Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea.

    Even with the rain, they were glad to be on their way--priests, nuns, tradesmen, men from the city, all pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. To pass the long journey they told each other stories: of magic and trickery, of animals with blazing eyes, of people with their pants on fire, of two thousand men battling before smoking walls, stories of love and death and the devil. There were written down by Geoffrey Chaucer, and he called them The Canterbury Tales. Geraldine McCaughrean retells The Canterbury Tales for children in a lively and humorous style which captures the original flair of Chaucer himself. She introduces us to the characters who told these tales: the shy, battle-hardened Knight, the Summoner whose breath smells of onions, the angry Miller with his read beard, and the Widow of Bath who likes a happy ending. The stories and the characters are vividly brought to life by Victor Ambrus, with pictures of wild chases, exciting battles, and the April countryside through which the pilgrims travel.

    Jan Morris shows clearly the manners of thought of the Welch people, as well as theirart, their landscapes and their folklore, their ways of earning a living, their character, their meaning and their historical destiny. Half Welsh, half English herself, Morris is a historian, a travel writer, and an essayist. All three disciplines she brings to this work--a vivid tribute to acountry not just on the map or in the mind but also in the heart. All of us, Morris writes, have some small country there.A dense, poetic, richly textured account of a land and a culture, passionate and extravagant in both location and spirit, almost hymnlike.--Washington Post Book WorldRanks among her best books...the writing sparkles.--The New York TimesAbout the Author:Jan Morris is the author of such books as the Pax Britannica trilogy, Spain, Destinations, and most recently, Journeys.With this book Morris joins the immortals. The splendors of the prose are, like Homer's sea, simply everywhere. She is an absolute master of the sentence.--Christian Science Monitor

    Although he has since established himself as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, his remarkable body of prose work remains an essential part of his oeuvre.In addition to his first book of short stories The Gold Diggers, a novel The Island, a radio play Listen, and Mabel: A Story, this omnibus edition includes two previously uncollected stories.

    On the way she meets her friends and tells them each a different story on how she got her scrape. Was she dropped by a wolf, a slithering snake, an enormous dragon, or a hairy gorilla? Just how did that scrape happen? Playful and creative, this is a fantastic journey of the imagination that every child can relate to.

    Moving on to post-World War II drama, the author explores the use of noneloquent speech and silence to convey the alienation and isolation engendered by the rise of political humanity.