Other books that might interest you

• 

  Terrifying Love - A Halloween...

  Helle Gade, Victoria Larque,...

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Come on a journey filled with witches, ghosts, hunters, and more. Our authors will thrill you, chill and keep you on the edge of your seat while keeping you reading well into the night.  
  Meet an artist who brings her creations to life, creatures who can save your soul, a desperate healer fighting to save humanity and a contemporary thriller involving fraud and murder and a cursed sailor looking for the reincarnation of his lost love - and these are just some of the stories contained within. 
  Join us on a voyage through the works of our wonderful authors and get a taste for their amazing talent in this collection of romance stories featuring scary encounters, obstacles, and chilling moments where we discern how love can conquer all. 
  Each story is accompanied by a poem written by award-winning poet - Helle Gade. 
  Included in this collection: 
  The Lighthouse by Elizabeth G. Ellis 
  Runes and Fangs by Victoria Larque 
  Imaginary Friends by Boris Bacic 
  The Spade and the Patio by Ada Rossi 
  Bloody Money by Annelie Janssen 
  Affliction by Cassandra Lyle

  Show book

• 

  Reckless Charity - A Charity...

  Wayne Stinnett

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Charity Styles is a world class sharpshooter, martial arts expert, and government assassin...but after a stressful assignment, all she wants is a little time to unwind on the quiet side of St. Thomas, the picturesque Magens Bay. 
  What does she get? A hurricane, an ex, drug dealers, a psychotic murderer, an amorous developer, and forced to stay in the rowdy tourist town of Charlotte-Amalie. Naturally. 
  By the time she sails Wind Dancer back to her beloved Magens Beach, a storm is brewing that threatens to displace her again, but this is a man-made storm and Charity has had all she can take. She's stressed and reckless and not even her friends can hold her in check as she takes on a fight that could change her future and the future of those she cares for.

  Show book

• 

  Bobok - From their pens to your...

  Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow on 11th November, 1821 to distinguished multi-ethnic parents from a Lithuanian background.  
  His childhood years were at the family home in hospital grounds which also contained an orphanage, an insane asylum and a cemetery for criminals.  The young Fyodor often disobeyed his father by talking to the ill in the hospital gardens.   
  His health was compromised at age 9 when he experienced his first epileptic fit. By the time he was a teenager both parents had died and he was now enrolled in a military academy where he graduated and eventually became a Lieutenant in 1842.  He left military service the next year. 
  In 1846 he published his first novel ‘Poor Cow’ to great literary acclaim.  His next was unable to emulate that success but his short stories helped provide an income.  Life as an author was definitely difficult. As he began his next work he was arrested and incarcerated for treason and participation in the political and literary Petrashevsky Circle. Although the case was weak and unjustified he was sentenced to 4 years of hard labour followed by 5 years of military service in a Siberian regiment.  
  Despite the undoubted hardships and setbacks in his life, and whether they helped or hindered his writing, his talents produced many exceptional works of literature including ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘The Idiot’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’.   
  Dostoevsky’s ability to get under the skin of his characters and show the inner workings of their mind was hugely influential and ahead of its time.  Interwoven with this was the influence of the broader social, spiritual and political forces at work in a person's psyche.   
  Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled financially and remained in poor health for much of his adult life.  He died from a lung haemorrhage on 9th February, 1881.

  Show book

• 

  Po' Sandy

  Charles W. Chesnutt

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  "Po' Sandy" is a second short story from The Conjure Woman, was published in The Atlantic in 1888.  It follows the same frame narrative as the previous one with Julius McAdoo advising John against following through with his plans of demolishing a schoolhouse to build a kitchen. In this short story, Sandy is an enslaved man owned by Mars Marrabo McSwayne, who sends Sandy to travel to help friends and families. During one of Sandy's trips, McSwayne sells Sandy's wife and replaces her for another woman named Tenie. Over time, Sandy and Tenie develop a relationship, at which point Tenie reveals to Sandy that she was a conjure woman for some time in her life. With this information, the couple decides that they will turn Sandy into a tree so that he no longer has to travel and turn him back into a person from time to time. However, as McAdoo relates, one day McSwayne decides to have the tree cut down to build floorboards in his kitchen, ending the life of Sandy. Afterwards, other enslaved people claimed that they heard groans and moans coming from the floor, resulting in the belief that the building was haunted. This led to the kitchen being demolished, of which lumber was used to build the schoolhouse that John wishes to dismantle to build a kitchen in its place. After hearing the haunted story from McAdoo, Annie dissuades John from dismantling the schoolhouse to build the kitchen and leaves it alone.

  Show book

• 

  A Saga of the Seas - From their...

  Kenneth Grahame

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Kenneth Grahame was born on 8th March 1859 in Edinburgh. 
  At age 5 his mother succumbed to puerperal fever.  His father, who had a drinking problem, now sent his 4 children to live with their grandmother at her large house in Cookham, Berkshire. Here the children lived in large open grounds next to the river.  These early experiences would in later years, be retold in his writing through a myriad of characters. 
  Grahame loved being a pupil at St Edward's School, Oxford and wanted to enroll at the university there but his guardian demurred on account of the cost. 
  Instead, a banking career was chosen for him, starting in 1879 at the Bank of England, where he rose steadily to the rank of its Secretary until retiring, with a pension, in 1908 due to ill health. 
  Alongside his commercial career Grahame had written and published various stories and essays in several periodicals. Some were anthologized as ‘Pagan Papers’ in 1893, and two years later ‘The Golden Age’ and later still ‘Dream Days’ and its masterpiece ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ became part of many home libraries.  His ability to view life through the lens of a young and curious child was superb, enabling the reader to easily identify with the character.   
  Grahame married Elspeth Thomson in 1899 and they had one child; Alastair, born semi-blind and plagued by health problems.  In a heart-rending tragedy he would later take his own life whilst attending Oxford University in 1920.   
  In 1908 Grahame reworked many of the bedtime stories he had fashioned for his son into the enduring favourite; ‘The Wind in the Willows’, describing the heart-warming adventures of Mr Toad and his friends.   
  Kenneth Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire, on 6th July 1932.

  Show book

• 

  The Facts in the Case of...

  Edgar Allan Poe

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Edgar Poe was born in Boston Massachusetts on 19th January 1809. His father abandoned his family the following year and within a year his mother had died leaving him an orphan.   
  He was taken in by the Allan family but never formally adopted although he now referred to himself as Edgar Allan Poe.  His father alternatively spoiled or chastised him and tension was frequent over gambling debts and monies for his education.  His university years to study ancient and modern languages was cut short by lack of money and he enlisted as a private in the army claiming he was 22, it is more probable he was 18. After 2 years he obtained a discharge in order to take up an appointment at the military academy, West Point, where he failed to become an officer. 
  Poe had released his 1st poetry volume in 1827 and after his 3rd turned to prose and placing short stories in several magazines and journals.  At age 26 he obtained a licence to marry his cousin.  She was a mere 13 but they stayed together until her death from tuberculosis 11 years after. 
  In January 1845 ‘The Raven’ was published and became an instant classic.  Thereafter followed the prose works for which he is now so rightly famed as a master of the mysterious and the macabre. 
  Edgar Allan Poe died at the tragically early age of 40 on 7th October 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland. Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as ‘congestion of the brain’ or ‘cerebral inflammation’, common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism but the actual cause of death remains a mystery.

  Show book