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FICTION / Classics

  • Youth
    Author:
    Asimov, Isaac
    Summary:

    Two young boys find some very unusual new pets in this short story from a Grand Master of Science Fiction. Tagging along while his astronomer father visits an industrialist at his vast estate, young Slim is lucky enough to make fast...
  • Youth
    Author:
    Tolstoy, Leo
    Summary:

    The third and final novel in Tolstoy's Autobiographical Trilogy, following Childhood and Boyhood. In Youth, Leo Tolstoy's protagonist-now a fervent sixteen-year-old-eagerly prepares to strike out on his own. And as he does so...
  • Wives and daughters
    Author:
    Gaskell, Elizabeth
    Summary:

    Secrets and scandals steer a young woman's life as she comes of age and finds love in Victorian England. Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson has grown up under the watchful eye of her widowed father, the doctor Mr. Gibson. After one of...
  • Vanity fair
    Author:
    Thackeray, William Makepeace
    Summary:

    This classic story of two nineteenth-century social climbers is the basis for countless films and TV series, and one of the UK's "Best-Loved Novels." Before the Real Housewives, there were Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley. Ruthless and...
  • Under western eyes
    Author:
    Conrad, Joseph
    Summary:

    This is the story of a young man unwittingly caught in the political turmoil of pre-revolutionary czarist Russia. When a bomb kills a hated Russian minister of police, along with several innocent bystanders, a young student named...
  • The wayward bus
    Author:
    Steinbeck, John
    Summary:

    In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California's back roads,...
  • The virgin and the gypsy
    Author:
    Lawrence, D. H.
    Summary:

    In a claustrophobic household, oppressed by her blind, toad-like grandmother and a cowardly, conventional father, Yvette's exuberance seems doomed to suppression. But meeting a gypsy awakens unfamiliar emotions in her, making her...
  • The story of classic crime in 100 books
    Author:
    Edwards, Martin
    Summary:

    This book tells the story of crime fiction published during the first half of the twentieth century. The diversity of this much-loved genre is breathtaking, and so much greater than many critics have suggested. To illustrate this, the...
  • The sleeper awakes
    Author:
    Wells, H. G.
    Summary:

    This frighteningly prophetic tale from the progenitor of modern science fiction remains as powerful today as when it was written-more than a century ago. Firebrand activist Graham falls into a drug-induced sleep in 1897 London-and is...
  • The long arm of the law
    Author:
    Summary:

    In classic British crime fiction, dazzling detective work is often the province of a brilliant amateur - whereas the humble police detective cuts a hapless figure. The twelve stories collected here strike a blow for the professionals,...
  • The last best friend
    Author:
    Sims, George
    Summary:

    "The small man standing on the narrow ledge stared fixedly forward with eyes made wide and blank by terror." At 2pm on a Monday in 1966, Ned Balfour wakes in Corsica beside a beautiful woman. In the same instant, back in London, fellow...
  • The incredible crime
    Author:
    Austen-Leigh, Lois
    Summary:

    Prince's College, Cambridge, is a peaceful and scholarly community, enlivened by Prudence Pinsent, the Master's daughter. Spirited, beautiful, and thoroughly unconventional, Prudence is a remarkable young woman. One fine...
  • The idol of Paris
    Author:
    Bernhardt, Sarah
    Summary:

    Fifteen-year-old Esperance Darbois, the only daughter of philosophy professor François Darbois, is determined to become an actor, though her family insists it will sully their reputation and harm her marriage prospects.
  • The defiant agents
    Author:
    Norton, Andre
    Summary:

    A battle for survival begins and ends in the human mind in the thrilling novel from the Time Traders series. The latest gambit by the Western powers to outmaneuver the Russians was Operation Cochise-which launched Travis Fox and his...
  • The dead shall be raised and the murder of a quack
    Author:
    Bellairs, George
    Summary:

    With an Introduction by Martin Edwards Two classic cases featuring Detective Inspector Littlejohn. In the winter of 1940, the Home Guard unearth a skeleton on the moor above the busy town of Hatterworth. Twenty-three years earlier, the...
  • The country of the pointed firs
    Author:
    Jewett, Sarah Orne
    Summary:

    A classic collection of American short stories about the lives of the late-nineteenth-century citizens of Maine. Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece, The Country of Pointed Firs is a short story sequence that celebrates what the author...
  • The complete cosmicomics
    Author:
    Calvino, Italo
    Summary:

    Italo Calvino's beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells the...
  • The Charles Dickens collection volume one : Oliver Twist, Great expectations, and Bleak house
    Author:
    Dickens, Charles
    Summary:

    Three of Dickens's most compelling orphan protagonists'Oliver Twist, Pip, and Esther Summerson'in three of his greatest novels. Perhaps no writer in the English language is more closely associated with orphaned characters than Charles...
  • The blackboard jungle
    Author:
    Hunter, Evan
    Summary:

    The "shocking" and "suspense-packed" bestseller about one teacher's stand against student violence, and the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film (The New York Times Book Review). After serving his country...
  • Tell me how long the train's been gone : a novel
    Author:
    Baldwin, James
    Summary:

    Between Leo Proudhammer's childhood and his arrival into the world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. There are love affairs with both a man and a woman. And everywhere exists the anguish of being black...

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