Stendhal's first novel is a romance novel set during the Bourbon Restoration and published anonymously in 1827. Octave de Malivert, a taciturn but brilliant young man barely out of the Ecole Polytechnique is attracted to Armance Zohiloff, who shares his feelings. The novel describes how a series of misunderstandings…Read More »
A veteran's comfortable life is upended when long-buried memories of his time in the trenches of World War I come rushing back Charles Rainier's family feared him lost along with so many of Britain's youth during the First World War. But two years after he was reported MIA, he appears in a Liverpool hospital with no…Read More »
This anthology contains the strangest nautical tales. These are not your typical ghost stories; rather, they walk the line between science, the supernatural, and the bizarre. These stories have everything from invisible sea monsters to rabies-infected crews turning the ship into a blood bath, odd twins, and sea-wors…Read More »
London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god; and Gordon is losing the war. Nearly 30 and 'rather moth-eaten already,' a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen 'flatter than any pancake,' Gordon has given up a 'good' job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Always…Read More »
Herbert Curzon is a former cavalry officer who earned fortuitous distinction in the Boer War. He knew little then; he learned nothing since. But the army, desperate for officers in the opening months of WW I, hands Curzon, a new division to train. A few months later his formations dissolve at the Somme, hosed down b…Read More »
The most beautiful and powerful people in the world had bargained with the Devil. They played Russian Roulette with seven footprints to world domination–and lost. They had become subject to the Collector of Infernal Revenue–Satan. The Master Player of games would glut his lust with souls and gain world power throu…Read More »
When George is transported to a far-future Earth, he finds himself caught between two very different species of humanity–the Amphibians, dwellers of the deeps, and the giant Dwellers, rulers of the large island that constitutes the major land mass. With the help of one of the Amphibians, George goes looking for any…Read More »
A portrait of the residents of an English country town in the mid nineteenth century, Cranford relates the adventures of Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two middle-aged spinster sisters striving to live with dignity in reduced circumstances. Through a series of vignettes, Elizabeth Gaskell portrays a community governed…Read More »
The final adventure of Carson Napier among the exotic peoples and beasts of Amtor is the sequel to his fabulous four Venus novels, it is an adventure not to be missed as Napier encounters a new kind of science and a new master of alien deviltry.
Anthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the cynical and manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Antho…Read More »
Nellie March and Jill Banford manage an ailing Berkshire farm at the time of the First World War, a task which is made all the more complicated by the frequent rampages of a local fox through their chicken coop. When a young soldier turns up and begins to wrest control of the farm by asserting his own ideas for its …Read More »
When Hopalong Cassidy's friend, Johnny Nelson, left Bar-20 searching for even greater adventure, and joined the CL Ranch, he found more than he bargained for. He found a hidden valley between Twin Buttes with over 200 of CL cattle rebranded QE. He found a gang of rustlers out to steal the rest of CL's beef. He found…Read More »
When his friend Charles Pitt-Heron vanishes mysteriously, Sir Edward Leithen is at first only mildly concerned. But a series of strange events that follow Pitt-Heron’s disappearance convinces Leithen that he is dealing with a sinister secret society. Their codename is ‘The Power-House’. The authorities are unable to…Read More »
An Egyptian romance of the present time, full of the charm of the land of the Nile and dramatic in plot and setting. The book is a most creditable romance vibrant with human nature and the mystery and fascination of the East. A young Englishman, with an abundant fortune and a passion for Egyptology, visits the villa…Read More »
Set against a backdrop of pre-Renaissance Italy (a larger than life time, with swaggering condottieri, Machiavellian plotting, and high stakes in politics and war) convent-bred orphan Bellarion is sidetracked almost immediately upon setting out on a journey from the monastery at Cigliano to study at Pavia. The adven…Read More »
Tom's second year starts at a private school, but due to an epidemic of fever in the area, all the school's boys are sent home, and Tom is transferred mid-term to Rugby School. On his arrival, the eleven-year-old Tom Brown is looked after by a more experienced classmate, Harry 'Scud' East. Tom's nemesis at Rugby is …Read More »
Described by T.H. White as a study in claustrophobia and fear. Police Inspector Buller is called upon to investigate two mysterious deaths in a Cambridge College. The Inspector is able to solve the mystery, but cannot find sufficient evidence to convict the clever murderer. The murderer and Buller are reunited when …Read More »
In 1634 Urbain Grandier, a handsome and dissolute priest of the parish of Loudun was tried, tortured and burnt at the stake. He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier main…Read More »
Forester came up with the premise for the book while he was at home in the Berkeley hills, minding his two boys while his wife Kathleen was away. The younger of the two, 8 year old George, went on a hunger strike; he refused to eat. Forester made up the stories to tell during dinnertime, but would only tell them if …Read More »
One of Shakespeare's later plays, best described as a tragic-comedy, the play falls into two distinct parts. In the first Leontes is thrown into a jealous rage by his suspicions of his wife Hermione and his best-friend, and imprisons her and orders that her new born daughter be left to perish. The second half is a p…Read More »
Renowned for their wit, erudition and suspense, these stories are each masterfully constructed and represent a high achievement in the ghost genre. The details of horror are almost never explicit, the stories relying on a gentle, bucolic background to emphasise the awfulness of the otherworldly intrusions. James' st…Read More »
Three generations of the Weagle family grow up in and work for boarding houses, inns and hotels. Focus is on two brothers, Myron and Ora, of the second generation. Poetic, ethereal Ora could not wait to escape hotel drudgery, though never too proud to ask plodding Myron for money.
A great cataclysm shakes the world, and much of Great Britain sinks beneath the ocean during a terrifying windstorm that has already flattened most of mankind's dwellings. Deluge is one of the most famous of the English catastrophe novels. Beautifully written and action packed-RKO Radio Pictures even filmed this s…Read More »
In Charlie Chan's fourth outing the 'camel', or death itself according to the Chinese proverb, has 'knelt by the gate' of a glamorous Hollywood actress who is visiting Honolulu. More accurately, she has been murdered-stabbed through the heart-and Inspector Chan must unravel the web of secrets and intrigue that s…Read More »
Lord Dunsany had invented a new mythology, and his fourth book supported this to the end. He skims the cream of old and new romance, giving a concentration of all that is most strange, poetical, grotesque, and glamorous, in his tales of unknown gods, untraveled deserts, ghostly peoples, cities, and temples, and cata…Read More »
John Turner, a young man with a checkered past, has been told he has just one year to live. He decides to use his remaining time in search of three very different men he met in the hospital during the war, each of them in trouble of some kind: a pilot whose wife had betrayed him, a young corporal charged with killin…Read More »
The adventures of Laura Ingalls and her family continue as they leave the prairie and travel in their covered wagon to Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Here they settle in a new home made of sod beside the banks of Plum Creek. Soon Pa builds a wonderful new little house with real glass windows and a hinged door. Laura and h…Read More »
Ian Hamilton's March picks up the action immediately after Churchill's London to Ladysmith chronicles, documenting the eponymous general's 400-mile advance from Bloemfontein to Pretoria. The march saw ten major battles and numerous skirmishes, culminating in the release of prisoners from the camp where Churchill…Read More »
At the Universal Advertising Agency on the Strand, London, a murder is being planned. Three men have been discovered taking bribes and face the grim prospect of the dole queue, unless they can get rid of the person who caught them. Their ringleader, thick-set and vicious Mr Morris, soon discovers that killing is far…Read More »
A Lancia Spyder with its hood down tore past him, cut in cheekily across his bonnet and pulled away, the sexy boom of its twin exhausts echoing back at him. It was a girl driving, a girl with a shocking pink scarf tied round her hair. And if there was one thing that set James Bond really moving, it was being passed …Read More »