Headstrong David Balfour, orphaned at seventeen, sets out from the Scottish lowlands to seek his fortune in Edinburgh and finds himself abducted on the orders of his wealthy Uncle Ebenezer. He's carried away to sea to be sold into slavery in the Carolinas, where he secures a timely alliance with Jacobite adventurer Alan Breck, and together they make an epic escape across the western Highlands. Inspired by real events, Kidnapped is a swashbuckling adventure of bizarre encounters, political assassination and wild carousings with Robert Louis Stevenson's unique counterpoint of low morals and high comedy threaded ... |
|
|
After losing his mother at a very young age, the narrator is thrust from his comfortable, middle-class environment, afforded by his distant but aristocratic father, into the wider world. His passion for music begins in Georgia's all-black church community and takes him from New York, where he plays ragtime for a rich white gentleman, to the South, where he witnesses lynchings and out of fear gives up his passion, as well as his race, to pass for white. Relevant to this day, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is an unflinching account of black experience in America. James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an ... |
|
|
Mr Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that misfortune will follow him - and so it has. Meaning only to avoid punishment, he causes the death of his father and the dissolution of his family. Wanting simply to flirt with a beautiful woman, he ends up marrying her. But in spite of endless setbacks, Mr Biswas is determined to achieve independence, and so he begins the gruelling struggle to buy a home of his own. Heart-rending and darkly comic, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels, a classic that evokes a man's quest for autonomy ... |
|
|
Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul's strikingly original responses to India's paralyzing caste system, its acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. This may be the most ... |
|
|
A Book Lover's Guide to the Zodiac marries astrology and literature by connecting both writers and fictional characters to the twelve different star signs and their particular traits. Astrology and literature have so much in common: our star signs help us to understand ourselves, our motivations and our behaviour, whilst reading enables us to make sense of the world, our own characters and those around us. Read how the passionate and overly idealistic Madame Bovary from Flaubert's masterpiece exhibits all the traits of a Gemini, whilst the unconventional Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll, with his groundbreaking ... |
|
|
Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is the source of Zen Buddhism, and is probably the most broadly influential spiritual text in human history. Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, cloth-bound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is translated and introduced by David Hinton. Fluent in ancient Chinese and an acclaimed poet, he skilfully reveals how remarkably current and even innovative this text is after 2500 years. According to legend, Lao Tzu left China at ... |
|
|
Complete and unabridged. Three Men in a Boat remains one of the best-loved and most entertaining comic novels. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, unabridged, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features illustrations by A. Frederics and an afterword by David Stuart Davies. Join our young heroes J., George and Harris (not forgetting Montmorency, the mischievous, irascible fox terrier) as they take a boating holiday along the Thames. Their aim is to escape the ... |
|
|
In Kafka 's powerful and disturbing novel, an innocent man is arrested and repeatedly interrogated for a crime that is never ever explained. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is translated from German by Douglas Scott and Chris Waller, and features an afterword by David Stuart Davies. On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, a young bank official named Joseph K is arrested although he has done nothing wrong and is never ... |
|
|
A dead body is dredged from the Thames, presumed to be the son of wealthy miser John Harmon, in Charles Dickens final novel, "Our Mutual Friend". Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library - a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition has an introduction by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley and original illustrations by Marcus Stone. John Harmon made his fortune collecting "dust", and on his death his estranged son is due to inherit his wealth on the condition that ... |
|
|
Complete and unabridged. A pocket sized book - 10 x 15.5 cm. ... William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" includes some of the visionary poet's finest and best-loved poems such as "The Lamb", "The Chimney-Sweeper" and "The Tiger". Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition has a foreword by Peter Harness. Blake's work is instantly recognizable by its flamboyance and ... |
|
|
Complete and unabridged. A pocket sized book - 10 x 15.5 cm. ... This stunning Macmillan Collector's Library edition of Demelza features an afterword by novelist Liz Fenwick. Demelza Carne, the impoverished miner's daughter rescued from a fairground rabble, is now Ross Poldark's wife. But events are set to test their marriage and their love... Demelza's efforts to adapt to the ways of the gentry - and of her husband - bring her confusion and heartache, despite her joy at the birth of their first child. Meanwhile, Ross begins a bitter struggle for the rights of the mining communities, sowing the seed of ... |
|
|
Complete and unabridged. A pocket sized book - 10 x 15.5 cm. ... Dorian Gray is young, arrogant, and devastatingly handsome. Confronted by his beauty in the form of a portrait, and struck by the terrible realization that he will age, Dorian wishes to retain his charms forever and finds his desire granted. He abandons himself to a life of hedonism, vice and murder, yet his face remains unmarked by his evil. But, hidden in his attic, the painting ages and corrupts, and one day Dorian must stand face to face with the man he has become. A perfect depiction of fin-de-siècle decadence, Oscar Wilde's only novel ... |
