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Books > Fiction > General & literary fiction > General
Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction and Notes by
Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury. Crime and
Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever
written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied
consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is
inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder. From that moment
on, we share his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride,
of contempt for and need of others, and of terrible despair and
hope of redemption: and, in a remarkable transformation of the
detective novel, we follow his agonised efforts to probe and
confront both his own motives for, and the consequences of, his
crime. The result is a tragic novel built out of a series of
supremely dramatic scenes that illuminate the eternal conflicts at
the heart of human existence: most especially our desire for
self-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints of
morality and human laws; and our agonised awareness of the world's
harsh injustices and of our own mortality, as against the mysteries
of divine justice and immortality.
Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers. With
Oliver Twist his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The
novel contains many classic Dickensian themes - grinding poverty,
desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in
the face of great adversity. Oliver Twist features some of the
author's most enduring characters, such as Oliver himself (who
dares to ask for more), the tyrannical Bumble, the diabolical
Fagin, the menacing Bill Sikes, Nancy and 'the Artful Dodger'. For
any reader wishing to delve into the works of the great Victorian
literary colossus, Oliver Twist is, without doubt, an essential
title.
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The Chianti Flask
(Paperback)
Marie Belloc Lowndes; Introduction by Martin Edwards
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R377
R354
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Albion
(Hardcover)
Anna Hope
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R430
R384
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The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home – twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone – to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember. Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting them on a collision course with each other. Isa has long suspected that her father thought only of himself, and hopes to seek out her childhood love, who still lives on the estate, to discover whether it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her marriage. And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.
Jacob Hochstetler is a peace-loving Amish settler on the
Pennsylvania frontier when Native American warriors, goaded on by
the hostilities of the French and Indian War, attack his family one
September night in 1757. Taken captive by the warriors and grieving
for the family members just killed, Jacob finds his beliefs about
love and nonresistance severely tested. Jacob endures a hard winter
as a prisoner in an Indian longhouse. Meanwhile, some members of
his congregation the first Amish settlement in America move away
for fear of further attacks. Based on actual events, Jacob's Choice
describes how one man's commitment to pacifism leads to a season of
captivity, a complicated romance, an unrelenting search for missing
family members, and an astounding act of forgiveness and
reconciliation. This expanded edition of Jacob's Choice includes
maps, photographs, family tree charts, and other historical
documents to help readers enter the story and era of the
Hochstetler family.
Down the rabbit-hole and through the looking-glass! Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland & Other Stories features all of the
best-known works of Lewis Carroll, including the novels Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, with the
classic illustrations of John Tenniel. This compilation also
features Carroll's novels Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno
Concluded, his masterpiece of nonsense verse "The Hunting of the
Snark," and miscellaneous poems, short stories, puzzles, and
acrostics.
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The House of the Dead / The Gambler
(Paperback)
Fyodor Dostoevsky; Translated by Constance Garnett; Introduction by A.D.P. Briggs; Series edited by Keith Carabine
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R141
R119
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Translated by Constance Garnett with an introduction by Anthony
Briggs. Dostoevsky's fascination for mental breakdown and violence
(20 murders in his four main novels) was based on his own life, and
these two unmistakably autobiographical works bear this out. The
House of the Dead is fiction, but based on his four years in a
Siberian prison. An educated upper-class man is condemned to live
among criminals and brutal guards, with arbitrary punishments,
lousy food, disgusting living conditions, hard toil and many
floggings. Somehow he avoids bitterness and recrimination; faith in
humanity survives. With its breadth of characterisation, acute
sense of detail and strong narrative interest, this work can still
shock, entertain and inspire. In The Gambler we see the Russian
community in a German spa town. Drawn to the casino, Alexey becomes
obsessed with roulette. In a gripping story, full of psychological
interest, his growing mania eclipses even his interest in Polina, a
heroine of demonic and vibrant sexuality. Dostoevsky himself was
rescued from a similar gambling obsession by the young stenographer
who took down this work at his dictation and married him soon
afterwards.
The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral
home—twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone—to bury Philip:
husband, father, and the blinding sun around which they have orbited
their entire lives.
Eldest daughter Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English
countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to
nature: a last line of defense against the coming climate catastrophe.
Her brother Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where,
under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be
reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing, setting
them on a collision course with each other.
Isa, Philip’s estranged youngest child, only hopes to reconnect with
her childhood love who still lives on the estate, to discover whether
it is her feelings for him that are creating the fault lines in her
marriage.
And then there is Clara, who arrives in their midst from America,
shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture all the
dreams on which they’ve built their lives.
Beautifully layered and utterly compelling, Anna Hope’s
multigenerational saga is a bold, brilliant, and deeply contemporary
examination of family dynamics, colonial legacies, and class, set
against the backdrop of the climate crisis.
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The King in Yellow
(Paperback)
Eric J. Guignard, Leslie S. Klinger; Robert W Chambers
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R457
R419
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The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer
Robert W. Chambers, first published in 1895. The book is named
after a play with the same title which recurs as a motif through
some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly
esteemed weird stories, and the book has been described by critics
as a classic in the field of the supernatural. There are ten
stories, the first four of which ("The Repairer of Reputations",
"The Mask", "In the Court of the Dragon", and "The Yellow Sign")
mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair
or madness in those who read it. "The Yellow Sign" inspired a film
of the same name released in 2001.
First published in 1878, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is the tragic
story of aristocrat Anna Karenina and her ill-fated affair with the
cavalry officer Count Vronsky. Although passionately in love, the
couple finds their romance doomed by the sexual mores of their time
and place, and the double standards that apply to men and women.
The tale's panoramic sweep and Tolstoy's colorful depiction of
Russia and the European continent are virtually unparalleled in
world literature. This novel, in the estimation of William
Faulkner, is 'the best ever written.' Anna Karenina is one of
Barnes & Noble's leatherbound classics. Each volume features
authoritative texts by the world's greatest authors in an
exquisitely designed bonded leather binding, with distinctive gilt
edging and an attractive ribbon bookmark. Decorative, durable, and
collectible, these books offers hours of pleasure to readers young
and old and are an indispensable cornerstone for any home library.
Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The
Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and
a devastating expose of the 'Jazz Age'. Through the narration of
Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially
glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore
in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, her brash but
wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that
surrounds him. The Great Gatsby is an undisputed classic of
American literature from the period following the First World War
and is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
Published during the heyday of fascism in Europe, It Can't Happen
Here is a chilling cautionary tale by one of the greatest American
writers of the twentieth century, which is still startlingly
relevant almost a century later. Charting the rise to power of
Berzelius 'Buzz' Windrip, who whips his supporters into a frenzy
while promising drastic reform under a banner of patriotism and
traditional values, It Can't Happen Here decries the tactics used
by politicians to mobilise voters, and exposes the danger of
authoritarianism arising from populist platforms, and the chaos
such regimes can leave in their wake.
With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English
and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and
co-editor of 'Poetry Review'. Moby Dick is the story of Captain
Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest
is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man
becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the
crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a
co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands,
each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the
crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and
extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent,
the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice
of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his 'mighty
theme' - not only the whale but all things sublime - Melville
breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest
novel ever written by an American.
With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at
Canterbury. The story of Edmund Dantes, self-styled Count of Monte
Cristo, is told with consummate skill. The victim of a miscarriage
of justice, Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and
empowered by a stroke of providence. In his campaign of vengeance,
he becomes an anonymous agent of fate. The sensational narrative of
intrigue, betrayal, escape, and triumphant revenge moves at a
cracking pace. Dumas' novel presents a powerful conflict between
good and evil embodied in an epic saga of rich diversity that is
complicated by the hero's ultimate discomfort with the hubristic
implication of his own actions. Our edition is based on the most
popular and enduring translation first published by Chapman and
Hall in 1846. The name of the translator was never revealed.
Sharp left by the school and down the lane to the gas works. The
gasworks? I, a dentist, heading for the gasworks in a small Welsh
market town? It was the furnace I wanted... From the dramatic
scenery of Snowdonia and the Gower to the stunning coastlines and
hushed valleys, the landscapes of Wales have inspired many writers
of Golden Age mystery stories - from within and without its
borders. Centred around a lost novella by Cledwyn Hughes, this new
collection features the best stories from celebrated Welsh authors
such as Mary Fitt and Ethel Lina White, as well as short mysteries
inspired by or set in the cities and wilds of the country by both
beloved Golden Age writers and authors from the 1960s and 70s who
continued to push the boundaries of the genre.
With an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer,
School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. Tender is the
Night is a story set in the hedonistic high society of Europe
during the 'Roaring Twenties'. A wealthy schizophrenic, Nicole
Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver - her psychiatrist. The
resulting saga of the Divers' troubled marriage, and their circle
of friends, includes a cast of aristocratic and beautiful people,
unhappy love affairs, a duel, incest, and the problems inherent in
the possession of great wealth. Despite cataloguing a maelstrom of
interpersonal conflict, Tender is the Night has a poignancy and
warmth that springs from the quality of Fitzgerald's writing and
the tragic personal experiences on which the novel is based. Six
years separate Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon, the novel
Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death in December 1940.
Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood more or less continuously from July
1937 until his death, and a novel about the film industry at the
height of 'the studio system' centred on the working life of a top
producer was begun in 1939. Even in its incomplete state The Last
Tycoon remains the greatest American novel about Hollywood and
contains some of Fitzgerald's most brilliant writing.
Few books have been as universally cherished by children and adults
alike as The Little Prince. A beautiful gift edition of this
touching and wise classic children's book, with the original
translation by Katherine Woods and full-colour illustrations. A
pilot stranded in the desert awakes one morning to see the most
extraordinary little fellow standing before him. "Please,... asks
the stranger, "draw me a sheep.... And the pilot realises that when
life's events are too difficult to understand, there is no choice
but to succumb to their mysteries. He pulls out a pencil and paper
... and thus begins this wise and enchanting fable that, in
teaching the secret of what is really important in life, has
changed the world forever for its readers. This stunning new
edition of the classic children's book The Little Prince, includes
the classic English translation by Katherine Woods and original
colour illustrations which will capture the hearts of readers of
all ages. Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944) was born in Lyons,
France. He wrote The Little Prince in the United States during a
two-year self-imposed exile from occupied France. A year after the
book's publication in 1943, Saint-Exupery disappeared over the
Mediterranean while flying a reconnaissance mission for his French
air squadron. Best known throughout the world as the author and
illustrator of The Little Prince, Saint-Exupery wrote several other
books that have also become classics of world literature. Katherine
Woods (1886-1968) produced the original English translation of The
Little Prince in 1943. It was later followed by several other
English translations, but her classic translation is treasured by
fans and is often considered to be the definitive English
translation. Her poetic translation perfectly captures the
enchantment and charm of Saint-Exupery's storytelling.
Carol A. Senf traces the vampire's evolution from folklore to
twentieth-century popular culture and explains why this creature
became such an important metaphor in Victorian England. This
bloodsucker who had stalked the folklore of almost every culture
became the property of serious artists and thinkers in Victorian
England, including Charlotte and Emily Bronte, George Eliot,
Charles Dickens, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. People who did
not believe in the existence of vampires nonetheless saw numerous
metaphoric possibilities in a creature from the past that exerted
pressure on the present and was often threatening because of its
sexuality.
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