One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.

    On the voyage he encounters again John Laputa, the celebrated Zulu minister, of whom he has strange memories.In his remote store David finds himself with the key to a massive uprising led by the minister, who has taken the title of the mythical priest-king, Prester John.David's courage and his understanding of this man take him to the heart of the uprising, a secret cave in the Rooirand.

    Here, many famous names are mentioned and there is obviously a grave risk that families and friends are going to take offence... Uncle Oswald discovers the electrifying properties of the Sudanese Blister Beetle and the gorgeous Yasmin Howcomely, a girl absolutely soaked in sex, and sets about seducing all the great men of the time for his own wicked, irreverent reasons.

    Contending with the perils and the varied cast of characters of the marriage market, Belinda strides resolutely toward independence. Admired by her contemporary, Jane Austen, and later by Thackeray and Turgenev, Edgeworth tackles issues of gender and race in a manner at once comic and thought-provoking. The 1802 text used in this edition also confronts the difficult and fascinating issues of racism and mixed marriage, which Edgeworth toned down in later editions.

    Book 1 of 3. Elizabeth Lara built a perfect life as San Francisco’s top divorce attorney, but when she loses her great-aunt Mags, the woman who raised her, she boards a plane and leaves it all behind.The Irish shores welcome her as she learns a shocking truth, kept secret for thirty-five years. Devastated and now alone in the world, Beth tries to find peace in a beautiful cottage by Lough Rhiannon, but peace isn’t what fate had in mind. Almost as soon as she arrives, Beth’s solitary retreat into the magic wilds of Ireland is interrupted by Connor Bannon. A man with light brown hair, ice blue eyes and a secret of his own. He’s gorgeous, grieving, and completely unexpected. With the help of Mags’ letters, the colorful townspeople of Dingle, and Connor, Elizabeth might just find a way back to the girl she lost long ago and become the woman she always wanted to be.

    As a young man he falls in love with both Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, her beautiful, headstrong daughter, and is inspired to join the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to reinstate James Stuart to the throne. Thackeray valued Henry Esmond more than any of his other novels and it displays many of his own memories and emotions.

    His two earliest, and perhaps most accessible, successes—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners—are here brought together in one volume. Both works reflect Joyce’s lifelong love-hate relationship with Dublin and the Irish culture that formed him.In the semi-autobiographical Portrait, young Stephen Dedalus yearns to be an artist, but first must struggle against the forces of church, school, and society, which fetter his imagination and stifle his soul. The book’s inventive style is apparent from its opening pages, a record of an infant’s impressions of the world around him—and one of the first examples of the “stream of consciousness” technique.Comprising fifteen stories, Dubliners presents a community of mesmerizing, humorous, and haunting characters—a group portrait. The interactions among them form one long meditation on the human condition, culminating with “The Dead,” one of Joyce’s most graceful compositions centering around a character’s epiphany. A carefully woven tapestry of Dublin life at the turn of the last century, Dubliners realizes Joyce’s ambition to give his countrymen “one good look at themselves.” Kevin J. H. Dettmar is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author or editor of a half-dozen books on James Joyce, modernist literature, and rock music. He is currently finishing a term as President of the Modernist Studies Association.--back cover

     MacFARLAND'S LASS by Glynnis Campbell - writing as Kira Morgan (formerly Captured by Desire) A woman on the run…a man on the hunt. He has forty days to earn her trust. She has forty days to win his heart. They have forty days to outwit their enemies. When Florie Gilder, the once-respected jeweler to Queen Mary, claims sanctuary in an abandoned church for a crime she didn't commit, huntsman Rane MacFarland, a local hero of the common folk, vows to protect her. But when his overlord charges him with preventing the fugitive lass's escape, Rane finds himself torn between duty and desire when he begins to fall for his spirited captive. And when powerful foes conspire to turn Rane and Florie against each other, they need courage, wits, and, most of all, love, to survive.

    The Jago is a London slum where crime and violence are the only way of life, and from which there is no escape for the inhabitants. Only the characters themselves are fictional: Morrison's descriptions of the fearful physical conditions are based directly on what he saw. He conjures up an extraordinarily vivid picture of a world which, even as he wrote, was about to vanish in one of the first of the slum clearance schemes.

     The Skye Preston. The daughter of the wealthiest businessman in the world, and the most beautiful woman I've ever known. Her looks don't compare to her golden heart. And her heart doesn't compare to that big brain of hers. But I could never tell her. Because we've been best friends for twenty years. She has a jerk for a boyfriend, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. The rest of the gang can't stand him either. But I'm not the kind of guy to intervene. I respect her too much to pull a stunt like that. But then I spot her at a party, too drunk to even walk. The men are eyeing her like easy prey so I take her home. But when we get there Skye is different. She looks at me differently. She touches me differently. And she wants me differently.

    Beneath the once decorous surface of their lives, unsavories like blackmail and adultery are now to be glimpsed. As spooky as it is witty, poignant and wickedly hilarious, Memento Mori may ostensibly concern death, but it is a book which leaves one relishing life all the more.

    She’s not about to let a little thing like gender get in her way. She’ll use every wile–feminine or otherwise–and her considerable strength of will to win this battle of the sexes. But the limits of her determination are tested by the only Navy SEAL capable of commanding her heart. Commander Marc Miller is equally determined to keep her out of his program. As the newly appointed CO of BUD/S, he’s been tasked with cleaning up SEAL Training. He doesn’t need a red-hot redhead compounding the problem. For him Hell Week begins when one well-connected junior officer walks into his office. The last thing he wants is to be her commanding officer when the only thing he wants is her. The only way to have her––and the surest way to lose her––is to see that she fails. Will love conquer all or tear them apart?

    A girl of the isolated Four-Legs Clan, all she knows about the King's elite Water Dogs is that they leash wicked creatures called daevas to protect the empire from the Undead. But when scouts arrive to recruit young people with the gift, she leaps at the chance to join their ranks. To hunt the monsters that killed her sister.Scarred by grief, she's willing to pay any price, even if it requires linking with a daeva named Darius. Human in body, he's possessed of a terrifying power, one that Nazafareen controls. But the golden cuffs that join them have an unwanted side effect. Each experiences the other's emotions, and human and daeva start to grow dangerously close.As they pursue a deadly foe across the arid waste of the Great Salt Plain to the glittering capital of Persepolae, unearthing the secrets of Darius's past along the way, Nazafareen is forced to question his slavery—and her own loyalty to the empire. But with an ancient evil stirring in the north, and a young conqueror sweeping in from the west, the fate of an entire civilization may be at stake…

    It was first published in the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine in October, 1912. The character was so popular that Burroughs continued the series into the 1940s with two dozen sequels.

    ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a beautiful princess, Flicka von Hannover, who lived an enchanted life. She jetted around Europe staging charity events with friends, had married a handsome prince in the most spectacular royal wedding of the 21st century, and should have lived happily ever after. But then she found the handsome prince in bed with a duchess. And then a coffee shop barista. And then her own goddamn secretary. Finally, the beautiful princess had had enough of the cheating prince, and she ran away. The prince didn’t want to let her go. He couldn’t take his throne without her and sent henchmen to take her back to the castle. Her worried royal brother sent people to look for her, too. The prince threatened her. He said that if the princess contacted her brother or any of her friends for help, he would kill her brother and her brother’s new, pregnant wife. So the princess ran to the only person she could trust, a man who was frankly not a handsome prince. Dieter Schwarz had been Flicka’s bodyguard for years. He had protected her from assassins, kidnappers, and high school dates who got too handsy after a few drinks. He was a sharp-witted, sharp-jawed, hard-muscled former Swiss Special Forces operator who had started his own private security firm, Rogue Security, and had no past that he spoke of.No one knew that he had been her first lover and had broken her heart.And he’s the only person who can save her.