Catalog Search Results
1) The Duchess
Author
Description
Angélique Latham has grown up at magnificent Belgrave Castle under the loving tutelage of her father, the Duke of Westerfield, after the death of her aristocratic French mother. But when he dies, her half-brothers brutally turn her out, denying her very existence. Angélique has a keen mind, remarkable beauty, and an envelope of money her father pressed upon her. To survive, she will need all her resources--and one bold stroke of fortune. Unable...
Author
Description
"Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town -- riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I...
3) The Stranger
Author
Appears on list
Description
A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...
Author
Description
An abandoned orphan Gypsy boy Heathcliff is taken in by a well-to-do 19th century English family, the Earnshaws on the isolated moors. He becomes their stable boy and falls in love with the family's spoiled young daughter Catherine Earnshaw, his childhood friend. The beautiful Cathy is desperately in love with Heathcliff, but because of his low birth begins seeing a wealthy neighbor's son. Heathcliff leaves during a misunderstanding and with driving...
6) Adam Bede
Author
Description
George Eliot takes the well-worn tale of a lovely dairy-maid seduced by a careless squire and out if it creates a portrait of the lives of ordinary Midlands working people their labors and loves, their beliefs, their speech.
7) Dubliners
Author
Description
In this collection of masterful stories, steeped in realism, James Joyce creates an exacting portrait of his native city, showing how it reflects the general decline of Irish culture and civilization.
Author
Appears on list
Description
'Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister's ... was more striking' As the title of Jane Austen's first published novel suggests, the difference between two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, lies not only in their appearance but also in their temperament. Yet Sense and Sensibility not only contrasts Elinor's good sense,...
9) Swann's way
Author
Description
The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, also known as Remembrance of Things Past, Swann's Way is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the volume, the...
10) Siddhartha
Author
Appears on list
Description
A young man, blessed with loving parents and a safe home in a world where want and neglect abound, leaves his family in search of himself. He joins the Samanas, a band of wandering ascetics without possessions or earthly ties. His quest unfulfilled, he descends into a life of unbounded luxury and indulgence. Where is truth? Where will his soul find true ease, in denial, in decadence, or in some truth far greater than himself, so simple, so close to...
11) The good earth
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer prize-winning novel of a China that is now in a contemporary classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In the Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the...
Author
Description
Boy, Roald Dahl's bestselling autobiography, is full of hilarious anecdotes about his childhood and school days. With fabulous new line drawings by Quentin Blake. "An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details. This is not an autobiography". (Roald Dahl). This reissue includes 30 delightful new line drawings by the inimitable Quentin Blake. Throughout his young days at school and...
14) Anna Karenina
Author
Appears on list
Description
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing oficer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...
17) Middlemarch
Author
Description
Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces reisistance from the society she inhabits.
Author
Description
Barnabus Pike is no gunfighter and not much of a street fighter. Eddie Holt is a black boxer in a white man's world. They've both taken their share of hard knocks. Now they're looking to survive a brutal winter in a remote Montana line shack, collect their pay, and settle down for good. Then they cross paths with a hardworking Irish immigrant and his beautiful, spirited sister, who've been burned off their land. It's a fight Pike and Holt don't want,...
19) Don Quixote
Author
Description
From the publisher. Our ceaseless human quest for something larger than ourselves has never been represented with more insight and love than in this story of Don Quixote -- pursuing his vision of glory in a mercantile age -- and his shrewd, skeptical manservant, Sancho Panza. As they set out to right the world's wrongs in knightly combat, the narrative moves from philosophical speculation to broad comedy, taking in pastoral, farce, and fantasy on...
20) So Big
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
A rollicking panarama of Chicago's high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges.