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  A Country Doctor

  Sarah Orne Jewett

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  A hundred and thirty years after it was first published, Sarah Orne Jewett's story of a young medical woman remains an incisive rendering of the dilemmas of gender, society, and self. Nan Prince first becomes interested in medicine as a child, as the ward of the widowed physician Dr. Leslie. In time she becomes his protégée. But when she enters medical college, she realizes that she will have to choose between marriage and her career, between the demands of her society and her obligations to her true self. Inspired by Jewett's own interests and by her father, A Country Doctor portrays a world very much in flux and Nan, ultimately, as a woman with a new world opening to her.

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  Letters of Travel

  Rudyard Kipling

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  Letters of Travel comprises three books: From Tideway to Tideway 1892-95 contains pieces first published in the Times covering voyages across north America (USA and Canada) and in Japan; his Letters to the Family first appeared in the Morning Post, while Nash's Magazine was the first publisher of the articles (on Egypt and Sudan) in Egypt of the Magicians.Kipling's observations are cast in a wry style that permits, as his work often does, different readings. The unsympathetic reader can hear a banal repetition of the patriarchal, racist and imperialist ideas of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century trotted out. (Or even in his characterisation of the Jewish power behind the pedlar in "The Face of the Desert" a suggestion of something worse.) A more nuanced reading will perceive an amused or wry smile in Kipling's remembering and the human sympathy that infuses all his writing.(US listeners should be warned that in Kipling's day "the N word" was in common use, and he therefore uses it naturally to describe people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry.)

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  White Fang

  Jack London

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  His world was the cruel, savage world of the wild. His introduction to the "man-gods" was brutal and bloody. White Fang was forced to accept a way of life innate to his kind-kill or be killed, destroy or be destroyed and in him developed a hatred so strong that no man or beast could tame him.  Until Weedon Scott.

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  The Madman

  Kahlil Gibran

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  Kahlil Gibran (author of The Prophet) was a Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, novelist, mystical poet and artist. During the last 20 years of his life, he lived in the United States, where his works gained recognition and influence within the American popular culture. 
  This abridged audio of The Madman communicates in stories and metaphors Gibran's belief that if a sensible way of living and thinking could be found, people would have mastery over their lives.

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  Martin Eden

  Jack London

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  The phrase ‘this book will change your life’ has become one of the clichés of the publishing world but ‘Martin Eden’ is certainly a novel that merits that observation. 
  Set in turn of the century San Francisco, Jack London’s semi-autobiographical narrative tells of working class sailor Eden’s struggle to elevate himself to a level of society wherein, he believes, resides the intellect and culture he craves. One of the reasons for this endeavour is Ruth Morse, with whom he has fallen in love, and whose bourgeois family make a union between them impossible until he obtains an equality of wealth and status. 
  However, Martin’s inexorable and painful quest changes him and he is as uncompromising in his new found beliefs as London is in his telling of the tale. Success comes at the price of disillusion and when the publishers and middle-class are finally at his feet Martin already begrudges them. Having achieved his ambition by appreciation and comprehension of  the works of evolutionist Herbert Spencer, Martin is now at the mercy of one of the tenets of this creed: "the survival of the fittest." Tasting the fruit of the tree the successful writer has nothing but contempt for the values of the class he has reached and is unfit for his place. Can he turn back despite the fact he has not only lost his faith in God but also his belief in his fellow men?

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  The Business of Madame Jahn

  Vincent O'Sullivan

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  Vincent O'Sullivan (1868-1940), born in New York to an Irish American family, moved as a child to London. As a young man, he soon became well recognised as the master of decadent and macabre fiction. "The Business of Madame Jahn" is a macabre ghost story of a suicide, a terrible murder and an awful revenge.

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