First in a series of stories following an ex-detective, Frank James, as he tries to solve the death of his ex-partner. Delving deeper into the murder he begins to uncover a widespread trail of corruption as he battles for the future of his city.
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The most famous of the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles features the phantom dog of Dartmoor, which, according to an ancient legend, has haunted the Baskervilles for generations. When Sir Charles Baskerville dies suddenly of a heart attack on the grounds of the family’s estate, the locals are convinced that the spectral hound is responsible, and Holmes is called in.
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The Moon and Sixpence is the complex story of Charles Strickland, a man who abandons his family and his secure life as an English businessman to pursue an uncertain but meaningful existence as an artist, from Paris slums to the lush fertility of Tahiti, and into the glory of the creative wilderness. Inspired by the life of the artist Paul Gauguin, this is a psychological study of the creative urge as it stands in conflict with the bonds of ordinary life and personal relationships.
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Sub-titled 'Notes of a ramble in Southern Italy', By The Ionian Sea describes George Gissings journey in 1897 by boat, train, and carriage from Naples to Reggio di Calabria, via Paola, Cosenza, Crotone and Squillace. George Gissing's writing celebrates Calabria's rich cultural past and beautiful landscapes while providing a candid account of the region's hardship and poverty.
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A satirical novel about the sinful attachment of British society in the early 19th century to worldly things, the pilgrims on John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress arrive at the town of Vanity and it's perpetual fair.
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“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.” Thus begins one of the most terrifying and morally prescient science fiction novels ever penned. Beginning with a series of strange flashes in the distant night sky, the Martian attack initially causes little concern on Earth. Then the destruction erupts—ten massive aliens roam England and destroy with heat rays everything in their path. Very soon mankind finds itself on the brink of extinction.
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Hardy's masterpiece traces a poor stonemason's ill-fated romance with his free-spirited cousin. No Victorian institution is spared — marriage, religion, education — and the outrage following publication led the embittered author to renounce fiction. Modern critics hail this novel as a pioneering work of feminism and socialist thought.
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Based on a series of lectures delivered at Yale University in April 1913, Sir William Ostler delivers "an aeroplane flight over the progress of medicine through the ages."
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