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  Moll Flanders

  Daniel Defoe

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  One of the most determined, energetic, and lusty heroines in all of English literature, Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders will do anything to avoid poverty. Born in Newgate Prison, she was for twelve years a whore, five times a wife (once to her own brother), twelve years a thief, and eight years a transported felon in Virginia before finally escaping from the life of immorality and wickedness imposed on her by society. She is as much a survivor and just as resourceful as Defoe's other great literary creation, Robinson Crusoe.Celebrated as "a masterpiece of characterization" by E. M. Forster, Moll Flanders is both a cunning examination of social mores and a hugely entertaining story filled with scandalous sexual and criminal adventures. In Moll, Defoe created a character of limitless interest, in spite of her unconcealed ethical shortcomings. Taking Moll through the echelons of eighteenth-century English society, Defoe seldom moralizes as he champions the personal qualities of self-reliance, perseverance, and hard work-even when it takes the form of crime.

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  Wisdom of Father Brown The...

  G.K. Chesterton

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  The Wisdom of Father Brown is the second book in the series of cases involving the eccentric yet competent detective. Invented by renowned author, essayist and journalist G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown is an amateur sleuth whose day job involves preaching to his congregation at church. Chesterton himself was a committed Christian who wrote volumes of essays and fiction surrounding faith and spirituality, and would base his Father Brown stories upon a priest - Father John O'Connor - he himself knew. Despite its intention as a parody, the Father Brown books became a popular hit in early 20th century Britain as well as the USA. Today they remain a well-considered and much-liked classic series which fans of detective fiction return to more than a century after their original publication. Characterised by his easily digestible style, ready use and exposure of paradox, and his use of wit and humour to advance argument, Chesterton's fiction and non-fiction writings on the topics of human behaviour and wider society remain relevant and poignant to this day.

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  Le Grand Meaulnes [The Wanderer]

  Henri Alain-Fournier

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  Le Grand Meaulnes is one of the great classics of French literature, a mysterious, even impressionistic tale of adolescence in the French countryside in the dying years of the 19th century.A teenager, Agustin Meaulnes, arrives in a country school, and his strong personality immediately affects its rural atmosphere, especially in the eyes of his younger school companion, the 15 year old François. He is dubbed 'le grand Meaulnes', and he lives up to his reputation by going missing for a few days. He says little about his adventure on his return. But François eventually discovers that Meaulnes stumbled upon a strange party held at an unknown chateau, and became enmeshed in the lives of the beautiful young Yvonne de Galais and her brother Frantz.Love, confusion, the urgency of young passion propels these three along unpredictable paths, observed anxiously by François, who desperately wants to help solve and resolve the mysteries. But Meaulnes and Frantz are driven by their own emotions along a trajectory which is anything but simple and straight.Le Grand Meaulnes, regarded by John Fowles as 'the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature' has cast a remarkable spell on successive many generations.In turn elliptical, impressionist, hopeful, haunting, Le Grand Meaulnes made an immediate impression on the French public when it was first published in 1913 (a year before its author died in the First World War) and swiftly gained a permanent place in European literature. The translation by Françoise Delisle has been revised for this recording.

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  Anna Karenina

  Leo Tolstoy

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  The heroine of Tolstoy's epic of love and self-destruction, Anna Karenina has beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son, but feels that her life is empty until she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike, and brings jealousy and bitterness in its wake.  
    
  Contrasting with this is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.

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  The Blanket of the Dark

  John Buchan

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  In this classic historical adventure by the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, a young monastic scholar is groomed to take the throne from Henry VIII. It is 1536, and powerful men reveal to Peter Pentecost that it is he, and not the tyrannical Henry VIII, who should be on the throne of England. Can they persuade him to risk everything in a treasonable rebellion against the throne? In the hands of John Buchan—one of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite writers—the dark, dangerous days of Tudor England come alive like never before.

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  Street The (Unabridged)

  H.P. Lovecraft

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  The story traces the history of the titular street in a New England city, presumably Boston, from its first beginnings as "but a path" in colonial times to a quasi-supernatural occurrence in the years immediately following World War I. As the city grows up around the street, it is planted with many trees and built along with "simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood", each with a rose garden. As the Industrial Revolution runs its course, the area degenerates into a run-down and polluted slum, with all of the street's old houses falling into disrepair.After World War I and the October Revolution, the area becomes home to a community of Russian immigrants. Among the new residents is the leadership of a "vast band of terrorists," who are plotting the destruction of the United States on Independence Day. When the day arrives, the terrorists gather to do the deed, but before they can get started, all the houses in the street collapse concurrently on top of each other, killing them all. Observers at the scene testify that immediately after the collapse, they experienced visions of the trees and rose gardens that had once been in the street.

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