Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
The Betrothed - From the Italian of Alessandro Manzoni - cover

The Betrothed - From the Italian of Alessandro Manzoni

Alessandro Manzoni

Publisher: DigiCat

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

The Betrothed is a novel by Alessandro Manzoni. Renzo and Lucia are two young paramours barred from marrying by a tyrant. Ruthlessly separated, they encounter perils including plague, famine and captivity.
Available since: 05/28/2022.
Print length: 451 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • The Toss of a Lemon - A Novel - cover

    The Toss of a Lemon - A Novel

    Padma Viswanathan

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A “superbly done” novel of a woman, her family, and a village in India that “makes a vanished world feel completely authentic” (Booklist).   Sivakami was married at ten, widowed at eighteen, and left with two children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she puts on widow’s whites. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband’s house to raise her children. There, her servant Muchami, a closeted gay man who is bound by a different caste’s rules, becomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together through the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too; Sivakami’s son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld. The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family.
    Show book
  • The Somme - Also Including The Coward - cover

    The Somme - Also Including The...

    A. D. Gristwood

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Two World War I classics: The story of a British soldier enduring the battle in France and a novella starring a man who takes drastic steps to escape the Great War.The million British dead have left no books behind. What they felt as they died hour by hour in the mud, or were choked horribly with gas, or relinquished their reluctant lives on stretchers, no witness tells. But here is a book that almost tells it. . . . Mr. Gristwood has had the relentless simplicity to recall things as they were; he was as nearly dead as he could be without dying, and he has smelt the stench of his own corruption. This is the story of millions of men—of millions.” —H. G. Wells In The Somme and its companion The Coward, first published in 1927, the heroics of war and noble self-sacrifice are completely absent, replaced by the gritty realism of life for the ordinary soldier in World War I and an unflinching portrayal of the horrors of war. Written under the guidance of master storyteller H. G. Wells, they are classics of the genre. Based on A. D. Gristwood’s own wartime experiences, The Somme revolves around a futile attack during the 1916 Somme campaign. On the battlefront, Tom Everitt is wounded and must be moved back through a series of dressing stations to the General Hospital at Rouen. Few other accounts of the war give such an accurate picture of trench life, and The Spectator praised Gristwood’s “very effective writing,” calling The Somme “a book which anyone who was not in the War should read.”The Coward concerns a man who shoots himself in the hand to escape the chaos during the March 1918 retreat—an offense punishable by death—and is haunted by fear of discovery and self-loathing. Together, these works offer a vivid, immersive view of the First World War and the suffering it inflicted on the men who fought it.
    Show book
  • My Uncle Jules - cover

    My Uncle Jules

    Guy de Maupassant

    • 0
    • 1
    • 0
    "An impoverished French family awaits the prodigal return of their long vanished Uncle Jules from his travels in America.From his letters it would appear that he has made his fortune and when he returns the family hopes their fortunes will change too.A boat trip to Jersey provides the opporunity for a reunion...but nobody could anticipate the twist in events."
    Show book
  • Crane Pond - A Novel of Salem - cover

    Crane Pond - A Novel of Salem

    Richard Francis

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    This novel of the Salem Witch Trials from the point of view of a judge is “leavened with wit [and] finely crafted” (Kirkus Reviews).   In a colony struggling for survival, in a mysterious new world where infant mortality is high and sin is to blame, Samuel Sewall is committed to being a loving family man, a good citizen, and a fair-minded judge. Like any believing Puritan, he agonizes over what others think of him, while striving to act morally correct, keep the peace, and, when possible, enjoy a hefty slice of pie. His one regret is that months earlier, he didn’t sentence a group of pirates to death.   What begins as a touching story of a bumbling man tasked with making judgments in a society where reason is often ephemeral quickly becomes the chilling narrative we know too well. And when public opinion wavers, Sewall learns that what has been done cannot be undone.  Crane Pond explores the inner life of a well-meaning man who compromised with evil and went on to regret it. At once a searing view of the Trials, an empathetic portrait of one of the period’s most tragic figures, and an indictment of the malevolent power of idealism, it is a thrilling new telling of one of America’s founding stories.   “[Crane Pond] goes straight on to my (small) list of historical novels that draw out the capacities of the form and allow readers to brush against the pleasures and terrors of the past.” —Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall   “Deftly crafted . . . perfectly balances issues of religion, faith, and law.” —Library Journal
    Show book
  • The Edge of Lost - cover

    The Edge of Lost

    Kristina McMorris

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    On a cold night in October 1937, searchlights cut through the darkness around Alcatraz. A prison guard's only daughter-one of the youngest civilians who lives on the island-has gone missing. Tending the warden's greenhouse, convicted bank robber Tommy Capello waits anxiously. Only he knows the truth about the little girl's whereabouts, and that both of their lives depend on the search's outcome.Almost two decades earlier and thousands of miles away, a young boy named Shanley Keagan ekes out a living as an aspiring vaudevillian in Dublin pubs. Talented and shrewd, Shan dreams of shedding his dingy existence and finding his real father in America. The chance finally comes to cross the Atlantic, but when tragedy strikes, Shan must summon all his ingenuity to forge a new life in a volatile and foreign world.Skillfully weaving these two stories, Kristina McMorris delivers a compelling novel that moves from Ireland to New York to San Francisco Bay. As her finely crafted characters discover the true nature of loyalty, sacrifice, and betrayal, they are forced to confront the lies we tell-and believe-in order to survive.
    Show book
  • A Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter - cover

    A Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter

    Alice Turner Curtis

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Sylvia Fulton is a ten-years-old girl from Boston who stayed in Charleston, South Carolina, before the opening of the civil war. She loves her new home, and her dear friends. However, political tensions are rising, and things start to change. Through these changes, Silvia gets to know the world better: from Estrella, her maid, she starts to understand what it is to be a slave, from her unjust teacher she learns that not all beautiful people are perfect, and from the messages she carries to Fort Sumter she learns what is the meaning of danger. However, this is a lovely book, written mostly for children.(Summary by Stav Nisser)
    Show book