Our Book Catalog (page 4)

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Bellarion Rafael Sabatini

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 Brown at Rugby Thomas Hughes

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 »
Darkness at Pemberley T. H. White

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 »
The Devils of Loudun Aldous Huxley

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 »
Poo-Poo and the Dragons C. S. Forester

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 »
The Winter's Tale William Shakespeare

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 »
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary M. R. James

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 »
Work of Art Sinclair Lewis

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.
Deluge S. Fowler Wright

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 »
The Black Camel Earl Derr Biggers

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 »
A Dreamer's Tales Lord Dunsany

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 »
The Chequer Board Nevil Shute

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 »
On the Banks of Plum Creek Laura Ingalls Wilder

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 Winston S. Churchill

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 »
Plain Murder C. S. Forester

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 »
On Her Majesty's Secret Service Ian Fleming

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 »
Home of the Gentry Ivan Turgenev

Coming back to the nest of his family home in Russia after years of fruitless endeavours away from his roots, Lavretsky decides to turn his back on the vacuous salons of Paris and his frivolous and unfaithful wife Varvara Pavlovna. On his return he meets Liza, the daughter of one of his cousins, whom he had known wh…Read More »
Moran of the Lady Letty Frank Norris

This is to be a story of a battle, at least one murder, and several sudden deaths. For that reason it begins with a pink tea and among the mingled odors of many delicate perfumes and the hale, frank smell of Caroline Testout roses. There had been a great number of debutantes 'coming out' that season in San Francis…Read More »
A Bride from the Bush E. W. Hornung

Today, a family would think nothing of the fact that one of their sons had fallen in love with an Australian woman. In the stodgy nineteenth century, however, the news was taken somewhat differently. Indeed, for the proper British Bligh family in E. W. Hornung's A Bride From the Bush, a dispatch delivering this info…Read More »
The Place of the Lion Charles Williams

When platonic archetypes begin to invade London and the heavenly world intrudes on our own, a small number of people who know what is happening react in varying ways. Some attempt to control these rabid Ideas while others run and hide. One ignores their existence and another vows to stop their impending rule.
Escape on Venus Edgar Rice Burroughs

Earthman Carson Napier had found his share of adventure on the cloud-shrouded planet of Venus. He had rescued his beloved Princess Duare from one peril after another. But when Carson finally restored Duare to her home in the lofty kingdom of Vepaja, she was sentenced to death for daring to love a lesser mortal! Once…Read More »
Hornblower and the Hotspur C. S. Forester

The Peace of Amiens is breaking down. Napoleon is building ships and amassing an army just across the Channel. Horatio Hornblower, who, at age twenty-seven, has already distinguished himself as one of the most daring and resourceful officers in the Royal Navy-commands the three-masted Hotspur on a dangerous reconnai…Read More »
Mistress Masham's Repose T. H. White

So ten-year-old Maria, orphaned mistress of Malplaquet, discovers the secret of her deteriorating estate: on a deserted island at its far corner, in the temple long ago nicknamed Mistress Masham's Repose, live an entire community of people — 'The People', as they call themselves—all only inches tall. With the help…Read More »
Tappan's Burro Zane Grey

Prospecting was a lonely business for Tappan, but his burro Jenet was good company, and more. She knew the trails and waterholes better than Tappan, from the scorching heat and poison air of Death Valley to the blinding blizzards of Arizona's mountains. Jenet tracked with him, faithful, his only friend. And he repai…Read More »
The Lion and the Unicorn George Orwell

Orwell's moving reflections on the English character and his passionate belief in the need for political change. The Lion and the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest…Read More »
Seeds of Life John Taine

This is the story of Neils Bork, an alcoholic and failure raised to supernal heights of scientific genius and altruism by a scientific accident. And it is the story of what became of his golden dream of free, limitless energy for all, and of the marriage he thought would be crowned with glorious offspring.

This ama…Read More »
Lieutenant Hornblower C. S. Forester

The nineteenth century dawns and the Napoleonic Wars rage as Horatio Hornblower is ordered to the Caribbean and dangerous waters. New Lieutenant Hornblower's latest ship is HMS Renown, a sound vessel whose captain is unfortunately of rather unsound mind. When ordered to attack a Spanish anchorage, the chain of comma…Read More »
War In Heaven Charles Williams

The Holy Grail mysteriously surfaces in an obscure country parish becoming a sacramental object to protect, or a vessel of power to exploit. Williams gives a contemporary setting to the traditional Grail quest, examining the distinction between magic and religion. War in Heaven is an eerily disturbing book, one th…Read More »
Sylvia's Lovers Elizabeth Gaskell

The tragic tale of a young woman caught between the attractions of two very different men. England is at war with France, and press gangs are seizing young men for service. Charley Kinraid, a whaling harpooner who captured the heart of Sylvia Robson, was one of their victims. After her true love is believed to have …Read More »
Many Dimensions Charles Williams

The fabled Stone of Suleiman (King Solomon) is illegally purchased from its Islamic guardian in Baghdad by an evil antique dealer. On returning to England he discovers not only that the Stone can multiply itself infinitely without diminishing the original, but that it also allows its possessor to transcend the barr…Read More »