After living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. Everything else is lost. Waiting in Ipswich is Silvana's husband Janusz, who has not seen his wife and son for six years. He has found his family a house and works hard planting a proper English garden to welcome them. But the six years apart have changed them all. To make a real home, Silvana and Janusz will have to come to terms with what happened during the war, accept that each is different, and allow their beloved but wild son Aurek to be who he truly is.

    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 battle he'd face there would make or break the club - or him.David Peace's extraordinarily inventive novel tells the story of a world characterised by fear of failure and hunger for success set in the bleak heart of the 1970s.

    Yet he always seems to be troubled by disagreeable tradesmen, impertinent young office clerks and wayward friends, not to mention his devil-may-care son Lupin with his unsuitable choice of bride. Try as he might, he cannot avoid life's embarrassing mishaps. In the bumbling, absurd, yet ultimately endearing figure of Pooter, the Grossmiths created an immortal comic character and a superb satire on the snobberies of middle-class suburbia - one which also sends up late Victorian crazes for spiritualism and bicycling, as well as the fashion for publishing diaries by anybody and everybody.

    Times are harsh, and Barbara's bank account has seen better days. Stumped for ideas, Barbara draws inspiration from fellow residents of her quaint English village, writing a revealing novel that features the townsfolk as characters. The smashing bestseller is published under the pseudonym John Smith, which is a good thing because villagers recognize the truth. But what really turns her world around is when events in real life start mimicking events in the book. Funny, charming, and insightful, this novel reveals what happens when people see themselves through someone else's eyes.

    Never out of print since its original publication in 1928, when it won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Sassoon's reminiscences about childhood and the beginning of World War I are channeled through young George Sherston, whose life of local cricket tournaments and fox-hunts falls apart as war approaches and he joins up to fight. Sassoon's first novel, though rife with comic characters and a jaunty sense of storytelling, presents his own loss of innocence and the destruction of the country he knew and loved.Memoirs Of A Fox-Hunting Man Siegfried Sassoon Early Days - The Flower Show Match - A Fresh Start - A Day With the Potford - At the Rectory - The Colonel's Cup - Denis Milden as Master -Migration of the Midlands - In the Army - At the front Originally published in 1928.

    Set in Shropshire in the 1800s, it is alive with the many moods of Nature, benevolent and violent and the many moods -- equally benevolent and violent -- of the people making lives there. Prue Sarn is an unlikely heroine, born with a facial disfiguration which the Fates have dictated will deny her love. But Prue has strength far beyond her handicap, and this woman, suspected of witchcraft by her fellow townspeople, rises above them all through an all-encompassing sweetness of spirit. Precious Bane is also the story of Gideon, Prue's doomed brother, equally strong-willed, but with other motives. Determined to defeat the poverty of their farm, he devotes all his energies to making money. His only diversion from this ambition, he abandons her for the stronger drive of his money lust. And finally, it is the story of Kester Woodseaves, whose steady love for all created things leads him to resist people's cruelty toward nature and each other, and whose love for Prue Sarn enables him to discern her natural loveliness beneath her blighted appearance. Rebecca West, a contemporary of Mary Webb, called her, simply, "a genius," and G. K. Chesterton, another contemporary, asserted: "the light in the stories . . . is a light not shining on the things but through them." Critic Hilda Addison summed up Precious Bane: "The book opens with one of those simple sentences which haunt the mind until the curiosity has been satisfied . . . It strikes a note which never fails throughout; it opens with a beauty which is justified to the last sentence." When the book was first published in 1926 in America, the New York Times Book Review predicted: " on some bookshelves, we feel sure, Precious Bane will find almost a hallowed place."

    This classic work of post-war fiction was made into a magnificent BBC television series starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.

    A potter's assistant by day and dress lodger by night, Gustine sells herself for necessity in a rented gown, scrimping to feed and protect her only love: her fragile baby boy. She holds a glimmer of hope after meeting Dr. Henry Chiver, a prisoner of his own dark past. But in a world where suspicion of medicine runs rampant like a fever, these two lost souls will become irrevocably linked, as each crosses lines between rich and destitute, decorum and abandon, damnation and salvation. By turns tender and horrifying, The Dress Lodger is a captivating historical thriller charged with a distinctly modern voice. . . .

    At the request of Lord Emsworth, Uncle Fred journeys to Blandings Castle to steal the Empress of Blandings before the ill-tempered, egg-throwing Duke of Dunstable can lay claim to her. Disguised as the eminent nerve specialist Sir Roderick Glossop, and with his distressed nephew Pongo in tow, Uncle Fred must not only steal a pig but also reunite a young couple and diagnose various members of the upper class with imaginary mental illnesses, all before his domineering wife realizes he’s escaped their country estate.

    You don't need to give Arthur more than one chance to do the Government or trick the foreman.And when the day's work is over, Arthur is off to the pubs, raring for adventure. He is a warrior of the bottle and the bedroom - his slogan is 'If it's going, it's for me' - for his aim is to cheat the world before it can cheat him. And never is the battle more fiercely joined than on Saturday night.But Sunday morning is the time of reckoning, the time for facing up to life - the time, too, you run the risk of getting hooked!Arthur is no exception.

    This sudden solitude compels Joan to assess her life for the first time ever and face up to many of the truths about herself. Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her.

    Now, back home in the Yorkshire moors, duty-bound to a blind father and an alcoholic brother, an ambitious Charlotte refuses to sink into hopelessness. With her sisters, Emily and Anne, Charlotte conceives a plan to earn money and pursue a dream: The Brontës will publish. In childhood the Brontë children created fantastical imaginary worlds; now the sisters craft novels quite unlike anything written before. Transforming her loneliness and personal sorrow into a triumph of literary art, Charlotte pens her 1847 masterpiece, Jane Eyre.Charlotte’s novel becomes an overwhelming literary success, catapulting the shy and awkward young woman into the spotlight of London’s fashionable literary scene—and into the arms of her new publisher, George Smith, an irresistibly handsome young man whose interest in his fiercely intelligent and spirited new author seems to go beyond professional duty. But just as life begins to hold new promise, unspeakable tragedy descends on the Brontë household, throwing London and George into the background and leaving Charlotte to fear that the only romance she will ever find is at the tip of her pen. But another man waits in the Brontës’ Haworth parsonage—the quiet but determined curate Arthur Nicholls. After secretly pining for Charlotte since he first came to work for her father, Arthur suddenly reveals his heart to her.Romancing Miss Brontë is a fascinating portrayal of an extraordinary woman whose life and work articulated our deepest human longing: to love and be loved in return.

    Stella Rodney is one of those who chose to stay. But for her, the sense of impending catastrophe becomes acutely personal when she discovers that her lover, Robert, is suspected of selling secrets to the enemy, and that the man who is following him wants Stella herself as the price of his silence. Caught between these two men, not sure whom to believe, Stella finds her world crumbling as she learns how little we can truly know of those around us.

    On the way their ship is set upon by pirates, and the children are accidentally transferred to the pirate vessel. Jonsen, the well-meaning pirate captain, doesn't know how to dispose of his new cargo, while the children adjust with surprising ease to their new life. As this strange company drifts around the Caribbean, events turn more frightening and the pirates find themselves increasingly incriminated by the children's fates. The most shocking betrayal, however, will take place only after the return to civilization.The swift, almost hallucinatory action of Hughes's novel, together with its provocative insight into the psychology of children, made it a best seller when it was first published in 1929 and has since established it as a classic of twentieth-century literature - an unequaled exploration of the nature, and limits, of innocence.