Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

• 

  Regret - From their pens to your...

  Guy de Maupassant

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5th, 1850 near Dieppe in France.  
  Maupassant’s early life was badly torn when at age 11 (his younger brother Hervé was then five) his mother, Laure, a headstrong and independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace in order to obtain a legal separation from her husband. 
  After the separation, Laure kept custody of her two boys. With the father now forcibly absent, Laure became the most influential and important figure in the young boy's life.   
  Maupassant’s education was such that he rebelled against religion and other societal norms but a developing friendship with Gustave Flaubert began to turn his mind towards creativity and writing. 
  After graduation he volunteered for the Franco-Prussian war. With its end he moved to Paris to work as a clerk in the Navy Department.  Gustave Flaubert now took him under his wing.  Acting as a literary guardian to him, he guided the eager Maupassant to debuts in journalism and literature.  For Maupassant these were exciting times and the awakening of his creative talents and ambitions. 
  In 1880 he published what is considered his first great work, ‘Boule de Suif’, (translated as as ‘Dumpling’, ‘Butterball’, ‘Ball of Fat’, or ‘Ball of Lard’) which met with a success that was both instant and overwhelming.  Flaubert at once acknowledged that it was ‘a masterpiece that will endure.’ Maupassant had used his talents and experiences in the war to create something unique.  
  This decade from 1880 to 1891 was to be the most pivotal of his career.  With an audience now made available by the success of ‘Boule de Suif’ Maupassant organised himself to work methodically and relentlessly to produce between two and four volumes of work a year.  The melding of his talents and business sense and the continual hunger of sources for his works made him wealthy. 
  In his later years he developed a desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death as well as a paranoia of persecution caused by the syphilis he had contracted in his youth.  
  On January 2nd, 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat.  Unsuccessful he was committed to the private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris.  It was here on July 6th, 1893 that Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant died at the age of only 42.

  Mostra libro

• 

  Shirley

  Charlotte Brontë

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  "I believe in the spirit of the age; it is a spirit of progress, though its path is often through blood."
  
  Set in Yorkshire during the turbulent years of 1811–1812, Shirley is Charlotte Brontë's most ambitious social novel. Against a backdrop of the Luddite riots and the economic strangulation of the Napoleonic Wars, the story weaves together the lives of two very different women: the shy, repressed Caroline Helstone and the vibrant, independent heiress Shirley Keeldar.
  
  The Clash of Progress and Tradition: At the heart of the crisis is Robert Moore, a mill owner whose determination to modernize his factory puts him at odds with his starving workers. As tensions escalate into violent attacks on the mill, the characters are forced to navigate a world of shifting loyalties, class warfare, and the harsh realities of the Industrial Revolution.
  
  A Masterpiece of Shared Experience: While Jane Eyre focused on the individual, Shirley explores the power of community and the "Woman Question." Brontë masterfully portrays the bond between Shirley and Caroline as they challenge the restrictive roles imposed upon them by society. It is a novel of intellectual depth and political passion, blending gritty historical realism with a poignant search for personal fulfillment.
  
  Witness the birth of the modern world through the eyes of two unforgettable women. Purchase "Shirley" today and experience Brontë's most expansive historical drama.

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Shell of Sense

  Olivia Howard Dunbar

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  First published in Harper’s Magazine in 1908, The Shell of Sense is a quietly devastating supernatural tale that explores what remains of love, jealousy, and moral awareness after death. 
  Newly released from the physical world, a woman finds herself lingering invisibly within her former home—watching, thinking, feeling with an unnerving clarity she never possessed in life. As she observes her husband and her sister moving through grief, tenderness, and unspoken devotion, she begins to understand how limited her living perceptions once were—and how dangerous her lingering emotions have become. 
  This is not a story of rattling chains or violent hauntings. It is a ghost story of consciousness, of the pain of knowing too much too late, and of the fragile boundaries between possession and love, pity and control. The haunting unfolds through psychological tension and moral reckoning rather than spectacle, culminating in a quiet, transcendent release that reframes loss, loyalty, and forgiveness. 
  Narrated with restraint and emotional intelligence by Myriam Berger, The Shell of Sense is a luminous Edwardian meditation on perception beyond death—a haunting of conscience rather than place, and a classic of literary supernatural fiction that lingers long after it ends.

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll...

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson is a classic gothic novella exploring the both the good and evil sides of human nature. 
   
   Seeking to isolate his darker impulses, Dr. Jekyll develops a potion.  Drinking it transforms him into Edward Hyde - a smaller, younger, and purely evil persona.  Jekyll enjoys the freedom of being Hyde, who commits violent acts, such as trampling a child and murdering Sir Danvers Carew. Jekyll maintains a separate home for Hyde. 
   
  Jekyll finds himself turning into Hyde involuntarily, even without the potion. The potion begins to lose its effectiveness, as the salt used for it was impure.  Hyde takes over completely, and Jekyll locks himself in his laboratory, eventually running out of the necessary ingredients for the potion. 
   
  Jekyll loses control as Hyde takes over fully, leading them both to their deaths.

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Chaplet of Pearls

  Charlotte M. Yonge

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  France, 1572: an English boy and a French girl are married as children to settle a lawsuit, and meet again as strangers in Paris in the week of St Bartholomew. Yonge lived her whole life in one Hampshire village and taught Sunday school for seventy-one years; she read the massacre in the sources and wrote it without either side becoming a monster, which is harder than it sounds and rarer than it should be.

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Only Husband

  H. C. Bailey

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A family breakfast. A casual remark — "the only husband I ever had." And a man whose heart, by lunchtime, will have stopped for reasons that have nothing to do with his heart.
  Reggie Fortune doesn't investigate. He drawls, he sighs, he says "my dear chap" — and somewhere underneath all that languor, he's already counting the lies.
  There were two victims that morning. Only one of them was found in the wood.
  H.C. Bailey at his most deceptively gentle — and his most precise.

  Mostra libro