Heidi
Including an introduction from writer and feminist activist Scarlett Curtis, curator of Sunday Times Bestseller Feminists Don’t Wear Pink. When five year old Heidi is sent to live with her grandfather high up in the Alps, no one really knows how they will get on. Even though her grandfather can be fierce,
Pride and Prejudice
Including an introduction from writer and feminist activist Scarlett Curtis, curator of Sunday Times Bestseller Feminists Don’t Wear Pink. The only thing in the world that matters to Mrs Bennett, is marrying all five of her daughters to rich, landed gentlemen. So when two wealthy young gentlemen move to town.
The Railway Children
When Father is taken away unexpectedly, Roberta, Peter, Phyllis and their mother have to leave their comfortable life in London to go and live in a small cottage in the country. The children seek solace in the nearby railway station, and make friends with Perks the Porter and the Station Master himself.
A Little Princess
When wealthy Sara Crewe arrives at Miss Minchin’s boarding school in London, she is determined to settle in and make friends. Charismatic and popular, with a big heart and a love of storytelling, she seems to be succeeding. Her father always said she was a Little Princess, and she knows exactly what it means to be a princess: to be kind, understanding and polite.
Between the Acts
Virginia Woolf’s last novel, in equal parts a triumphant celebration and witty mockery of ‘Englishness’, Between the Acts is edited by Stella McNichol, with an introduction and notes by Gillian Beer in Penguin Modern Classics. Outwardly a novel about life in a country house in whose grounds there is to be a pageant,
Bagombo Snuff Box
New York, 1950. A young PR man working at General Electric sold his first magazine piece. By the time he’d sold his third, he decided to quit his job and join the likes of Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and make a living as a full-time writer. That young man was Kurt Vonnegut.
Slaughterhouse 5
Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller – these are the life roles of Billy Pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse. Slaughterhouse Five is one of the world’s great anti-war books. Centring on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
Breakfast Of Champions
In a frolic of cartoon and comic outbursts against rule and reason, a miraculous weaving of science fiction, memoir, parable, fairy tale and farce, Kurt Vonnegut attacks the whole spectrum of American society, releasing some of his best-loved literary creations on the scene.
God Bless You, Mr Rosewater
Eliot Rosewater is tortured by a fabulous inheritance he feels he does not deserve, so he devotes himself to drink, and to a life serving the dull, the ugly, the irrelevant and the useless. This is a novel about the pleasures, pains and perversions of people and money. It is the story of a millionaire’s lunacy
Love in the Time of Cholera
A poignant meditation on the nature of desire, and the enduring power of love, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman in Penguin Modern Classics. Florentino Ariza is a hopeless romantic who falls passionately for the beautiful Fermina Daza, but finds his love tragically rejected.
A Farewell To Arms
In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the ‘war to end all wars’. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came his early masterpiece, A Farewell to Arms. In an unforgettable depiction of war, Hemingway recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteers and the men and women he encounters along the way with conviction and brutal honesty.
For Whom The Bell Tolls
High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dyamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco’s rebels.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence.
Great Expectations
Pip doesn’t expect much from life … His sister makes it clear that her orphaned little brother is nothing but a burden on her. But suddenly things begin to change. Pip’s narrow existence is blown apart when he finds an escaped criminal, is summoned to visit a mysterious old woman and meets the icy beauty Estella.
The Greatest Cases of Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes, scourge of criminals everywhere, whether they be lurking in London’s foggy backstreets or plotting behind the walls of an idyllic country mansion, and his faithful colleague Dr Watson solve these breathtaking and perplexing mysteries.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales
Horror, madness, violence and the dark forces hidden in humanity abound in this collection of Poe’s brilliant tales, including – among others – the bloody, brutal and baffling murder of a mother and daughter in Paris in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, the creeping insanity of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’,
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