In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Scottish Kirk was in direct conflict with the King of England. By 1666, the king s soldiers were given lists of the names of the Scottish Covenanters by the curates, who then hunted them down and persecuted them. This is the story of Will Wallace, a young man in the service of the King who is tasked with searching for Andrew Black, a defiant Protestant. But Will soon joins Black as a follower of Christ and becomes one of the hunted and harried himself. Robert Michael Ballantyne was part of a famous family of printers and publishers. At the age of 16 he went to Canada and was six years in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He returned to Scotland in 1847, and published his first book the following year, Hudson’s Bay. For some time he was employed by Messrs Constable, the publishers, but in 1856 he gave up business for the profession of literature, and began the series of adventure stories for the young with which his name is popularly associated. Views: 306
Lily is a primitive spirit trapped on Earth, and has been from the day she was born, nine years ago and counting. She can’t smell, taste, touch or be heard. Lily wants to experience such sensations. But most of all, she wants her human sister – dead.Lily is a primitive spirit trapped on Earth, and has been from the day she was born, nine years ago and counting. She can’t smell, taste, touch or be heard. Lily wants to experience such sensations. But most of all, she wants her human sister – dead.Rose discovers her twin sibling in a forest, bathed in moonlight. She and Lily are transported to the afterlife, three billion light years away, within a galaxy called Domino.On the planet Kiian, the twins go in search of their mother, the key to transforming Lily into a fully formed spirit. However, humans and primitives are not welcome in Domino. Fearless creatures called the Govern seek out the twins to remove them from the afterlife and, in turn, from each other. Views: 306
YOU must not be surprised because the adventures of Billy Topsail and a few of his friends fill this book. If all the adventures of these real boys were written the record would fill many books. This is not hard to explain. The British Colony of Newfoundland lies to the north of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and to the east of the Canadian Labrador. It is so situated that the inhabitants may not escape adventures. On the map, it looks bleak and far away and inhospitable—a lonely island, outlying in the stormy water of the Atlantic. Indeed, it is all that. The interior is a vast wilderness—a waste place. The folk are fishermen all. They live on the coast, in little harbours, remote, widely scattered, not connected by roads; communication is only by way of the sea. They are hospitable, fearless, tender, simple, willing for toil; and, surely, little else can be said of a people. Long, long ago, their forbears first strayed up that forbidding shore in chase of the fish; and[6] the succeeding generations, though such men as we are, have there lived their lives, apart from the world\'s comforts and delights as we know them. The land is barren; sustenance is from the sea, which is moody and cold and gray: thus life in that far place has many perils and deprivations and toilsome duties. The boys of the outports are like English-speaking boys the world over. They are merry or not, brave or not, kind or not, as boys go; but it may be that they are somewhat merrier and braver and kinder than boys to whom self-reliance and physical courage are less needful. At any rate, they have adventures, every one of them; and that is not surprising—for the conditions of life are such that every Newfoundland lad intimately knows hardship and peril at an age when the boys of the cities still grasp a hand when they cross the street. Views: 306
First published in serial form in the Graphic (1881-2), Marion Fay is half tragedy, half romantic burlesque, and one of Trollope's most detailed scrutinies of the workings of the English class system. Based on the first three-volume edition of 1882, the novel contrasts two love affairs, each involving an aristocrat and a commoner. Trollope vividly evokes the dull working lives, plain homes, blank streets, and limited horizons of the dwellers in Paradise Row, using them as an ironic choric commentary on the unattainable world of rank, wealth, and freedom, symbolized by life in the great country houses. Views: 303
Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s magnificent Magic Seeds continues the story of Willie Chandran, the perennially dissatisfied and self-destructively naive protagonist of his bestselling Half a Life.
Having left a wife and a livelihood in Africa, Willie is persuaded to return to his native India to join an underground movement on behalf of its oppressed lower castes. Instead he finds himself in the company of dilettantes and psychopaths, relentlessly hunted by police and spurned by the people he means to liberate. But this is only one stop in a quest for authenticity that takes in all the fanaticism and folly of the postmodern era. Moving with dreamlike swiftness from guerrilla encampment to prison cell, from the squalor of rural India to the glut and moral desolation of 1980s London, Magic Seeds is a novel of oracular power, dazzling in its economy and unblinking in its observations.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 301
Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. Views: 300
The fourth in the fun new 12-book collectible series for young readers from survival expert and Chief Scout BEAR GRYLLS.Chloe is enjoying activity camp and all the outdoor fun - what's not to like? But she can't understand why everyone goes on and on about "leaving things the way you found them". After all, what's the big deal about a bit of litter in the middle of the woods? The world is big enough for a bit of rubbish not to matter.But when she's given a mysterious compass with a fifth direction she's transported to a tropical island beach and has to brave the extreme conditions with the help of survival expert Bear Grylls. It's not like a typical trip to the seaside! First there's a shipwreck to escape through raging surf, fresh water to source, not to mention quicksand and sea urchins...Will Bear persuade her to change her ways when she sees how much non-degradable litter still washes up, and the damage it does to wildlife? And who will get the compass... Views: 298
The Backwoods Settlement—Crusoe’s Parentage and Early History—The agonising pains and sorrows of his puppyhood, and other interesting matters. The dog Crusoe was once a pup. Now do not, courteous reader, toss your head contemptuously, and exclaim, “Of course he was; I could have told you that.” You know very well that you have often seen a man above six feet high, broad and powerful as a lion, with a bronzed shaggy visage and the stern glance of an eagle, of whom you have said, or thought, or heard others say, “It is scarcely possible to believe that such a man was once a squalling baby.” If you had seen our hero in all the strength and majesty of full-grown doghood, you would have experienced a vague sort of surprise had we told you—as we now repeat—that the dog Crusoe was once a pup—a soft, round, sprawling, squeaking pup, as fat as a tallow candle, and as blind as a bat. But we draw particular attention to the fact of Crusoe’s having once been a pup, because in connection with the days of his puppyhood there hangs a tale. This peculiar dog may thus be said to have had two tails—one in connection with his body, the other with his career. This tale, though short, is very harrowing, and, as it is intimately connected with Crusoe’s subsequent history, we will relate it here. But before doing so we must beg our reader to accompany us beyond the civilised portions of the United States of America—beyond the frontier settlements of the “far west,” into those wild prairies which are watered by the great Missouri river—the Father of Waters—and his numerous tributaries. Here dwell the Pawnees, the Sioux, the Delawares, the Crows, the Blackfeet, and many other tribes of Red Indians, who are gradually retreating step by step towards the Rocky Mountains as the advancing white man cuts down their trees and ploughs up their prairies. Here, too, dwell the wild horse and the wild ass, the deer, the buffalo, and the badger; all, men and brutes alike, wild as the power of untamed and ungovernable passion can make them, and free as the wind that sweeps over their mighty plains. There is a romantic and exquisitely beautiful spot on the banks of one of the tributaries above referred to—a long stretch of mingled woodland and meadow, with a magnificent lake lying like a gem in its green bosom—which goes by the name of the Mustang Valley. This remote vale, even at the present day, is but thinly peopled by white men, and is still a frontier settlement round which the wolf and the bear prowl curiously, and from which the startled deer bounds terrified away. At the period of which we write the valley had just been taken possession of by several families of squatters, who, tired of the turmoil and the squabbles of the then frontier settlements, had pushed boldly into the far west to seek a new home for themselves, where they could have “elbow room,” regardless alike of the dangers they might encounter in unknown lands and of the Red-skins who dwelt there. The squatters were well armed with axes, rifles, and ammunition. Most of the women were used to dangers and alarms, and placed implicit reliance in the power of their fathers, husbands, and brothers to protect them—and well they might, for a bolder set of stalwart men than these backwoodsmen never trod the wilderness.... Views: 297
The night was hot in Paris. Breathless heat had brooded over the city all Saturday, the 23rd of August, 1572. It was the eve of Saint Bartholomew. The bell of Saint Germain l\'Auxerrois had just clashed out the signal. The Louvre was one blaze of lights. Men with lanterns and poleaxes, as if going to the shambles to kill oxen, hurried along the streets. Only in the houses in which were lodged the great Huguenot gentlemen, come to the city for the marriage of the King\'s sister Marguerite to the King of Navarre, there were darkness and silence. None had warned them—or, at least, they had taken no warning. If any suspected, the word of a King, his sworn oaths and multitudinous safe-conducts, lulled them back again into security. In one chamber, high above the courtyard, a light burned faint and steady. It was that beside the bed of the great Admiral—Coligny. He had been treacherously wounded by the arquebuse of one of the guard of the King\'s brother—Monsieur de France, Henry Duke of Anjou, afterwards to be known to history as Henry III., the favourite son of Catherine de Medici, the cunningest, and the most ungrateful. Views: 296
Following on from his hugely successful books, Moab is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles, comes the third chapter in Stephen Fry's life.
This unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of More Fool Me is performed by Stephen Fry himself. Views: 296
The Island Queen By R.M. BallantyneThe Island Queen By R.M. Ballantyne Views: 296
The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of R. M. (Robert Michael) Ballantyne then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. Views: 291
CHAPTER I THE ROCK Early on a summer morning, about the beginning of the nineteenth century, two fishermen of Forfarshire wended their way to the shore, launched their boat, and put off to sea. One of the men was tall and ill-favoured, the other, short and well-favoured. Both were square-built, powerful fellows, like most men of the class to which they belonged. It was about that calm hour of the morning which precedes sunrise, when most living creatures are still asleep, and inanimate nature wears, more than at other times, the semblance of repose. The sea was like a sheet of undulating glass. A breeze had been expected, but, in defiance of expectation, it had not come, so the boatmen were obliged to use their oars. They used them well, however, insomuch that the land ere long appeared like a blue line on the horizon, then became tremulous and indistinct, and finally vanished in the mists of morning. The men pulled "with a will,"—as seamen pithily express in silence. Only once during the first hour did the ill-favoured man venture a remark. Referring to the absence of wind, he said, that "it would be a\' the better for landin\' on the rock." This was said in the broadest vernacular dialect, as, indeed, was everything that dropped from the fishermen\'s lips. We take the liberty of modifying it a little, believing that strict fidelity here would entail inevitable loss of sense to many of our readers. The remark, such as it was, called forth a rejoinder from the short comrade, who stated his belief that "they would be likely to find somethin\' there that day." They then relapsed into silence. Under the regular stroke of the oars the boat advanced steadily, straight out to sea. At first the mirror over which they skimmed was grey, and the foam at the cutwater leaden-coloured. By degrees they rowed, as it were, into a brighter region. The sea ahead lightened up, became pale yellow, then warmed into saffron, and, when the sun rose, blazed into liquid gold. The words spoken by the boatmen, though few, were significant. The "rock" alluded to was the celebrated and much dreaded Inch Cape—more familiarly known as the Bell Rock—which being at that time unmarked by lighthouse or beacon of any kind, was the terror of mariners who were making for the firths of Forth and Tay. The "something" that was expected to be found there may be guessed at, when we say that one of the fiercest storms that ever swept our eastern shores had just exhausted itself after strewing the coast with wrecks. The breast of ocean, though calm on the surface, as has been said, was still heaving with a mighty swell, from the effects of the recent elemental conflict. "D\'ye see the breakers noo, Davy?" enquired the ill-favoured man, who pulled the aft oar. "Ay, and hear them, too," said Davy Spink, ceasing to row, and looking over his shoulder towards the seaward horizon. "Yer een and lugs are better than mine, then," returned the ill-favoured comrade, who answered, when among his friends, to the name of Big Swankie, otherwise, and more correctly, Jock Swankie.... Views: 291
