Other books that might interest you

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  The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Oscar Wilde

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  The Picture of Dorian Gray, first published in 1890,  is still one of the most riveting novels ever written. The genius plot has everything to capture and hold the imagination, from lust, debauchery and doomed romance though blackmail, murder and the disastrous effect of a morally depraved French novel. That’s not even counting the visits to the opium den, the addiction, the stalking or the string of deaths — accidental or self-inflicted. 
   The characters are likewise intriguing in their extreme expression of hedonism, vanity, callous indifference and a host of other sins. But it is the relentless accumulation of evidence on Dorian’s picture which lends the narrative that brooding sense of Gothic horror which renders it so irresistible. 
   Finally, Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece conducts an intertextual conversation with Hamlet, The Tempest, Goethe’s Faust and ‘Against the Grain’, a remarkable 1884 novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

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  The Soldier and the Gentlewoman

  Hilda Vaughan

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  Love and duty in the aftermath of WW1 - 20thC Welsh classic of the Great War

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  Under the lilacs

  Louisa May Alcott

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  "Under the Lilacs" is a novel written by Louisa May Alcott, first published in 1878. The story is set in a small New England town and revolves around two main characters, Ben Brown and his sister Bab, who befriend a runaway circus performer named Bab and a performing dog named Sancho. The narrative explores themes of friendship, imagination, and the innocence of childhood.

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  The Bostonians

  Henry James

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  Henry James’s tragicomic masterpiece pits a headstrong Mississippi lawyer against his feminist cousin in a no-holds-barred fight for the heart of an impressionable young suffragette  When Basil Ransom, a headstrong Mississippi lawyer, comes to Boston to call on his wealthy activist cousin, Olive, an epic battle of wills ensues. Basil is a conservative of the most ardent type while Cousin Olive is steadfast in her radicalism. Perhaps for a laugh, perhaps for a story to tell his lawyer friends back in Mississippi, Basil accompanies Olive to a women’s emancipation rally, whereupon he falls irrevocably in love with a young suffragette, Miss Verena Tarrant, and sets about trying to rewrite her beliefs. The problem is that Olive has been grooming Miss Tarrant as her protégé. Will Basil reform the lovely young activist orator, or will Olive win the young woman’s heart and mind?   Often proclaimed James’s funniest novel and regarded as his most successful political work, The Bostonians deals with love and friendship in the awkward landscape of shifting social roles, feminism in post–Civil War America, and a woman’s place in this brave new world. Funny, astute, and merciless, The Bostonians is one of James’s most successful portrayals of a world teetering between old values and the relentless march of social progress.   This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

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  Charles

  A. J. Alan

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  The story opens with the narrator on his way home from the theatre one evening, when his attention is drawn to a crowd gathered around a road accident in the West End of London. A taxi has hit a pedestrian. Out of the crowd emerges Charles, an old friend, supporting a fainting women. They had been the passengers in the taxi, and Charles now charges the narrator with seeing the lady home.This is the start of a highly eventful evening, in which the husband of the woman dies in a mysterious manner and the two of them agree to collude over the evidence to be given at the inquest. The most important thing, however, is to keep Charles's name out of it.

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  The Gambler

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  In this dark and compelling short novel, Dostoevsky tells the story of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young tutor working in the household of an imperious Russian general. Alexey tries to break through the wall of the established order in Russia, but instead becomes mired in the endless downward spiral of betting and loss. His intense and inescapable addiction is accentuated by his affair with the General’s cruel yet seductively adept niece, Polina. In The Gambler, Dostoevsky reaches the heights of drama with this stunning psychological portrait. 
   
  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart and his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction. He is commonly regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived, penning works including four long novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. His ideas profoundly shaped literary modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology, and literary criticism. His works are often called prophetic because he accurately predicted how Russia’s revolutionaries would behave if they came to power. In his time, he was also renowned for his activity as a journalist.   

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