Other books that might interest you

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  Ape and Essence - A Novel

  Aldous Huxley

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  When Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first appeared in 1932, it presented in terms of purest fantasy a society bent on self-destruction. Few of its outraged critics anticipated the onset of another world war with its Holocaust and atomic ruin. In 1948, seeing that the probable shape of his anti-utopia had been altered inevitably by the facts of history, Huxley wrote Ape and Essence. In this savage novel, using the form of a film scenario, he transports us to the year 2108. The setting is Los Angeles where a "rediscovery expedition" from New Zealand is trying to make sense of what is left. From chief botanist Alfred Poole we learn, to our dismay, about the twenty-second-century way of life.

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  Little Match Girl The - Story...

  Hans Christian Andersen

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  "The Little Match Girl" (Danish: Den Lille Pige med Svovlstikkerne, meaning "The little girl with the matchsticks") is a short story by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen. The story, about a dying child's dreams and hope, was first published in 1845. It has been adapted to various media, including an animated short film, a television musical, and an animated virtual reality story called "Allumette". On a cold New Year's Eve, a poor, young girl tries to sell matches in the street. She is already shivering from cold and early hypothermia, and she is walking barefoot having lost her too large slippers. Still, she is too afraid to go home, because her father will beat her for not selling any matches, and also as the many cracks in their shack can't keep out the cold wind. The girl takes shelter in a nook or alley and sits down...

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  August Heat - From their pens to...

  W F Harvey

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  William Fryer Harvey AM was born on 14th April 1885 into a wealthy Quaker family in Leeds, West Yorkshire. 
  He was educated at the Quaker Bootham School in Yorkshire and Leighton Park School in Reading before university at Balliol College, Oxford.  
  His health was fragile and he poured his energies into writing short stories and in 1910 published his first collection ‘Midnight House’. 
  In the Great War he was with the Friends' Ambulance Unit and then served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy.  There he received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving but lung damage received at that time troubled him for the rest of his life. 
  He continued to write short stories, and even a memoir, but by 1925 ill health had forced his retirement to any outside work.  Three years later he published his second collection which contained his macabre classic ‘The Beast with Five fingers’, only one more collection would come from his pen in his lifetime. 
  For many years of his life he now lived in Switzerland with his wife but a yearning to be home saw them come back to England in 1935. 
  W F Harvey died in Letchworth on the 4th June 1937. He was 52.

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  The Philistine - A touching...

  E M Delafield

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  Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture, and more commonly known as E M Delafield, was born in Steyning, Sussex on 9th June 1890.   
   
  Raised in the fading years of the Victorian era with its Empire and strict moral codes Delafield, not yet married at twenty-one, joined a French religious order, in Belgium, but soon decided that this was a totally wrong choice for her.   
   
  Her next challenge was her work during the horror of the First World War.  Delafield decided to take up a position as a nurse in a Voluntary Aid Detachment in Exeter.  It was whilst here that she managed to write her first novel, ‘Zella Sees Herself’.   
   
  With the end of the war new opportunities were sought and she now took up a position for the South-West Region of the Ministry of National Service in Bristol.  With it came enough time to write two more novels: ‘The War Workers’ (1918) and ‘The Pelicans’ (1918).   
   
  On 17th July 1919, she married Colonel Arthur Paul Dashwood, OBE, an engineer responsible for building the massive docks at Hong Kong Harbour.  The marriage produced two children; Lionel and Rosamund.  That same year her fourth novel, ‘Consequences’, was published.   
   
  The couple spent their early years in Malaya but returned to England to live in Croyle, an old house in Kentisbeare, Devon.  Delafield continued to collect responsibilities and organise whatever she could.  At the initial meeting of the Kentisbeare Women's Institute, Delafield was unanimously elected president, and also became a Justice of the Peace, raised the children and, of course, continued to write her best-selling novels.   
   
  Her greatest work is undoubtedly the largely autobiographical ‘Diary of a Provincial Lady’, which is a simply structured journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman, living mostly in a Devon village of the 1930s.  It spawned several best-selling sequels.  Her works also includes stage and radio plays, film scripts and short stories.  
   
  After the death of her son in 1940, her health began to markedly decline.    
   
  E M Delafield died on 2nd December 1943 after collapsing whilst giving a lecture in Oxford.  She was 53.

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  Marriage à la Mode

  Katherine Mansfield

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  Marriage à la Mode is a 1921 short story by Katherine Mansfield. It was first published in The Sphere on 31 December 1921, and later reprinted in The Garden Party and Other Stories. - The title is a play on the phrase mariage à la mode in French, which means 'fashionable marriage'.
  William would usually buy his children sweets because he knows his wife won't let him buy them 'big donkeys and engines', as that would be unseemly. This time he buys fruit instead.

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  Fair Exchange and No Robbery...

  L. M. Montgomery

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  Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874 - April 24, 1942), published as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. The book was an immediate success. The title character, orphan Anne Shirley, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following.
  Fair Exchange and No Robbery: Katherine Rangely was packing up. Her chum and roommate, Edith Wilmer, was sitting on the bed watching her in that calm disinterested fashion peculiarly maddening to a bewildered packer.

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