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Penguin Island is Anatole France’s most searching and satirical novel. A humorous critique of customs and laws, rituals and rites, its subject is human nature, but its characters are penguins in the mythical land of Penguinia. The story of the strutting penguins and their virtues and vices is not merely a burlesque allegory of French history, but a satire of the history of mankind.

Says Charles Pooter, "I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a 'somebody' - why my diary should not be interesting." Surprisingly, Mr. Pooter's life is fascinating! The fascination is two-fold: firstly, his astounding arrogance that we should care about his domestic trivia and narcissistic scribblings. Secondly, we can all sympathize with (and wince at!) this ridiculous slave to convention.

A Room with a View portrays the love of a British woman for an expatriate living in Italy, a country which to Forster represents the forces of true passion. Caught up in a world of social snobbery, Forster's heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, finds herself constrained by the claustrophobic influence of her British guardians, who encourage her to take up with a well-connected boor.

Born in an overcrowded slum in Scotland in 1813, David Livingstone worked 12-hour days in a cotton factory from age 10 to 24. But a pamphlet by Karl Gutzlaff changed his life. Resolved to become a missionary, he applied himself to medicine, self-educating and eventually qualifying as a doctor.

A case from his past is about to ruin Assistant Chief Constable Ned French's career. Heather Jonas, forced into a false confession to murder after a harrowing late-night interview session with French, has now served 15 years of her 20-year sentence. In all that time she's never appealed against her lot; but now, someone else has confessed, and a citizen's rights campaigner is determined to get to the truth.

Charles Paris's star gig is as "forklift-driver-for-a-day" in a corporate video. Charles must position the forklift and then declaim in the trained voice of an actor the wonders of the company and its big, happy family of employees. He delivers his lines with his usual aplomb, but he can't help wondering about the "happy family". It's rather fun to learn to manipulate a forklift. But it's a responsibility, too, as Charles learns to his horror: a forklift can be a tool for murder.

Abandoned by her lover and left to bring up their two children alone, Gervaise Macquart has to fight to earn an honest living. When she accepts the marriage proposal of Monsieur Coupeau, it seems as though she is on the path to a decent, respectable life at last. But with her husband's drinking and the unexpected appearance of a figure from her past, Gervaise's plans begin to unravel tragically.

E. M. Forster’s first novel explores the comic and tragic effects of culture clash between insular, provincial British personalities and sensual Italian culture and atmosphere. Lilia Herriton, an impulsive 33-year-old widow from London, travels to Tuscany, where she falls in love with both Italy and the handsome, carefree Gino Carelli, a dentist’s son 12 years her junior. When news reaches the snobbish Herriton family that Lilia intends to marry again, this time to an unsuitable Italian, the domineering Mrs. Herriton sends her son, Philip, to prevent the catastrophe - but he arrives too late.

This short novel follows the fate of Sissy Jupe, a warm-hearted circus child, and the family that adopts her. Deserted by her ailing father, Sissy is taken into the cold household of the Gradgrind family, which operates a school. The "eminently practical" Thomas Gradgrind believes only in facts and figures and has raised his children accordingly, thoroughly suppressing the imaginative side of their nature, and the consequences are devastating.

Phileas Fogg, a distinguished member of London's Reform Club, takes up a wager to circle the globe in just 80 days. Together with manservant Passepartout and a detective named Fix, Fogg makes a fantastic world tour utilizing every means of transportation available in the 1870s. This is a marvelous travelogue mixed with dazzling suspense, delightful fantasy, and lively comedy.

What would you say to a young stranger who wishes to die? What arguments would you use to restore his will to live? What ideas and ideals would you invoke to save him? Faced with that dilemma, the principal character of Elie Wiesel's magnificent novel - an old wanderer named Azriel - decides to tell a story: his own. The very one he was not supposed to tell, the one he had pledged to keep to himself.

In the days following the Six-Day War, a survivor of the Holocaust visits the reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall in the Old City, he encounters the beggars and madmen that congregate there every evening - and who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present.

St. Augustine was the greatest Western philosopher for 1,000 years and a dominant influence on the history of Christian theology. From his conversion in 386 to his death in 430, he remained a great teacher, church statesman, and polemical theologian. St. Thomas Aquinas was one of many scholars influenced by Augustine’s theories.

One rainy morning in the winter of 1909, a man with an altogether average look about him quit his job at the London Morning Leader, kissed his wife and children goodbye, and took a train to Swansea in Wales, where he talked his way aboard a freighter bound for somewhere in the upper reaches of the Amazon. Three years later, Tomlinson published a book about his adventures. This book made him famous.

'The right good book,' says Mr. Tomlinson, 'is always a book of travel: it is about a life's journey.'

The Trespasser, first published in 1912, was Lawrence's second novel and foreshadowed the passion of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Helena Verden, a young woman in her late 20s, and Siegmund MacNair, her violin teacher, are in love. But there is more than one obstacle to their happiness. Siegmund is a married man with children and Helena is full of inhibitions. They spend a week together on the Isle of Wight, their passion remaining unrequited. When they return to London, Siegmund faces a deadlock. Tormented by his family's bitter reproaches, he is nonetheless unable to desert them for Helena. His solution to his dilemma turns a woman's longing for love into tragedy. Lawrence based his novel on the true-life experiences of his friend Helen Corke, as revealed in her diaries.

Two American travelers have been killed—one with poison, the other with a knife through the heart—and the only clues at the scene are a woman’s wedding ring and the German word for “vengeance” written in blood. The military surgeon Dr. John Watson is brought in to investigate, along with his clever, arrogant new roommate, Sherlock Holmes.

Charles Paris' old friend Mark, who runs a recording studio in Bath where Charles is making a talking book, has a drinking problem that amounts to a death wish. But it's not the drink that kills Mark, it's somebody in the cast of Charles' play who has a dirty little secret that Mark must not be allowed to reveal...

This terse and startling novel is the story of a struggle for possession and of its devastating consequences. Three women seek to secure the affections of one man, while he, in turn, tries to satisfy them all. But in the middle of this contest of wills stands his unwitting and vulnerable young daughter. The conclusion of The Other House makes it one of the most disturbing and memorable of Henry James' depictions of the uncontrollable passions that lie beneath the polished veneer of civilized life.

First published in 1908, and widely regraded as his masterpiece, Penguin Island is Anatole France's most searching and satirical novel. A humorous critique of customs and laws, rituals and rites, its subject is human nature, but its characters are penguins in the mythical land of Penguinia. The story of the strutting penguins and their virtues and vices is not merely a burlesque allegory of French history, it is a satire of the history of mankind. With gentle yet biting irony, France challenges the Spencerian belief in the ultimate perfectibility of man, though his irony reveals his sympathy for man's weaknesses and his need for social institutions.

"I think the Cosmopolis is a bally rotten hotel!" Having made a bitter enemy of Daniel Brewster, owner of New York's Hotel Cosmopolis, Archie Moffam (fresh from England) checks out and heads south, where he woos and weds one Lucille Brewster...little thinking. Back at the Hotel Cosmopolis, Archie once again finds himself confronted by Mr. Brewster, who resembles nothing so much as a "man-eating fish." And then the fun begins...