Frederick Davidson
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Blackstone Audio
Pub. Date
p1996
Description
Written in 1831 before Hugo was forced to flee from Louis Napoleon's France. In this novel, Hugo paints a vivid portrait of medieval Paris. Quasimodo, the one-eyed, hunchbacked refugee; Esmeralda, the dancing gypsy girl, threatened by the gallows; and a world where chaos is in charge--Hugo captures them all in this timeless, almost Gothic, piece of literature.
Story of Jean Valjean, the ex-convict who rises against all odds from galley slave to mayor,...
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In the last of his World War I adventures, Richard Hannay undertakes his most dangerous assignment yet When England calls, Richard Hannay answers. Not yet forty and already a brigadier general, he has led the charge into some of the fiercest fighting of World War I: Loos, the Somme, Arras. There is no telling how far up the ranks he might climb if only the Foreign Office would stop taking him off the front lines for cloak and dagger work. Adding insult...
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Twenty Years After - Alexandre Dumas - Twenty Years After (French: Vingt ans après) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, first serialized from January to August 1845. A book of The d'Artagnan Romances, it is a sequel to The Three Musketeers and precedes The Vicomte de Bragelonne (which includes the sub-plot Man in the Iron Mask).
The novel follows events in France during the Fronde, during the childhood reign of Louis XIV, and in England near the end...
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Once a celebrated Naval officer, John Rowland has fallen from grace. After slipping into alcoholism, Roland is dismissed from the Navy and shamed. Having lost everything, Rowland now works as a deckhand on the Titan, operating deck machinery and keeping watch. However, Rowland is just as shocked and horrified as the civilian passengers when the mighty ocean liner collides with an iceberg, beginning the ship's slow sink to ruin. As the Titan sinks,...
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Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a novel by English author E.M. Forster. The work was Forster's first novel, and its success helped launch his lengthy and critically acclaimed career as a writer of literary fiction. Where Angels Fear to Tread, the title is drawn from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism (1711), is a moving meditation on class, gender, social convention, and the grieving process.
Following the death of her husband, a widow named...
6) Germinal
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Germinal, by Emile Zola, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary...
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Samuel Butler was an individualistic Victorian era writer who published a variety of works. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, considerable studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history as well as criticism. Butler even made prose translations of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" which remain some of the most popular to this day. His authority on literature came through his posthumous novel, "The...
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Father Brown is an insightful sleuth who travels far-and-wide to solve a new set of mysteries that require his unique skills and wisdom. This selection of short stories also includes a variety of locales from Italy to Cornwall and everywhere in between. Once again, Father Brown has found himself at the center of the action. The Wisdom of Father Brown is the follow-up to G.K. Chesterton's first entry, The Innocence of Father Brown. The sequel builds...
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The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Inspired by the life of French painter Paul Gauguin, Maugham set out to capture, the disconnect between an artist's desire, to create and their obligations to their loved ones and society. Praised for its multifaceted portrayal of tortured genius and wasted talent, The Moon and Sixpence explores the distance between expectation and desire in a man whose decisions, however, hastily made,...
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When dystopian futures don't feel so future at all…Four decades before George Orwell wrote 1984, The Napoleon of Notting Hill defined the dystopian genre. One of the first dystopian comedies, instead of a dark vision of jackboots and surveillance states, G.K. Chesterton explores the question of what a society would look like if no one could take a joke.In this future England, each new king is decided by lottery. When Auberon Quin, a man who cares...
11) Prester John
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South Africa, 1900. After his father dies, nineteen-year-old David Crawfurd is sent off to South Africa to earn his living as a storekeeper in the back of beyond. A strange encounter on the journey suggests that dark deeds and treacherous intrigues are afoot - all bound up with the mysterious primeval kingdom of Prester John. Written as a boys' adventure story and set mostly in South Africa (where Buchan had worked), "Prester John" was published in...
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Originally published in Polish in 1896 by Nobel Prize-winning author Henryk Sienkiewicz, "Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero" is the story of a love that develops in Rome between a young Christian woman, Lygia, and Marcus Vinicius, a Roman patrician, during the reign of Nero in 64 AD. The title "Quo Vadis" is translated from Latin as "Where are you going?" The quote is a reference to the New Testament verse John 13:36, which states "Simon...
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Mr. William Whittlestaff was strolling very slowly up and down the long walk at his countryseat in Hampshire, thinking of the contents of a letter, which he held crushed up within his trousers' pocket. He always breakfasted exactly at nine, and the letters were supposed to be brought to him at a quarter past. The postman was really due at his hall-door at a quarter before nine; but though he had lived in the same house for above fifteen years, and...
14) Catriona
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Uncovering a governmental conspiracy to frame a friend for murder puts David Balfour on the run and striving to protect the woman he's come to love.
Released with the title David Balfour when originally released in the United States, Catriona is Robert Louis Stevenson's follow-up to Kidnapped. David Balfour, hero of both books, is made a target by his willingness to testify in favor of a friend falsely accused of murder. His stubborn sense of justice...
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When Lady Maud Marsh, a passionate young woman, admits to her affluent family that she is in love with a poor man, they forbid her from leaving the house. Having met the man, Geoffrey, the previous summer in Wales, Maud is set on marrying him, but will not tell her family who he is. George Bevan is a bored and lonely composer from America who has valiant dreams of helping a damsel in distress. One night, after seeing a play, he gets his wish. After...
16) Don Juan
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First published in 1819, "Don Juan" is often acknowledged as one of Lord Byron's greatest poetic works. An epic poem, comprised of seventeen cantos that Byron continued to work on and expand until his death, "Don Juan" follows the adventures of the famous Spanish libertine and reflects upon many of the romantic and personal experiences that are universal to all mankind. From a forbidden love affair in Spain, to exile in Italy, from being shipwrecked...
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Featuring ten works of comedic short fiction, P.G Wodehouse's The Clicking of Cuthbert is comprised of stories about golfers that teach a lesson is an odd and amusing way. In A Woman is Only a Woman, the friendship between two men is threatened when they both fall in love with the same woman. Since she claims to like them equally, the two men decide to challenge each other to a game of golf, agreeing that the best golfer gets the woman's hand in marriage....
18) Burmese Days
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Honest and evocative, George Orwell's first novel is an examination of the debasing effect of empire on occupied and occupier.
Burmese Days focuses on a handful of Englishmen who meet at the European Club to drink whisky and to alleviate the acute and unspoken loneliness of life in 1920s Burma where Orwell himself served as an imperial policeman during the waning days of British imperialism.
One of the men, James Flory, a timber merchant, has grown...
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Full of exquisite moonlit scenes that play out like dreams and underground escapades descending into nightmare, this is a must-read for all fantasy aficionados and fans of Tolkien, Lewis, and RowlingEight-year-old Princess Irene lives a lonely life in a wild, desolate, mountainous kingdom, with only her nursemaid Lootie for company. She is protected from the outside world and oblivious to the existence of goblins, hideous creatures that live underground...
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Sally Nicholas is a pretty and popular American woman working as dance partner for hire. Orphaned, she and her brother, Fillmore, has been on their own for years. However, on Sally's twenty-first birthday, her life is changed when she learns that she and her brother have inherited a fortune, which they now have access to. Fillmore, who is overly ambitious, and impulsive intends on investing his money in schemes that promise fast wealth, in hopes to...