Publisher: Jules verne
This book is a sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. A party of British adventurers, who had been ballooning, but whose trip had ended by being cast away on a Pacific island, have various setbacks due to both pirates and convicts who had escaped from jails in mainland Australasia.
London businessman Mr. Bedford is broke. He retreats to a beautifully mundane area of the British countryside to focus on writing a play, which he hopes will bring him financial success. By a stroke of luck, Mr. Bedford quickly reaches new heights…just not in the way he anticipated. Mr. Bedford’s countryside retreat is interrupted by a peculiar physicist named Mr. Cavor, who is developing an anti-gravity material called cavorite. The unlikely pair sets sight on the moon and begins planning the first ever lunar expedition. Mr. Bedford sees it as a lucrative business venture. Mr. Cavor sees it as a chance for recognition in his field. But when they are captured by an alien species, they must face a more pressing matter: Will they make it back to earth alive? From the father of science fiction H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon transports readers to distant worlds while ultimately shedding light on our own human nature and civilization as we know it.Show book
Legends tell of an ancient sorceress who has learned the secrets of immortality. She rules over a lost people deep in unexplored Africa. She can slay at a glance, and her beauty is so legendary that no man can look upon her and keep his own will. Leo Vincey learns of a quest that has haunted his family for generations. He is to go to find this all powerful woman, and discover the secret of eternal lifeShow book
In Mrs. Podgers' Teapot, an old woman and her boarder take in an orphan on a cold winter's night. The child's natural spirit of generosity moves Mrs. Podgers, and helps her find true happiness at Christmas.Show book
The Ramsey family, with house guests, visit the Isle of Skye at least twice. The plot is not at all the point though, as this is a book about how people think and feel and relate. There’s insight into the world of childhood thought and emotion, and a variety of views of adult care and perceptions. I hope this doesn’t make it sound ‘difficult’, it doesn’t need to be – just let the sentences flow and make your own sense of the words. It’s perhaps as close as a novel can come to the highly individual experience of looking at a painting. Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in using stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement. Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work.Show book
The Club of Queer Trades is a collection of stories by G. K. Chesterton first published in 1905. Each story in the collection is centered on a person who is making his living by some novel and extraordinary means (a "queer trade", using the word "queer" in the sense of "peculiar"). To gain admittance one must have invented a unique means of earning a living and the subsequent trade being the main source of income.Show book
M.R. James (1862-1936) was provost of King's College, Cambridge and Eton College. He was a highly regarded scholar and academic in his time but today is remembered for his ghost stories which are considered among the finest in the genre. Here is one of them: The Tractate Middoth.Public Domain (P)2016 Spiders' House Audio/Roy MacreadyShow book
