After years of fierce battle, the Emperor Charlemagne's army is finally on the brink of victory over the Saracens in Spain. Having proposed his stepfather Ganelon for the perilous task of serving as Charlemagne's envoy in the negotiations over the surrender of the Saracen king Marsile, Count Roland gets a taste of his own medicine when, with peace secured, Ganelon suggests that Roland should lead the rearguard of the army on the difficult return journey over the mountain passes to France. Yet Marsile's forces are massing, and Roland is unaware of just how deep Ganelon's treachery runs. Probably written ... |
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If I told you that I'd killed a man with a glance, would you wait to hear the rest? The why, the how, what happened next? Monster. Man-hater. Murderess. Forget everything you've been told about Medusa. Internationally bestselling author Jessie Burton flips the script in this astonishing retelling of Greek myth, illuminating the woman behind the legend at last. Exiled to a far-flung island after being abused by powerful Gods, Medusa has little company other than the snakes that adorn her head instead of hair. Haunted by the memories of a life before everything was stolen from her, she has no choice but to make ... |
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In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with his notes and extracts from his letters to relatives and associates. Highly valuable both as a detailed depiction of the Tsarist system of penal servitude and as an insight into Chekhov’s motivations and objectives for visiting ... |
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Fyodor Dostoevsky's later novels, The Adolescent occupies a very special place: published three years after The Devils and five years before his final masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, the novel charts the story of nineteen-year-old Arkady - the illegitimate son of the landowner Versilov and the maid Sofia Andreyevna - as he struggles to find his place in society and become a Rothschild against the background of 1870s Russia, a nation still tethered to its old systems and values but shaken up by the new ideological currents of socialism and nihilism. Both a Bildungsroman and a novel of ideas, dealing with themes ... |
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When the world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with his neighbour, the poet Vladimir Lensky. Coldly rejecting the amorous advances of Tatyana and cynically courting her sister Olga - Lensky's fiancee - Onegin finds himself dragged into a tragedy of his own making. Eugene Onegin - presented here in a sparkling translation by Roger Clarke, along with extensive notes and commentary - was the founding text of modern Russian literature, marking a clean break from the high-flown classical style of its ... |
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Old Arkhip sits every day by the roots of a wizened, hunchbacked willow, fishing and exchanging whispered stories with the ancient tree. One of these takes Arkhip three decades back in time, to a quiet day in early spring when a strange encounter shook him momentarily from the rural bliss in which he lived, catapulting him into a world of crime, corruption, violence and murder. A quintessential example of Chekhov's artistry, The Willow is here accompanied by thirty-two other short stories - some of them never or rarely translated into English - which are representative of the three main phases of the author’s ... |
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Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfill his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that ... |
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer charts the escapades of a thirteen-year-old boy growing up on the banks of the Mississippi. Testing the patience of his aunt Polly, the bold and sharp-witted Tom Sawyer frequently skips school in search of excitement, and the scrapes he gets into with his friend Huckleberry Finn range from innocent japes to more serious events such as the witnessing of a murder. One of the most popular and influential American novels, Mark Twain's masterpiece is at the same time a highly entertaining romp which celebrates youth and freedom and a more profound investigation of his times, touching on ... |
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Controversial, scandalous, erudite and funny, Ulysses is undisputedly a landmark of twentieth-century modernism. It charts one day - 16th June 1904 - in the lives of three inhabitants of Dublin: the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, the artist Stephen Dedalus and Bloom's wife Molly. Their peregrinations, thoughts and encounters form the basis of the narrative, which becomes a celebration of all human experience through the lives of specific individuals in a specific place at a specific time. Ulysses is both an experimental novel and a book intimately concerned with the events of modern life. A lively repository of ... |
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When Buck is smuggled from his beloved home in the Santa Clara Valley and forced to work as a sled-dog in the frozen wilderness of the Yukon, he must forget the long, lazy Californian days and face a life of constant toil and danger under the whip of cruel or inept masters, where survival itself must be fought for. But with his primal instincts stirred, how long can Buck resist the call of the wild? Set at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, The Call of the Wild is one of the greatest evocations of the natural world, and perhaps the best example of London's famously urgent and vivid style. Contains: Extra material ... |
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The boy who wouldn't grow up, Peter Pan has the power of flight and lives on a magical island. But he is fascinated by Mary Darling's bedtime stories for her children and makes covert night-time visits to their Bloomsbury home. One evening he loses his shadow, and after Mary's daughter Wendy helps him reattach it, he invites her to fly away with him on an extraordinary adventure. In addition to the famous 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, which tells the familiar adventures of Peter Pan in Neverland and popularized the characters of Tinkerbell and Captain Hook, this volume contains the celebrated stage version on ... |
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A Victorian scientist and inventor creates a machine for propelling himself through time, and voyages to the year AD 802701, where he discovers a race of humanoids called the Eloi. Their gently indolent way of life, set in a decaying cityscape, leads the scientist to believe that they are the remnants of a once great civilization. He is forced to revise this assessment when he comes across the cave dwellings of threatening ape-like creatures known as Morlocks, whose dark underground world he must explore to discover the terrible secrets of this fractured society, and the means of getting back to his own time. A biting ... |
