doomed to perish in tortures the most severe'Shocking, erotic and violent, The Monk is the story of Ambrosio, torn between his spiritual vows and the temptations of physical pleasure. His internal battle leads to sexual obsession, rape and murder, yet this book also contains knowing parody of its own excesses as well as social comedy. Written by Matthew Lewis when he was only nineteen, it was a ground-breaking novel in the Gothic Horror genre and spawned hundreds of imitators, drawn in by its mixture of bloodshed, sex and scandal.

    In this new edition, the original topics have been brought up to date, added to and elaborated upon: Abbreviations, for example, now includes an essential array of chat room acronyms; Fashion boasts a complete list of British Hairdressers of the Year; and Music features a comprehensive listing of every Top Ten single of the last 40 years.

    Nancy Mitford's most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love satirizes British aristocracy in the twenties and thirties through the amorous adventures of the Radletts, an exuberantly unconventional family closely modelled on Mitford's own.The Radletts of Alconleigh occupy the heights of genteel eccentricity, from terrifying Lord Alconleigh (who, like Mitford's father, used to hunt his children with bloodhounds when foxes were not available), to his gentle wife, Sadie, their wayward daughter Linda, and the other six lively Radlett children. Mitford's wickedly funny prose follows these characters through misguided marriages and dramatic love affairs, as the shadow of World War II begins to close in on their rapidly vanishing world.

    Rose's crisis gives her search the force of immediacy and intimacy; her willingness to face life unsentimentally propels her toward the unexplored border between life and death. As she confronts the dilemma faced by all humankind - how to teach the mind what the heart knows, and the heart what the mind understands - Rose finds that attention to loss becomes the silence of grace, and that the personal becomes the universal. Extraordinarily candid and elegant, Love's Work is radiant as both memoir and philosophy; it provides a new model for introspection.

    He observes the gradual but profound changes wrought on the English countryside by the march of progress.

    Amid bloody and eerie scenes, his daughter is possessed by Tera's soul, and her fate depends upon bringing Tera's mummified body to life.

    By taking one ambitious father and his determination to do everything in his power to produce a child of genius, Pope exposes the true folly of the men of his age and their absurd veneration of the ancients. As this hallowed child grows into a man, it becomes clear that instead of being the scholar his father so desired, he is simply the inevitable offspring of a laughable generation of pseudo-intellectuals and literati.

    Chariton's Callirhoe, subtitled Love Story in Syracuse, is a fast-paced historical romance of the first century CE and the oldest extant novel.

    While engaged in this dreadful task, he loses his way and emerges in the bedroom of Ellie, the young daughter of the house who mistakes him for a thief. He runs away, and, hot and bothered, he slips into a cooling stream, falls fast asleep, and becomes a water baby.In this new life, he meets all sorts of aquatic creatures, including an engaging old lobster, other water babies, and at last reaches St Branden's Isle where he encounters the fierce Mrs Bedonbyasyoudid and the motherly Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. After a long and arduous quest to the Other-end-of-Nowhere young Tom achieves his heart's desire.

    There are the Ruttledges, who came from London in search of a different life on the edge of the village lake; John Quinn, who will stop at nothing to ensure a flow of women through his life; Jimmy Joe McKiernan, head of the local IRA as well as town auctioneer and undertaker; the gentle Jamesie and his wife, Mary, who have never left the lake and who know about everything that ever stirred or moved there; Patrick Ryan, the builder who never quite finishes what he starts; Bill Evans, the farmhand whose orphaned childhood was marked with state-sanctioned cruelties and whose adulthood is marked by the scars; and the wealthiest man in town, known as the Shah. A year in the lives of these and other characters unfolds through the richly observed rituals of work and play, of religious observance and annual festivals, and the details of the changing seasons, of the cycles of birth and death. With deceptive simplicity and eloquence, the author reveals the fundamental workings of human nature as it encounters the extraordinary trials and pleasures, terrors and beauty, of ordinary life.By the Lake is John McGahern’s most ambitious, generous, and superbly realized novel yet.(above copied from amazon.com)

    Jeremy is the son-in-law of Bernard and June Tremaine, whose union and estrangement began almost simultaneously. Seeking to comprehend how their deep love could be defeated by ideological differences Bernard and June cannot reconcile, Jeremy undertakes writing June's memoirs, only to be led back again and again to one terrifying encouner forty years earlier--a moment that, for June, was as devastating and irreversible in its consequences as the changes sweeping Europe in Jeremy's own time. In a finely crafted, compelling examination of evil and grace, Ian McEwan weaves the sinister reality of civiliation's darkest moods--its black dogs--with the tensions that both create love and destroy it.

    Her over-the-top drama was one of the most popular novels of the mid-1800s and provides an interesting portrayal of both class- and gender issues as they intersect within the domestic sphere.

    Ellen Wood played upon the anxieties of the Victorian middle classes who feared a breakdown of the social order as divorce became more readily available and promiscuity threatened the sanctity of the family. In her novel the simple act of hiring a governess raises the spectres of murder, disguise, and adultery. Her sensation novel was devoured by readers from the Prince of Wales to Joseph Conrad and continued to fascinate This edition returns for the first time to the racy, slang-ridden narrative of the first edition, rather than the subsequent stylistically 'improved' versions hitherto reproduced by modern editors.

    The title character is a papier mache bird that shares the front room of an apartment with a collection of bowling trophies that some time earlier were stolen from the home of the Logan brothers. The human tenants of this apartment are John and Pat, who have just returned from seeing a Greta Garbo movie in a local movie theater. Their neighbors are Bob and Constance, a married couple going through some rough times in their relationship. Because of their failing relationship, Bob becomes depressed. Meanwhile the Logan brothers are looking for their stolen trophies. The brothers have turned their happy life of bowling into a life of vengeance...

    But the harsh land near Christchurch where they settle threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in a creek bed, he hides the discovery from both his wife and mother, and becomes obsessed with the riches awaiting him deep in the earth. Abandoning his farm and family, he sets off alone for the new goldfields over the Southern Alps, a moral wilderness where many others, under the seductive dreams of the "colour," rush to their destinies and doom.