Catalog Search Results
1) Utopia
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
"In his most famous and controversial book, Utopia, Thomas More imagines a perfect island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and all property is communal. Through dialogue and correspondence between the protagonist Raphael Hythloday and his friends and contemporaries, More explores the theories behind war, political disagreements, social quarrels, and wealth distribution and imagines the day-to-day lives...
2) Bleak House
Author
Description
Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...
Author
Series
Description
In "Felix Holt, the Radical", an opportunistic bid for power sparks a dramatic love triangle.
It's the early 1830s in England, and the town of Treby is gearing up for an election. Harold Transome, a radical candidate, is leading the pack. The problem is that he's lacking in real beliefs-he's in politics for the fame. As the election draws nearer, Treby becomes a powder keg of tension. And to make matters worse, Harold and Felix Holt, a man with very...
Author
Series
Description
A rich American art-collector & his daughter Maggie buy in for themselves & to their greater glory a beautiful young wife & a noble husband. They do not know that Charlotte & Prince Amerigo were formerly lovers, nor that on the eve of the Prince's marriage they had discovered, in an antique shop, a golden bowl with a secret flaw.
5) Waverley
Author
Series
Description
Waverley' is among Walter Scott's first novels and one of the original Western historical novels. The sprawling story takes place during the Jacobite Rising from 1745 and follows the life of Edward Waverley, a British soldier who falls in love with a Scottish woman and joins a revolutionary army. 'Waverley' shows why Scott is considered one of the forefathers of European romanticism, as the tale follows an individual hero on a grand journey through...
Author
Series
Description
A retelling of the medieval poem about a group of travelers on a pilgrimage to Canterbury and the tales they tell each other. With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a motley crowd of pilgrims drawn from all walks of life-from knight to nun, miller to monk-reveal a picture of English life in the fourteenth...
Author
Series
Appears on list
Description
When Walter Hartwright encounters a solitary, terrified, beautiful woman dressed in white on a moonlit night in London, he feels impelled to solve the mystery of her distress. The story, full of secrets, locked rooms, lost memories, and surprise revelations, features heroine Marian Halcombe and drawing-master Walter Hartright as sleuthing partners pitted against the diabolical Count Fosco and Sir Percival Glyde.
8) Shirley
Author
Series
Description
Following the dramatic romance of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte intended Shirley to be a 'salutary' change. Set in Yorkshire during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, the novel articulates the social realities of economic hardship, the Luddite riots, dissatisfaction with the government and an inadequate Church. In the foreground of these concerns, a mill-owner, Robert Moore, in pursuit of financial security, ignores the suffering of his workers to such...
Author
Description
English Literature boasts three comic worthies - three great creations that will live for ever. Pickwick and Falstaff are better known, but Parson Adams, who bestrides Joseph Andrews like a colossus, is of the same company, the favourite of every reader who encounters him in these picaresque pages. He lives, and so do all the rest of the wonderful characters, for seldom was a novel so rich in incident and all round excellence. Says George Saintsbury:...
10) Erewhon
Author
Series
Erewhon series volume 1
Description
A utopian classic with a rich legacy–influencing authors from Huxley to Herbert and beyond–Erewhon satirizes Victorian society with biting insight still relevant today.
When Higgs, a young traveler, stumbles upon the beautiful land of Erewhon, he soon discovers that its seemingly ideal culture is founded upon bizarre, unsettling beliefs. Crime is a sickness, while sickness is a crime; the greatest scholarly achievement is unreason, and all machines...
11) Villette
Author
Series
Description
Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief. Charlotte Brontë's last novel, published in 1853, has a dramatic force comparable to that of her other masterpiece, Jane Eyre, as well as strikingly modern psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of...
Author
Description
Rum, a sailing ship, and a dare… …What could go wrong? Edgar Allan Poe's only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is one of the first adventure stories set in and around the Antarctic, which at the time was a place of mystery and the unknown. Pym takes us on an adventure across the seas to uncharted southern lands that are fraught with danger. With shipwrecks, murder, mutiny, and, yes, cannibalism, this tale has it...
