Nicholas Boulton
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Description
Published in 1896, A Child of the Jago is a gritty and realistic portrayal of life in the slums of London's East End during the late 19th century. The novel is set in an area known as the Old Jago (based on a real-life slum called the Old Nichol) and vividly describes the poverty, crime and squalor that characterised the impoverished neighbourhood.
The story revolves around Dicky Perrott, a young boy growing up in the Jago, and his struggle for survival...
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The music of Bohemian composer Antonín Dvořák is suffused with natural nobility, fluency and freshness, and embodies the spirit of his native land. This revealing biography portrays Dvořák as a complex and wide-ranging composer, and explores the creation and performance of his music as well as its reception on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing his art in all its richness and variety. Musical excerpts include the Cello Concerto, the 'New World'...
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Series
Description
Ollie and Caro Harcourt are moving house with their twelve-year-old daughter Jade. Ollie is desperate to leave the city. Caro is less sure. Then they view Cold Hill House, a dilapidated rural mansion, and fall instantly in love. It's expensive, but with its space, seclusion, and huge grounds, it seems like a brilliant idea.
That is, until they arrive.
It soon becomes apparent that they are not alone. A spectral woman appears on screens and walks...
24) Balthazar
Author
Series
Alexandria quartet volume 2
Pub. Date
2021
Description
'The politics of love, the intrigues of desire, good and evil, virtue and caprice, love and murder, moved obscurely in the dark corners of Alexandria's streets and squares, brothels and drawing-rooms—moved like a great congress of eels in the slime of plot and counter-plot.'
In Balthazar, the second volume in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the story and the characters come more clearly into focus. Darley, the reflective Englishman,
...25) Clea
Author
Series
Alexandria quartet volume 4
Pub. Date
2021
Description
'I knew that Clea would share everything with me, withholding nothing—not even the look of complicity which women reserve only for their mirrors.'
In Clea, the concluding part of The Alexandria Quartet, Darley returns to Alexandria now caught by war-fever. The conflagration has its effect on his circle—on Nessim and Justine, Balthazar and Clea, Mountolive and Pombal—and a clarity of purpose emerges as the story moves
...26) The Dead Secret
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Description
A masterful blend of Gothic drama and romance, Wilkie Collins's mystery novel is an exploration of illegitimacy and inheritance. Set in Cornwall, the plot foreshadows The Woman in White with its themes of doubtful identity and deception, and involves a broad array of characters. The 'secret' of the book's title is the true parentage of the book's heroine, Rosamond Treverton, which has been written down and kept in an unused room at Porthgenna Tower....
27) Mountolive
Author
Series
Alexandria quartet volume 3
Pub. Date
2021
Description
'Mountolive who had already found the open sesame of language ready to hand, suddenly began to feel himself really penetrating a foreign country...'
In Mountolive, the third volume in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the events surrounding the interwoven community of Nessim, Justine, Narouz, Pursewarden and the other major characters are given a very different perspective. The intrigues and complex relationships are seen through the political
...28) Come As You Are: Revised and Updated: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life
Author
Pub. Date
2021
Formats
Description
A revised and updated edition of Emily Nagoski's game-changing New York Times bestseller Come As You Are, featuring new information and research on mindfulness, desire, and pleasure that will radically transform your sex life.
For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, women's sexuality was an uncharted territory in science, studied far less frequently—and far less seriously—than its male counterpart.
That...
For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, women's sexuality was an uncharted territory in science, studied far less frequently—and far less seriously—than its male counterpart.
That...
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Description
The Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes form the wellspring of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Stories of knightly valour in the Welsh Marches had existed before the 12th century, but it was the magnificent poetry and imagination of Chrétien, the 12th century French poet and trouvère, which brought alive the great characters of Arthur, his wife Guinevere, Lancelot and others. In fact, it was here, in these romances,...
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Against Nature was one of the most shocking French novels of the 19th century. When it was published in 1884, it thrilled the aesthetes, the poets, and the intellectuals of Europe on both sides of the Channel (notably Oscar Wilde) because for all its lofty tone, it had, as its core, an unbridled decadence, and it was this same character that challenged, even horrified, established bourgeois society.
Des Esseintes, a minor aristocrat but a high intellectual...
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Dumas's novel became one of the great love stories from its first publication in 1848. The title role of the consumptive heroine and her ultimate sacrifice inspired actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to Greta Garbo, and led Giuseppe Verdi to write La traviata. In the hands of Nicholas Boulton, the story of passion and conflict is as fresh and moving as when it was first written.
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Description
Grigori Aleksandrovich Pechorin is an enigma: arrogant, cocky, melancholic, brave, cynic, romantic, loner, socialite, soldier, free soul, and yet, victim of the world, he eludes definition and remains a mystery to those who know him. Just who is he? And what does he hope to achieve? Evolving from first person to third person, and then into a diary, A Hero of Our Time takes on a variety of forms to interrogate Pechorin's cryptic character and his unusual...
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In "The House of the Dead," Fyodor Dostoevsky delves into the harrowing world of Siberian prison camps, drawing from his own experiences to paint a vivid and haunting portrait of life behind bars. Through the eyes of Alexander Goryanchikov, a nobleman sentenced to ten years of hard labor, Dostoevsky explores the depths of human suffering and the resilience of the human spirit. The narrative captures the grim realities of the penal system, where brutality...
35) The Monk
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A masterpiece of gothic fiction, The Monk is a cautionary tale of madness, horror, lust and despair. Father Ambrosio, the most pious and venerated monk in all of Madrid, is held as a paragon of virtue. But after thirty years of study and prayer, evil thoughts begin to permeate his mind. As two plots cleverly converge, torture, murder, incest, rape, poison and magic prevail, sustained by an elegance in the writing of the nineteen-year-old Matthew...
Author
Description
There is no watertight excuse for this book. It strolls impertinently over ground that has been carefully mapped by the qualified authorities and elegantly appreciated by many devoted amateurs. Its purview is ludicrously broad - nothing less than an exhibition of the Englishman in his more characteristic manifestations through the ages.
It is, wriggle out of it as we would, a hopelessly, damnably patriotic book. However, it is our opinion that the...
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The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories is a bizarre and colorful collection containing the complete Ukrainian and Petersburg stories by the iconic Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. From the witty and Kafkaesque The Nose, where a civil servant wakes up one day to find his nose missing, to the moving and evocative The Overcoat, about a sad and reclusive man whose only ambition is to replace his old, threadbare coat, Gogol gives us a unique and satirical...
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Set in the court of Urbino in 1507, Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier presents an invaluable look at court life and culture during the Renaissance. Over four nights of dialogue, the book explores the key question, 'What should a courtier be like?' and presents a deep and timeless discussion that is reminiscent of Plato's Symposium and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and invites comparisons with Machiavelli's The Prince. It is absorbing and enlightening,...
39) Armadale
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Description
If you can't get enough of classic British mystery novels, dive into this spine-tingling tale of mistaken identity penned by Wilkie Collins, the author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The tale, told partly through letters and documents, recounts the intertwined lives and fates of two distant cousins who both happen to bear the name 'Allan Armadale.'
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A stunning speculative novel about a small English village preparing of the end of the world.
Edgar Hopkins is a retired math teacher with a strong sense of self-importance, whose greatest pride is winning poultry-breeding contests. When not meticulously caring for his Bantam, Edgar is an active member of the British Lunar Society. Thanks to that affiliation, Edgar becomes one of the first people to learn that the moon is on a collision course with...