-
The Courtesan By Alexandra curry
By Alexandra curry
The year is 1881, the era of China’s humiliation at the hands of imperialist Europe. Seven-year-old Sai Jinhua is left alone and unprotected, her life transformed after her mandarin father’s summary execution for the crime of speaking the truth.
-
End This Depression Now!
By Paul Krugman
The Great Recession is more than four years old – and counting. Yet, as Nobel Prize winning author Paul Krugman argues in this powerful new book, “Nations rich in resources, talent, and knowledge – all the ingredients for prosperity and a decent standard of living for all – remain in a state of intense pain.”
- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (26 Feb. 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0393345084
- ISBN-13: 978-0393345087
- Product Dimensions: 14.2 x 2 x 20.8 cm
-
Moby Dick
By Herman Melville
Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab’s quest to avenge the whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.
But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab’s appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each.
Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education:
-
The Last of the Mohicans By James Fenimore Cooper
By James Fenimore Cooper
It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the sinister ‘Indian runner’, they find help in the person of Hawkeye, the white woodsman, and his companions, the Mohican Chingachgook and Uncas, his son, the last of his tribe.
-
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
By Jane Austen
‘Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security’. Jane Austen’s sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggle of two very different sisters to achieve respectability.
Sense and Sensibility is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two qualities. Elinor’s character is one of Augustan detachment, while Marianne, a fervent disciple of the Romantic Age, learns to curb her passionate nature in the interests of survival.
- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Wordsworth Editions; Reprint edition (5 May 1992)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9781853260162
- ISBN-13: 978-1853260162
- ASIN: 1853260169
- Product Dimensions: 12.7 x 2 x 19.6 cm
-
Pride and Prejudice By Jane Austen
By Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice, which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim – that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. In this she is mocked by her cynical and indolent husband.
With its wit, its social precision and, above all, its irresistible heroine, Pride and Prejudice has proved one of the most enduringly popular novels in the English language.
-
Oliver Twist By Charles Dickens
By Charles Dickens
Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers. With Oliver Twist his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The novel contains many classic Dickensian themes – grinding poverty, desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in the face of great adversity.
Oliver Twist features some of the author’s most enduring characters, such as Oliver himself (who dares to ask for more), the tyrannical Bumble, the diabolical Fagin, the menacing Bill Sikes, Nancy and ‘the Artful Dodger’.
For any reader wishing to delve into the works of the great Victorian literary colossus, Oliver Twist is, without doubt, an essential title.
- Paperback: 374 pages
- Publisher: Wordsworth Editions (2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1853260126
- ISBN-13: 978-1853260124
- Product Dimensions: 12.7 x 1.9 x 19.7 cm
-
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
By Mark Twain
In his introduction, E.L. Doctorow rightly points out that “ever since its publication in 1876, children have been able to readThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer with a sense of recognition for the feelings of childhood truly rendered: how Tom finds solace for his unjust treatment at the hands of Aunt Polly by dreaming of running away; or how he loves Becky Thatcher, the sort of simpering little blond girl all boys love, and how he does the absolutely right thing in lying and taking her punishment in school to protect her; or how he and his friends pretend to be pirates or the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest, accurately interrupting their scenarios with arguments about who plays what part and what everyone must say and how they must fight and when they must die.” Tom Sawyer is surely among America’s undisputed contributions to the world’s cast of unforgettable characters.
-
Treasure Island By Robert Louis Stevenson
One of the best-loved adventure stories ever written, Treasure Island’s timeless tale of pirates, lost treasure maps, mutiny and derring-do has appealed to generations of readers ever since Robert Louis Stevenson penned it in 1881 with the claim: “If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day.” But more than just a children’s classic, the novel is considered to be one of the greatest feats of storytelling in the English language, with characters such as the unforgettable Long John Silver becoming part of the cultural consciousness. Treasure Island is a coming-of-age story that will captivate both adults and children for as long as stories are told.
-
The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the “roaring twenties”, and a devastating expose of the “Jazz Age”.
-
Robinson Crusoe By Daniel Defoe
By Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe was first published in 1719 and is sometimes considered to be the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character-a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela, encountering Native Americans, captives, and mutineers before being rescued.
-
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain
All American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”” Ernest Hemingway To escape from his violent and drunken father, a 13-year-old boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Huckleberry Finn, fakes his own death and floats away on a raft down the Mississippi with Jim, a runaway slave.