Feeling helpless and frustrated, his youngest daughter, Agnes, applies for a job as a governess to the children of a wealthy, upper-class, English family.Ecstatic at the thought that she has finally gained control and freedom over her own life, Agnes arrives at the Bloomfield mansion armed with confidence and purpose. The cruelty with which the family treat her however, slowly but surely strips the heroine of all dignity and belief in humanity.A tale of female bravery in the face of isolation and subjugation, Agnes Grey is a masterpiece claimed by Irish writer, George Moore, to be possessed of all the qualities and style of a Jane Austen title. Its simple prosaic style propels the narrative forward in a gentle yet rhythmic manner which continuously leaves the listener wanting to know more.Anne Brontë, the somewhat lesser known sister, was in fact the first to finish and publish Agnes Grey under the pseudonym of Acton Bell. Charlotte and Emily followed shortly after with Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.As Anne passed away from what is now known to be pulmonary tuberculosis at the age of just 29, she only published one further title; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. As feminist in nature as Agnes Grey, Anne's brave voice resonates and permeates during one of the most prejudiced and patriarchal times of English history.

    And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.This edition also contains three stories: 'House of Flowers', 'A Diamond Guitar' and 'A Christmas Memory'.

    This novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events also embodies in its characters the shifts in England's class structures at the beginning of the twentieth century.

    The notebook containing the novel was rediscovered by her in adult life and sent by a friend to Frank Swinnerton, the English novelist, critic, editor and essayist. Published in 1919 by Chatto and Windus, with its original misspellings and an arch introduction by “Peter Pan” author J. M. Barrie, it was an immediate bestseller. Its child's view of high society (dukes and earls having ‘levies’ and residing in the ‘Crystall Pallace’) and its heavily romantic plot make it an engaging and enduring popular work. Source: jrank.org

    Its charm lies not in its plot, but rather in its wise and humane look at man's constant search for happiness. The text is based on the second edition as Samuel Johnson revised it.

    His fiction is an acknowledged influence on entire generations of writers, ranging from H.P. Lovecraft to James Branch Cabell, from Clark Ashton Smith to Lin Carter. Although many of his most famous stories are longer in length, the miniature portraits of Fifty-One Tales (originally published in 1915 and sometimes reprinted under the title The Food of Death) are an ideal introduction to Dunsany. Nowhere is the jewel-like quality of his prose more evident than in the short tales, seminal works which runs the gamut from whimsy to fantasy to social satire.CONTENTS:"The Assignation" "Charon" "The Death of Pan" "The Sphinx at Gizeh" "The Hen" "Wind and Fog" "The Raft Builders" "The Workman" "The Guest" "Death and Odysseus" "Death and the Orange" "The Prayer of the Flowers" "Time and the Tradesman" "The Little City" "The Unpasturable Fields" "The Worm and the Angel" "The Songless Country" "The Latest Thing" "The Demagogue and the Demi-Monde" "The Giant Poppy" "Roses" "The Man with the Golden Ear-rings" "The Dream of King Karna-Vootra" "The Storm" "A Mistaken Identity" "The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise" "Alone the Immortals" "A Moral Little Tale" "The Return of Song" "Spring in Town" "How the Enemy Came to Thlūnrāna" "A Losing Game" "Taking Up Piccadilly" "After the Fire" "The City" "The Food of Death" "The Lonely Idol" "The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)" "The Reward" "The Trouble in Leafy Green Street" "Furrow-Maker" "Lobster Salad" "The Return of the Exiles" "Nature and Time" "The Song of the Blackbird" "The Messengers" "The Three Tall Sons" "Compromise" "What We Have Come To" "The Tomb of Pan" "The Poet Speaks With Earth" (English version only) "The Mist" (American version only)

    Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.In this third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, we again meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Here, too, we are introduced to Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction. Wickedly barbed in its wit, uncanny in its seismographic recording of human emotions and social currents, this saga stands as an unsurpassed rendering of England's finest yet most costly hour.Includes these novels:The Valley of BonesThe Soldier's ArtThe Military Philosophers"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

    Hilton's classic story of an English schoolmaster.Mr. Chipping, the classics master at Brookfield School since 1870, takes readers on a beguiling journey through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sometimes Chips, as he is affectionately known, is an old man who dreams by the fire; then he's a difficult young taskmaster schooling his students, or a middle-aged man encountering the lovely Katherine, whose "new woman" opinions work far-reaching changes in him. As succeeding generations of boys march onward through Chips' mind, Hilton's narrative remains masterful. He seamlessly interweaves a poignant love story with the jokes and eccentricities of English public school life, while also chronicling a new, uncertain world full of conflict and upheaval that extends far beyond the turrets of Brookfield.

    Victor becomes the surrogate son and companion of a woman named Liza, who renames him “Jim” and depends on him for any news about the world outside their door. Raised in these odd yet touching circumstances, Jim is never quite sure of Liza’s relationship to the Captain, who is often away on mysterious errands. It is not until Jim reaches manhood that he confronts the Captain and learns the shocking truth about the man, his allegiances, and the nature of love. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by John Auchard.

    But a still greater horror will face the recluse - more inexorable, merciless and awful than any creature that can be fought or killed.A classic of the first water - H. P. Lovecraft

    Noah disembarks from his ark but he and his Voyage are not forgotten: they are revisited in on other centuries and other climes - by a Victorian spinster mourning her father, by an American astronaut on an obsessive personal mission. We journey to the Titanic, to the Amazon, to the raft of the Medusa, and to an ecclesiastical court in medieval France where a bizarre case is about to begin...This is no ordinary history, but something stranger, a challenge and a delight for the reader's imagination. Ambitious yet accessible, witty and playfully serious, this is the work of a brilliant novelist.

    A grand miasma of doom and foreboding weaves over the sterile rituals of the castle. Villainous Steerpike seeks to exploit the gaps between the formal rituals and the emotional needs of the ruling family for his own profit.

    In a satanic bargain, Melmoth exchanges his soul for immortality. The story of his tortured wanderings through the centuries is pieced together through those who have been implored by Melmoth to take over his pact with the devil. Influenced by the Gothic romances of the late 18th century, Maturin's diabolic tale raised the genre to a new and macabre pitch. Its many admirers include Poe, Balzac, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire.

    The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant Square's "female population."Ann Eliza gives Evelina a clock for her birthday. The clock leads the sisters to become involved with Herbert Ramy, owner of "the queerest little store you ever laid eyes on." Soon Ramy is a regular guest of the Bunner sisters, who realize that their "treadmill routine," once so comfortable, is now "intolerably monotonous."

    'Two on a Tower' is Hardy's ninth novel and contains perhaps his most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide, and also the fullest expression of his fascination with astronomy and science. This story of passion and sacrifice begins when Lady Viviette Constantine discovers the handsome young astronomer Swithin St Cleeve on the lonely tower on her estate.Starring Maggie O'Neill as Lady Constantine, Blake Ritson as Swithin St Cleeve, Conrad Nelson as Parson Torkingham and with Amy Humphreys, Stephen Tomlin, Pauline Jefferson, Richard Heap and Carter Dowland. Directed by Stefan Escreet.