Other books that might interest you

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  The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

  H.P. Lovecraft

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  In a world beyond the walls of sleep, Randolph Carter goes in search of an opulent and mysterious sunset city. First, he must go to Kadath, home of the Gods, where he hopes to be guided to the city of his dreams. No one has ever been to Kadath, and no one even knows how to get there – but that won't stop Carter from trying. In this masterful adaptation of Lovecraft's classic novella, I. N. J. Culbard captures Carter's journey through the dangerous and spectacular Dreamlands in beautiful, gripping detail

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  Around the World in Eighty Days...

  Jules Verne

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  Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne is an adventure classic. The main character is Phileas Fogg, a rich British gentleman living in solitude. Despite his wealth, Fogg lives a modest life with habits carried out with mathematical precision. Very little can be said about his social life other than that he is a member of the Reform Club. Having dismissed his former valet, James Forster, for bringing him shaving water at 84 °F (29 °C) instead of 86 °F (30 °C), Fogg hires a Frenchman, Jean Passepartout as a replacement. At the Reform Club, Fogg gets involved in an argument over an article in The Daily Telegraph stating that with the opening of a new railway section in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in 80 days. He accepts a wager for £20,000 (equal to about £1.6 million in 2015) from his fellow club members to complete such a journey within this time period.

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  The Lifted Veil

  George Eliot

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  Mary Anne Evans was born on 22nd November 1819 at Nuneaton in Warwickshire, England, 
   
  As a child she was a committed reader and brimmed with intelligence. Her father felt that her lack of physical beauty might not bring her the best selection of suitors in marriage and therefore thought a good education, rarely afforded to women at the time, might be the best path for her. 
   
  From the age of five to nine, she boarded with her sister at Miss Latham's school in Attleborough, and then Mrs. Wallington's school in Nuneaton, until she was thirteen, and it was to be Miss Franklin's school in Coventry until she was sixteen.  
   
  In 1835 her mother died and she returned home to keep house for her father and her siblings, and with it the cessation of her formal education. 
   
  Over the next decade she nurtured her literary ambitions but doubts on religious faith brought tensions with her father who was not enamored at the free-willed liberals she was associating with. 
   
  Despite this her first major literary work was completing an English translation of Strauss's ‘The Life of Jesus’ in 1846. 
   
  Her father died in 1849 and Eliot was able to begin a new life.  After a few months in Geneva she moved to London to work at the Westminster Review where she published many articles and essays.  In 1851 Mary Anne or Marian, as she liked to be called, met George Henry Lewes, and in 1854 they moved in together; a somewhat scandalous situation as he was already married.    
   
  Her view on literature had taken some time to coalesce but with the publication of parts of ‘Scenes From A Clerical Life’ in 1858 she knew she wanted to be a novelist.   
   
  Under the pseudonym of George Eliot that we know so well ‘Adam Bede’ was published in 1859 followed by her other great novels; ‘Mill on the Floss’, ‘Silas Marner’ and ‘Middlemarch’.         
   
  Her talents also extended to both small canons of poetry and short stories. 
   
  ‘The Lifted Veil’ is a both a beautiful story and typical of Eliot’s formidable powers of writing. 
   
  George Eliot died on 22nd December 1880 at Chelsea in London. She was 61.  She is buried at Highgate Cemetery.

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  The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Oscar Wilde

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  Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the authors most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novels corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray's relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be in other ages, perhaps.

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  The Giraffe Problem

  Barry Pain

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  Barry Pain (1864-1928) was an English journalist, poet, and writer, best known as a writer of parody and lightly humorous stories.The Giraffe Problem tells the story of an evening at the Problem Club, a secret society of gentlemen in London who meet once a month in a private room above a restaurant, where one of the waiters is the admirable Leonard. Every month Leonard sets the members a problem or challenge. The one who is able to complete the feat successfully wins that month's share of the membership fees.In this tale, Leonard's challenge involves inducing an unwitting woman spontaneously to utter the words: "You ought to have been a giraffe". Which of the gentlemen will be able to do this...and in what circumstances?

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  A Duchess's Secret

  Andrew Lang

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  In 'A Duchess's Secret', a young novelist is in the process of serialising a racy novel in the Fleet Street Magazine. It tells the story of a Duchess who murders her husband by giving him cheap sherry, in the knowledge that his constitution will not stand such rough liquor. The author is surprised to find a mysterious advertisement in the personal column of The Times which addresses the author of the sherry story and exhorts him to contact a certain firm of solicitors. On making enquiries, the author is invited to a remote stately home to stay with a genuine mysterious duchess who also harbours a guilty secret.

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