'Merry Christmas!...every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding'
Dickens' story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors, has proved one of his most well-loved works.
[lire la quatrième du livre A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings]
In 1960 Jack Kerouac was near breaking point. Driven mad by constant press attention in the wake of the publication of On the Road, he needed to 'get away to solitude again or die', so he withdrew to a cabin in Big Sur on the Californian coast. The resulting novel, in which his autobiographical hero Jack Duluoz wrestles with doubt, alcohol dependency and his urge towards self-destruction, is one [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre Big Sur]
'If life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie?' Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents at Dorlcote Mill, but her passionate, wayward nature and fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her conventional family.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Mill on the Floss]
Featuring beloved characters such as the Little Mermaid, Thumbelina, and the Snow Queen, a deluxe full-color edition of Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairytales, illustrated with stunning drawings and interactive artwork from MinaLima, the award-winning design studio behind the graphics for the ...
[lire la quatrième du livre The Little Mermaid and Other Fairy Tales [...]]
Here begins the story of an evil ages old and forever new. It is the story of those who feed a diabolic craving into the veins of their victims, into the men and women from whose blood they draw their only sustenance. It is a novel of peculiar power, of hypnotic fascination. The reader is warned that he who enters Castle Dracula may not escape its baleful spell, even when he closes this book.
[lire la quatrième du livre Dracula]
In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a 'wicked woman' as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Tenant of Wildfell Hall]
Today, however, the stories are admired for their intense and masterly dissection of "dear dirty Dublin," and for the economy and grace with which Joyce invested this youthful fiction.
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With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette.
There she struggles to retain her self- possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre Villette]
Set in the harsh Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, this tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth reveals Nathaniel Hawthorne's concerns with the tension between the public and the private selves.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Scarlet Letter]
The deadly hand of Professor Moriarty once more reaches out to commit a vile and ingenious crime, but a mole in Moriarty's criminal organization alerts Sherlock Holmes of the evil deed by means of a cipher . . .
When Holmes and Watson arrive at a Sussex manor house they appear to be too late. The discovery of a body suggests that Moriarty's henchmen have been at their work.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Valley of Fear]
The Penguin English Library Edition of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell"Eh, miss, but that be a rare young lady! She do have such pretty coaxing ways ..."Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson worships her widowed father. But when he decides to remarry, Molly's life is thrown off course by the arrival of her vain, shallow and selfish stepmother.
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Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle's absence in Antigua, the Crawford's arrive in the neighbourhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation.
[lire la quatrième du livre Mansfield Park]
As usual with the Sherlock Holmes stories it is very hard to say which are the best - but there are many stories here which would get the vote - ranging from The Boscombe Valley Mystery to the wonderful Adventure of Silver Blaze, from the Adventure of the Norwood Builder to A Case of Identity, but above to the uniquely strange and macabre Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb and Other [...]]
The Penguin English Library Edition of Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster'I had got an idea that everyone here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learned to be sincere - and, what's as bad, never learned how to enjoy themselves' E.
M.
[lire la quatrième du livre Where Angels Fear to Tread]
The Penguin English Library Edition of The Five Orange Pips and Other Cases by Arthur Conan Doyle'He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson ...
[lire la quatrième du livre The Five Orange Pips and Other Cases]
The Penguin English Library Edition of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins'Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond - bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man'When Rachel Verinder's birthday present - the ...
[lire la quatrième du livre The Moonstone]
When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy her freedom, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. Then she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Gilbert Osmond. Charming and cultivated, Osmond sees Isabel as a rich prize waiting to be taken.
[lire la quatrième du livre The Portrait of a Lady]
Those individuals include Emma, a Catholic, and Edward, a Protestant, whose forbidden love weaves through the heart of the story; and the simpleminded Barnaby, one of the riot leaders, whose fate is tied to a mysterious murder and whose beloved pet raven, Grip, embodies the mystical power of innocence.
[lire la quatrième du livre Barnaby Rudge]
Set partly in America, which Dickens had visited in 1842, the novel includes a searing satire on the United States. Martin Chuzzlewit is the story of two Chuzzlewits, Martin and Jonas, who have inherited the characteristic Chuzzlewit selfishness. It contrasts their diverse fates of moral redemption and worldly success for one, with increasingly desperate crime for the other. This powerful [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre Martin Chuzzlewit]
The Penguin English Library Edition of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens"What do you think that is?' she asked me, again pointing with her stick; 'that, where those cobwebs are?""I can't guess what it is, ma'am.""It's a great cake. A bride-cake.
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The Penguin English Library Edition of Emma by Jane Austen'I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall'Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others.
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A cylinder from space lands in south-west London, and naïve locals approach it armed with a white flag - only to be instantly incinerated by an all-destroying heat-ray, as tentacled Martians emerge. Soon the whole of humanity is under threat, as the invaders build gigantic killing machines that chase and feast on human prey.
H. G.
[lire la quatrième du livre The War of the Worlds]
The triffids are grotesque and dangerous plants, over seven feet tall, originally cultivated for their yield of high-grade oil. So long as conditions give the mastery to their human directors, they are a valuable asset to mankind. But when a sudden universal disaster turns those conditions upside down, then the triffids, seizing their opportunity, become an active and dreadful [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre The Day of the Triffids]
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette.
[lire la quatrième du livre Villette]
Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle's absence in Antigua, the Crawford's arrive in the neighborhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation.
[lire la quatrième du livre Mansfield Park]
As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre Bleak House]
Jane Austen's brilliant, hilarious - and often outrageous - early stories, sketches and pieces of nonsense, in a beautiful Penguin Classics clothbound edition. Jane Austen's earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven years, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work: wit, acute insight into human folly, and a preoccupation with manners, morals and money.
[lire la quatrième du livre Love and Freindship]
Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from any young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and 'bully of humanity' Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery.
[lire la quatrième du livre Hard Times]
Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage.
[lire la quatrième du livre Emma]
Jane Austen: Seven Novels is part of Barnes & Noble's Collectible Editions series. Each title in the series presents a classic work in an attractively designed edition bound in genuine bonded leather. These books make elegant additions to any home library.
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Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë's only novel. It was first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, and a posthumous second edition was edited by her sister Charlotte. The name of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors on which the story centres (as an adjective, wuthering is a Yorkshire word referring to turbulent weather).
[lire la quatrième du livre Wuthering Heights]
The Jungle Books can be regarded as classic stories told by an adult to children. But they also constitute a complex literary work of art in which the whole of Kipling's philosophy of life is expressed in miniature. They are best known for the `Mowgli' stories; the tale of a baby abandoned and brought up by wolves, educated in the ways and secrets of the jungle by Kaa the python, Baloo the bear, [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre The Jungle Books]
Roderick Random (1748), Smollett's first novel, is full of the dazzling vitality characteristics of all his work, as well as of his own life. Roderick is the boisterous and unprincipled hero who answers life's many misfortunes with a sledgehammer. Left penniless, he leaves his native Scotland for London and on the way meets Strap, and old schoolfellow.
Together they undergo many adventures [...]
[lire la quatrième du livre The Adventures of Roderick Random]
Now a major film directed by Armando Iannucci, starring Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben WhishawDickens's great coming-of-age novel, now in a beautiful clothbound Penguin editionThis is the novel Dickens regarded as his 'favourite child' and is considered his most autobiographical.
[lire la quatrième du livre David Copperfield]
A story of classic simplicity, based on a Mexican folk tale, The Pearl explores the secrets of man's nature, greed, the darkest depths of evil, and the luminous possibilities of love.
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The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit.
[lire la quatrième du livre Brideshead Revisited : The Sacred and Profane [...]]
