"On a dark midwinter's night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, the regulars are telling stories when a wounded stranger enters carrying the lifeless body of a small child. Hours later, the girl stirs, takes a breath and returns to life. Many secrets must be revealed before the girl's identity can be known"-- On a dark midwinter's night in an ancient inn on the river Thames, a wounded stranger carries in the lifeless body of a small child. Hours...

" A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as...

A charismatic, Gandhi-like leader emerges from the refugee camps to lead a million starving Africans on an epic march from Sudan into Europe, under the banner "Watch Us Die". When they reach their destination, the authorities' reaction is both predictable and violent.

The life of a consummate politician's wife is turned upside down when she discovers that her husband, the British Conservative government's Minister for the Family, has been having an affair with a former call girl.

The Golden Bowl comes in the first years of the 20th-century: the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, decided never to serialise it and published it in New York in December 1904 in two volumes. After just a few months, in February 1905, also Methuen published the novel in London in a one-volume edition. In 1909, a revised edition appeared as volumes 23 and 24 of the New York edition, and James this time also prepared the preface, in which he reflected...

The Spoils of Poynton is a novel by Henry James, first published under the title The Old Things as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly in 1896 and then as a book in 1897. This novel traces the shifting relations among three human beings and a magnificent collection of art, decorative arts, and furniture arrayed like jewels in a country house called Poynton. Mrs. Gereth, a widow of impeccable taste and iron will, formed the collection over decades only...

Katharine Hilbery and Mary Dachet are two young women of marriageable age, and although both have prospects, they also have other areas of interest-Katharine is passionate about her intellectual pursuits and Mary works on a campaign for women's suffrage. Both women must learn to balance their expectations for their futures and their prospects for marriage with their own passions and happiness. One of Virginia Woolf's lesser known, earlier novels,...

First published serially in 1861, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's "Lady Audley's Secret" is the wildly successful Victorian-era sensation novel. Sensation novels were very popular in English literature in the 1860s and 1870s. The novels were a combination of realism and romance and were usually tales of terrible crimes, such as murder, kidnapping, bigamy, adultery, and theft, occurring in otherwise normal, tranquil domestic settings. "Lady Audley's Secret"...

"It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson--a sensible schoolmarm and lonely spinster--is just trying to get through life. But one day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and her tidy, circumscribed life, to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia, Margery's childhood obsession ever since her father gave...

This annotated edition of the landmark inquiry into the women's role in society by one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, Viriginia Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own features an introduction by English and Women's Studies professor Susan Gubar, perfect for critical analysis in classrooms and beyond. "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare...