Other books that might interest you

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  Wasted Day

  Richard Harding Davis

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  This is a delightful little story about the most successful banker on Wall Street, who finds his philanthropic side when one of his former employees is arrested and needs someone to vouch for his character.. - Summary by Carolin

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  South of the Slot - Iconic...

  Jack London

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  John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12th, 1876 in San Francisco.   
   
  His father, William Chaney, was living with Flora Wellman when she became pregnant.  Chaney insisted she have an abortion.  Flora's response was to turn a gun on herself.  Although her wounds were not severe the trauma made her temporarily deranged. 
   
  In late 1876 his mother married John London and the young child was brought to live with them as they moved around the Bay area, eventually settling in Oakland where now, calling himself Jack, he completed grade school. 
   
  Jack worked hard at several jobs, sometimes 12-18 hours a day, but his dream was university.  He studied hard and borrowed the money to enrol in the summer of 1896 at the University of California in Berkeley. 
   
  In 1897, at 21, Jack searched out newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and for the name of his biological father. He wrote to Chaney, then living in Chicago, who claimed he could not be Jack’s father because he was impotent and casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men.  Jack, devastated by the response, quit Berkeley and went to the Klondike. Other accounts suggest that his dire finances presented Jack with the excuse he needed to leave. 
   
  In the Klondike Jack began to gather material for his writing but also accumulated many health problems, including scurvy, which together with hip and leg problems he would carry for the rest of his life. 
   
  During the late 1890's Jack was regularly publishing short stories and by the turn of the century full blown novels. 
   
  By 1904 Jack had married, fathered two children and was now in the process of divorcing.  A stint as a reporter on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was equal amounts trouble and experience. But that experience was always put to good use in a continuing and remarkable output of work. 
   
  In 1905 he married Charmian Kittredge who at last was a soul and companion who brought him some semblance of peace despite his advancing alcoholism and his incurable wanderlust. 
   
  Twelve years later Jack had amassed both wealth and a literary reputation through such classics as ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang’ and many others. He had a reputation as a social activist and was a tireless friend of the workers.   
   
  Jack London died suffering from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism and uremia, aged only 40, on November 22nd 1916 at his property in Glen Elen in California 
   
  In ‘South of the Slot’ Jack London reveals yet another facet of his writing talents. In turn of the Century San Francisco, a Professor of Sociology explores the working-class neighbourhoods gradually revealing an alter-ego with his Union loving personality and name.  The question is which is his real character.

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  Goodman's Child

  Stuart Wakefied

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  "Moire stood in the croft house’s porch, watching Goodman leave, plotting her escape. 
  His boots—thick leather the colour of oak, paler at the toe and heel—crunched in the shoal of pebbles he’d salvaged from the shore behind the house. A slab of grass, the dry stone wall, then the shore. And then… 
  Moire had long since given up wondering what lay beyond the wall that marked the perimeter of her understanding because, once lured there by Goodman, she’d never been able to leave. A prison formed from Goodman’s lies. 
  For seven years, Moire’s thoughts returned to the sea’s powerful protection and of a freedom she hadn’t known in all those years." 
  Praise for Goodman's Child:  
  "It's beautifully written and observed on many different levels - from the descriptions of the Orkney landscape, to Moire's emotions, to making folklore a reality - it just flows and I love it!" – Kate Tenbeth, author of Burly & Grum and Unlucky Dip.  
  "…a thoughtful, beautifully written tale that evokes Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' or, perhaps more closely, Roger McGough's wonderful poem 'Angel Wings'" – Mark Watkins, co-author of Keeping Mum.

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  The Invisible Man

  H. G. Wells

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  This masterpiece of science fiction is the fascinating story of Griffin, a scientist who creates a serum to render himself invisible, and his descent into madness that follows.

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  Wednesday's Child - Stories

  Yiyun Li

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  This program is read by the author and includes an audio-only bonus story, Call Me Ishmael's Mother.A new collection—about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life—by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living—exile, assimilation, loss, love—with her trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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  Wood's Wall - Action and...

  Steven Becker

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  Action and Adventure in the Florida Keys 
  It's easy to become invisible in the Florida Keys. Mac Travis is laying low: Fishing, Diving and doing enough salvage work to pay his bills until three fishermen trolling the Gulf Stream discover a square grouper. Besides the drugs, the package contains a secret that changes their lives and jeopardizes the very existence of the Keys. When his wayward deckhand brings him part of the package, he and his girlfriend Mel, are drawn into the chase that has dire consequences for the Keys. 
  An action-packed thriller featuring plenty of boating, SCUBA diving, fishing and flavored with a generous dose of Conch Republic counterculture

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