Other books that might interest you

• 

  Hound of the Baskervilles The...

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The desolate, treacherous Devon moors. A bloodcurdling legend of a ghastly hound from hell, haunting the Baskerville family for generations. Such is the setting for the most horrific Sherlock Holmes story ever written, where the celebrated sleuth's brains are pitted against those of a most diabolically cunning and elusive villain. (Summary by LadyMaria)

  Show book

• 

  The Murder at the Vicarage - A...

  Agatha Christie

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The first Miss Marple mystery, one which testsall her powers of observation and deduction. 
  “Anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe,”declared the parson, brandishing a carving knifeabove a joint of roast beef, “would be doing theworld at large a favor!” 
  It was a careless remark for a man of the cloth. Andone which was to come back and haunt the clergymanjust a few hours later—when the Colonel isfound shot dead in the clergyman’s study. But asMiss Marple soon discovers, the whole village seemsto have had a motive to kill Colonel Protheroe.

  Show book

• 

  According to Queeney - A Novel

  Beryl Bainbridge

  • 0
  • 1
  • 0

  This historical novel set during the eighteenth century recounts the tumultuous final years of famed English lexicographer and poet Samuel Johnson. In 1764, Britain’s greatest man of letters—the writer of the first English dictionary—shut himself in his room and refused to come out. Exhausted from working on an edition of Shakespeare’s plays, Samuel Johnson had fallen into a deep depression. He refused to eat and only opened his door to cry out incomprehensible phrases or empty his chamber pot. Finally, a priest was able to lure the scholar out of confinement, and, as he did, Johnson’s friend Henry Thrales arrived. Shocked by Johnson’s fit of madness, Thrales promptly whisked the man away for recuperation at a country mansion south of London.   Thus began one of the happiest periods of Johnson’s life. At the Thrales residence in Streatham, Johnson regained his sanity and engaged in family life. He selected books for the estate’s library, joked around at parties, and became close to Thrales’s wife, Hester. But as the years passed, the affection between Johnson and Hester developed into a dark romantic affair, the Thrales’s daughter grew up and became aware of her mother’s emotional unavailability, and Johnson’s passions and eccentricities led to cumbersome moral and spiritual dilemmas.   With chapter titles taken from entries in Johnson’s legendary dictionary, lauded British author Beryl Bainbridge paints a well-rounded portrait of an extraordinary man and his all-too-human experiences. Written from the perspective of the Thrales’s daughter, According to Queeney heightens fact with fiction, sincerity with irony, and humor with despair. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, it is a captivating account of the Georgian era, lending modern insight to British history.  

  Show book

• 

  In the Shape of a Boar

  Lawrence Norfolk

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  “One of the year’s most imaginative and challenging novels” from the acclaimed author of John Saturnall’s Feast (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).   Lawrence Norfolk’s In the Shape of a Boar is a juggernaut of a novel, an epic tour de force of love and betrayal, ancient myths and modern horrors. The story begins in the ancient world of mythic Greece, where a dark tale of treachery and destructive love unfolds amid the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon—a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of World War II, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer on a mission of vengeance. After the war, a young Jewish Romanian refugee, Solomon Memel, who was among the hunters will create a poem based on the experience, which becomes an international literary sensation. But the truth of what happened in the hills of Kalydon in 1945 is more complicated than it seems, and as the older Sol reunites with his childhood love in 1970s Paris, the dark memories and horrors of those days will emerge anew.   “An epic achievement . . . stitching together classical Greek culture and twentieth-century barbarism, the nature of human evil and the ambiguity of storytelling itself . . . Dazzling.”—San Francisco Chronicle   “Brilliant and exhaustively researched . . . In the Shape of a Boar is a Herculean task accomplished with bravado and style, but more than that, it’s storytelling of the highest echelon.”—The Hartford Courant   “Wonderfully complex . . . a fascinating story built from layered narrative lines.”—The Washington Post Book World

  Show book

• 

  Prince Edward - A Novel

  Dennis McFarland

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The profound coming-of-age story of a young boy growing up in rural Virginia, and the historic summer that would change his life foreverDuring the summer of 1959, Virginia’s Prince Edward County is entirely consumed by passionate resistance against, and in other corners, support for, the desegregation of schools as mandated by Brown v. Board of Education. Benjamin Rome, the ten-year-old son of a chicken farmer in one of the county’s small townships, struggles to comprehend the furor that surrounds him, even as he understands the immorality of racial prejudice. Within his own family, opinions are sharply divided, and it is against this charged backdrop that Ben spends the summer working with his friend Burghardt, a black farmhand, under the predatory gaze of Ben’s grandfather.While the elders of Prince Edward focus on closing the schools, life ambles on, and Ben grows closer to his pregnant sister, Lainie, and his troubled older brother, Al, while also coming to recognize the painful and inherent limitations of his friendship with Burghardt.Evocative and written with lush historical detail, Prince Edward is a refreshing bildungsroman by bestselling author Dennis McFarland, and a striking portrait of the social upheaval in the American South on the eve of the civil rights movement.

  Show book

• 

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Thomas Keneally

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Set in a remote British penal colony in the late eighteenth century, Bring Larks and Heroes explores the early years of European settlement of desperate men and corrupt soldiers to Australia, the world’s end. Corporal Phelim Halloran, an honest man, poet and lover, attempts to make a home for himself while confronting the demands of his secret bride, a convict-artist, his Irish comrades, and his own conscience. Can he overcome the hellish, sun-parched landscape to believe in something greater than his own existence?  

  Show book