy tales collected by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were first published in 1812-15. While no one knows where the tales first came from, features of many are found in myths from all over the world. Through the oral tradition, they were passed down for centuries by illiterate storytellers, until at last collectors began recording them in print for the world of today, where they still captivate and delight.
The award-winning translator Anthea Bell has selected, edited and written a foreword for this new collection. Views: 745
Ros Ballaster (Introduction/Editor) \'The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!\' Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor\'s warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love—and its threatened loss—the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love. This edition includes explanatory notes, textual variants between the first and second editions, and Tony Tanner\'s introduction to the original Penguin Classic edition. Views: 745
Turgenev was a major 19th century Russian novelist. His novel Fathers and Sons is his best-known work. Published in 1852 this collection of stories is also known as Hunting Sketches and Sketches from a Hunter's Album. The stories are based on Turgenev's experiences hunting on this mother's estate. While on these tripe he learned about the abuse suffered by the Russian peasants and the injustice of the Russian system. These stories along with his epitaph to Gogol led to his house arrest. Stories in this work include: Khor and Kalinych:, Yermolay and the Miller's Wife:, Raspberry Water, District Doctor:, My Neighbor Radilov, Famer Ovsyanikov:, Lgov:, Bezhin Lea:, Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands:, Bailiff:, The Office, Loner:, Two Landowners, Lebedyan, Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew:, Death, Singers, Pyotr Petrovich Karataev, Meeting. Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District: . Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin: The End of Chertopkhanov: Living Relic: The Clatter of Wheels: Forest and Steppe: T he Russian German, and The Reformer and the Russian Ge Views: 745
Widely considered one of the great dramatic creations of the modern stage, "Mother Courage and Her Children" is Bertolt Brecht's most passionate and profound statement against war. Set in the seventeenth century, the play follows Anna Fierling -- "Mother Courage" -- an itinerant trader, as she pulls her wagon of wares and her children through the blood and carnage of Europe's religious wars. Battered by hardships, brutality, and the degradation and death of her children, she ultimately finds herself alone with the one thing in which she truly believes -- her ramshackle wagon with its tattered flag and freight of boots and brandy. Fitting herself in its harness, the old woman manages, with the last of her strength, to drag it onward to the next battle. In the enduring figure of Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht has created one of the most extraordinary characters in the literature of drama. Views: 744
Hilarious, terrifying, insightful, and compulsively readable, these are the articles that Hunter S. Thompson wrote for Rolling Stone magazine while covering the 1972 election campaign of President Richard M. Nixon and his unsuccessful opponent, Senator George S. McGovern. Hunter focuses largely on the Democratic Party's primaries and the breakdown of the national party as it splits between the different candidates.
With drug-addled alacrity and incisive wit, Thompson turned his jaundiced eye and gonzo heart to the repellent and seductive race for president, deconstructed the campaigns, and ended up with a political vision that is eerily prophetic Views: 744
The story of young people from the city adjusting to a winter in the Connecticut hills. Views: 744
In this dark and compelling short novel, Fyodor Dostoevsky tells the story of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young tutor working in the household of an imperious Russian general. Alexey tries to break through the wall of the established order in Russia, but instead becomes mired in the endless downward spiral of betting and loss. His intense and inescapable addiction is accentuated by his affair with the General’s cruel yet seductive niece, Polina. In *The Gambler*, Dostoevsky reaches the heights of drama with this stunning psychological portrait. Views: 743
Alexander Pushkin was Russia's first true literary genius. Best known for his poetry, he also wrote sparkling prose that revealed his national culture with elegance and understated humour. Here, his gift for portraying the Russian people is fully revealed. "The Tales of Belkin", his first prose masterpiece, presents a series of interlinked stories narrated by a good-hearted Russian squire - among them "The Shot", in which a duel is revisited after many years, and the grotesque "The Undertaker". Elsewhere, works such as the novel-fragment "Roslavlev" and the "Egyptian Nights", the tale of an Italian balladeer seeking an audience in St. Petersberg, demonstrate the wide range of Pushkin's fiction. "A Journey to Arzrum", the final piece in this collection, offers an autobiographical account of Pushkin's own experiences in the 1829 war between Russia and Turkey, and remains one of the greatest of all pieces of journalistic adventure writing. Views: 743
The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op's most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 743
