Other books that might interest you

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  Bernice Bobs Her Hair

  F Scott itzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  His classic ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ carefully pulls apart the relationship between two cousins one hot summer.  Something has to give and with Fitzgerald its an absolute certainty that the brittle lives of young women finally snap in unique ways.

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  The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

  Victor Hugo

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  The Hunchback of Notre-Dame or Notre-Dame de Paris is a French Gothic novel by Victor Hugo, published in 1831.The story is set in Paris in 1482 during the reign of Louis XI. The gypsy Esmeralda (born as Agnes) captures the hearts of many men, including those of Captain Phoebus and Pierre Gringoire, but especially Quasimodo and his guardian Archdeacon Claude Frollo. Frollo is torn between his obsessive lust for Esmeralda and the rules of Notre Dame Cathedral. He orders Quasimodo to kidnap her, but Quasimodo is captured by Phoebus and his guards, who save Esmeralda. Gringoire, who attempted to help Esmeralda but was knocked out by Quasimodo, is about to be hanged by beggars when Esmeralda saves him by agreeing to marry him for four years.

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  Treasure Island

  Robert Louis Stevenson

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  A mysterious map, pirates, and pieces of eight! When young Jim Hawkins finds a map to pirates' gold he starts on an adventure that takes him from his English village to a desert island with the murderous Black Dog, half-mad Ben Gunn, and (of course) Long John Silver. Arr Jim lad! R.L. Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Scotland and travelled extensively in California and the south Pacific.An Author's Republic audio production.

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  Mystery Tales - Edgar Allan Poe...

  Edgar Allan Poe, Herbert Keen,...

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  Mystery Tales - Short Stories 
   
   
  Track List:The Purloined Letter - Edgar Allan PoeThe Tin Box - Herbert KeenThe Man who was not on the Passenger List - Robert Barr    

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  Count of Monte Cristo The -...

  Alexandre Dumas

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  Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas' epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.VOLUME 4: Two days after, a considerable crowd was assembled, towards ten o'clock in the morning, around the door of M. de Villefort's house, and a long file of mourning-coaches and private carriages extended along the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Rue de la Pépinière.

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  Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  In Edgar Allan Poe's short and turbulent life, he laid the groundwork for the genre of modern horror and, almost as an aside, invented the modern detective story. This collection brings together Poe's most popular short stories and poems, listed below:The Masque of the Red DeathBereniceThe Fall of the House of UsherThe Murders in the Rue MorgueThe Black CatThe Pit and The PendulumThe Tell-Tale HeartEleonoraThe Oval PortraitHop-FrogLigeiaThe SphinxThe Cask of AmontilladoThe Premature BurialThe Raven, Annabel Lee, The Bells & seven other poems 
  Narrated by Jake Urry, each story has its place in the history of dark fiction, and went on to inspire authors including Dostoevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne.

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