Just about everyone knows of George's long-standing affair with Felicity Mainwaring, the intimidating wife of a naval colleague. Her husband's death the previous year had prompted many to speculate that George would end up marrying his formidable mistress. No one expected it more than Felicity herself and as her letters and calls to George go unanswered she becomes suspicious. He somehow manages to duck Felicity's attempts to contact him long enough to marry Thea, and the couple embark on a harmonious life together in the heart of rural Devon. Thea enjoys matrimony immensely and through the naval network, finds a soul mate in Polly, another youthful bride, but not with such an understanding husband. But everything changes for Thea and George when she mentions that an old friend of his had dropped in for a chat while he was in London - Felicity Mainwaring.

    As the book cinematically moves from one character's perspective to another, events and characters move toward the convergence of the wedding--and a haunting dance of love and death.

    But why is it that his enthusiastic contribution is so seldom appreciated?Ten very funny stories about William - at war

    Found in schoolbooks from Alaska to Singapore, the poem has been stitched, stamped, quilted, set to music, printed on cards, written on cakes and made into films.Here 'Warning: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple' appears as a beautifully illustrated gift book, the perfect gift for a friend or relative who wants to grow older with joy.

    This audacious novel is a brilliant (and literal) head trip of a book that brings us into the wildly active, albeit coma-beset, mind of Roy Strang, whose hallucinatory quest to eradicate the evil predator/scavenger marabou stork keeps being interrupted by grisly memories of the social and family dysfunction that brought him to this state. It is the sort of lethally funny cocktail of pathos, violence, and outrageous hilarity that only Irvine Welsh can pull off.

    She tells nobody about the incident but her guilt manifests itself in the frequent nosebleeds she has at awkward moments. Fifty years later, she is still living her life sentence.

    Providing an account of her battle with an abusive man and with bureaucracy, this is the story of a woman's fight against a violent and tyrannical relationship, and her struggle to reclaim her two daughters, sold into marriage in the Yemen.

    In this collection of stories, predominated by winter and its festivals, George Mackay Brown re-establishes the tradition of ancient, hearthside story-telling.

    When first published in 1963, the critics acclaimed the text as "outstandingly skilful and memorable tribute from one Irish artist to another"

    Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge provide a full and candid account of Brittain's life that alters in important respects the self-portrait she presented in Testament of Youth and her later autobiographical work, Testament of Experience. Drawing on a treasure trove of private family papers and memorabilia, Berry and Bostridge chronicle her conservative and provincial upbringing, university education, and the devastating losses of her fiance, younger brother, and two friends in the first World War. They examine her struggles to become a successful writer, her close relationship with writer Winifred Holtby, her unconventional marriage to political scientist George Catlin, and her courageous stance against Britain's saturation bombing of Germany in World War II.

    It includes work by William Blake, John Clare, John Keats and William Wordsworth.

    Among those discussed directly are: Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Michael Field, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Proctor, Christina Rossetti, and Rosamund Marriott Watson. Key topics dealt with include the nature of home, the market, the fallen woman and the moral law, the mother, and the muse. Critics represented are: Isobel Armstrong, Kathleen Blake, Susan Conley, Stevie Davies, Sandra M. Gilbert, Gill Gregory, Terrence Holt, Linda K. Hughes, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Jerome J. McGann, Dorothy Mermin, Margaret Reynolds, Dolores Rosenblum, Chris White, and Joyce Zonana.

    Offers the reader fresh insight into the realms of witchcraft and presents evidence that lends credence to the 'Craft of the Wise' - and indeed, to the 'supernatural' as a whole.

    The book contains vampire glasses to decipher the secret coded messages, a "dead bugs" project, touch-and-feel caterpillar guts and batwings, a slugs and centipedes board game, snake earrings and a bat mobile.

    Drawing on extensive knowledge of the Anglican church in the nineteenth century, Marianne Thormahlen shows how the Brontes' familiarity with the contemporary debates on doctrinal, ethical and ecclesiastical issues informs their novels. Divided into four parts, the book examines denominations, doctrines, ethics and clerics in the Brontes' work. Lucid and vigorously written, it will open up new perspectives for Bronte specialists and enthusiasts alike on a fundamental aspect of the novels greatly neglected in recent decades.

    This book and the TV series it accompanies, reveals what it means to sail on British seas, it also affords an insight into John's reacquaintance with his native country.

    The Art of the Bront�s comprises 400 illustrated entries, recording such details as medium, dating, provenance, sources, style, and arguments for attribution; and documenting many previously unknown drawings and paintings. In addition, a sequence of narrative chapters provides new material on each of the four Bront� siblings and their relationships to the visual arts, suggesting ways in which their experience of drawing influenced their writing. An annotated and illustrated catalogue which is also a work of scholarly criticism, this publication is a landmark in Bront� studies and in the fields of nineteenth-century literature and painting generally.

    The author of twelve novels and four collections of short stories, she excelled at unravelling the comedy of ordinary life. DANGEROUS CALM draws on her volumes of short stories to produce a fine selection of her work. Stories such as 'Summer Schools', 'Flesh' and 'The Devastating Boys' confirm her status as one of the finest short story writers. This selection also features two previously unpublished stories and three uncollected ones, including the late, poignant tale, 'The Wrong Order'. Together they celebrate a formidable stylist whose work has delighted readers and critics for fifty years.

    Yet British fortune-seekers of the 1820s found Shaka's Zulus a dignified people whose martial qualities were tempered by generosity and hospitality. Within a few years, as Zulu territory was threatened by expanding colonial populations, all this had changed. Taylor's resonant and acute account conjures the atmosphere of the past through close adherence to contemporary oral sources. The Zulu world, its passions, intrigues and ideals, the sly white traders, the squabbling Boers, the thunderous battles and the bright African landscape rise fresh and startling from the page. Tribal orders are re-emerging in South Africa's first multi-racial democracy. Yet the Zulu - in the vanguard eighty years ago of the formation of the ANC - are now seen as rebels against the new order. Their past and their place in South Africa's history has taken on an urgent contemporary relevance.

    It highlights his myriad talents, as well as the fluctuating moods and passions that inform his work. Discovered at the age of 19 through a poetry competition in a London newspaper, Dylan Thomas became the object of immediate acclaim and criticism for his adventurous language and resonant verse. Thomas' poetry and prose embrace touching childhood reminiscence and a spiritual yearning from which he emerges, not as the loud bohemian of the personal legend, but as the careful and reflective artist of the poems, stories and broadcasts themselves.

    A one-volume collection of the complete short fiction of the author acclaimed as the grandfather of the modern detective story reveals his genius at pitting characters against one another and a mastery of plot that even Dickens admired.