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  Persuasion (Argo Classics)

  Jane Austen

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  William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first time. 
  An overlooked middle daughter destined to be a spinster. A handsome rejected naval officer. A family on the brink of financial ruin. 
    
  Anne Elliot has never forgotten about the man to whom she was persuaded out of an engagement by her family. When he returns to Anne's life eight years later, will she be able to secure a second chance? 
    
  Narrated by the incredible Prunella Scales, Persuasion is a story of missed opportunities, of family and class systems, love and heartache. 
  For fans of Charlotte Brontë (The Professor), Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), Diane Long Hoeveler (The Castle of Wolfenbach), Rachel Firth (Physics for Beginners), and Gill Hornby (Godmersham Park).

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  Off the Chain (Unabridged)

  H. G. Wells

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  Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, history, satire, biography and autobiography. His work also included two books on recreational war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels and is often called the "father of science fiction", along with Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback.OFF THE CHAIN: (December, 1910) I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren's "Ten Thousand a Year," and noting how much the world can change in seventy years.

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  The Island Of Doctor Moreau

  H. G. Wells

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  H. G. Wells’s science fiction classic: the dark and captivating story of one man’s fight for survival against the lab-made nightmares of a mad scientistShipwrecked and abandoned, Edward Prendick cautiously steps ashore a remote island in the Pacific. Though wary, Prendick is unaware of the horrors that await him here. But what appears at first to be a typical volcanic island slowly reveals itself to be the macabre workshop of maligned London physiologist Dr. Moreau. Moreau’s genius had been celebrated far and wide until the true nature of his work was exposed. Now secluded on his island, Moreau engages unimpeded in gruesome experiments of vivisection, splicing animal and man together in a terrifying display of his dominion over nature. When Prendick realizes he’s slated to be the next subject on Moreau’s grisly surgical table, he flees to the jungle—where all manner of unnatural creatures abound . . .

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  Esprit de Corps - Sketches from...

  Lawrence Durrell

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  A former member of Great Britain’s diplomatic corps, the celebrated author of the Alexandria Quartet offers eleven sketches of life in service of the crown.   After decades spent representing Britain around the globe, Antrobus has earned a shirtful of medals and the right to pass afternoons in his London club, musing over old times. His memory is long, and every old embarrassment still rankles—no matter how ridiculous. The incident with the Yugoslav ghost train, for instance, still causes him to clench his fists in fear. When he speaks of Sir Claud Polk-Mowbray, he takes pains to lower his voice—lest an American hear. And his stomach has never recovered from the incident involving the fried flag. Based on Lawrence Durrell’s own experience in the diplomatic corps, Antrobus’s cutting observation is drawn from the strange and humorous truth. Few are those with a better sense of place than Durrell, and even fewer with wit to match.

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  The Canterville Ghost

  Oscar Wilde

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  This is Oscar Wilde's tale of the American family moved into a British mansion, Canterville Chase, much to the annoyance of its tired ghost. The family—which refuses to believe in him—is in Wilde's way a commentary on the British nobility of the day—and on the Americans, too. The tale, like many of Wilde's, is rich with allusion, but ends as sentimental romance.

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  The Silent Cry - A Novel

  Kenzaburo Oe

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  Two brothers in post-war Japan experience an ideological conflict when they reunite at their family home in this philosophical novel by a Nobel laureate. 
   
  The Silent Cry follows two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested Western Japan. After decades of separation, the reunited men are each preoccupied by their own personal crises. One brother grapples with the recent suicide of his dearest friend, the birth of his disabled son, and his wife’s increasing alcoholism. The other brother sets out to incite an uprising among the local youth against the disintegration of the community’s culture and economy due to the imposing franchise of a Korean businessman nicknamed the “Emperor of the Supermarkets.” Both brothers live in the shadow of the mysteries surrounding the untimely deaths of their older brother and younger sister, as well as their great-grandfather’s political heroism. When long-kept family secrets are revealed, the brothers’ strained bond is pushed to its breaking-point and their lives are irrevocably changed . . .  
   
  Considered Oe’s most essential work by the Nobel Prize committee, The Silent Cry is as powerfully relevant today as it was when first published in 1967. 
   
  Praise for The Silent Cry 
   
  “[The Silent Cry] allows us a glimpse of Oe’s narrative mastery.” —Nobel Prize citation 
   
  “Somehow—and this is what gives his art such unquestionable stature—Oe manages to smuggle a comic thread in all this tragedy.” —Independent (UK) 
   
  “A new pinnacle in post-war Japanese fiction.” —Yukio Mishima 
   
  “Oe, in the range of hope and despair he covers, seems to me to have in him a touch of Dostoevsky.” —Henry Miller 
   
  “Oe is dense, analytical, with a highly modern self-consciousness, though there’s real nostalgia here for the dying traditions of pre-Westernized supermarket culture. A picture of fragmenting identity and social breakdown as brutalizing as the 20th century itself.” —Kirkus Reviews

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