Other books that might interest you

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  The Little Nugget

  P. G. Wodehouse

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  A comic crime caper from the popular and prolific twentieth-century author of the Jeeves novels featuring Bertie Wooster.   When Ogden Ford, the chubby son of a divorced American millionaire, arrives at a posh English prep school, he sets in motion a dastardly plot. There’s a new classics teacher at the school who’s not who he purports to be . . .   The schoolmaster in training, Peter Burns, is really working for Ogden’s mother, who wants her son back after losing custody of him to her ex-husband. What Peter doesn’t know is that he’s soon to have competition in the kidnapping contest. American gangsters have already targeted the boy, known as “Little Nugget,” for his ransom value—and they aren’t afraid to cross the pond to get him. What follows is a convoluted game of thwarted abductions, hair’s-breadth escapes, and romantic escapades.  Praise for P. G. Wodehouse   “Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” —Evelyn Waugh   “He exhausts superlatives.” —Stephen Fry   “Pure word music.” —Douglas Adams

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  The Murderer - Bulgakov expertly...

  Mikhail Bulgakov

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  Mikhail Bulgakov was born on 15th May 1891 in Kiev, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, into a Russian family.  He was one of seven children. 
   
  In 1901, Bulgakov attended the First Kiev Gymnasium, and developed a keen interest in Russian and European literature, theatre and opera.  After the death of his father in 1907, his mother assumed responsibility for his education.  After graduating Bulgakov entered the Medical Faculty of Kiev University and then took up a post as physician at the Kiev Military Hospital. 
   
  At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered as a doctor and was sent directly to the front, where he was badly injured at least twice.  To suppress chronic pain, especially in the abdomen, he injected morphine.  It took years to wean himself off. 
   
  He now took up medical posts in various towns and in 1919, he was mobilised by the Ukrainian People's Army and assigned to the Northern Caucasus.  There, he became seriously ill with typhus and barely survived.  
   
  After this illness, Bulgakov abandoned his medicine to pursue writing.  He moved to Vladikavkaz and had two plays staged there with great success.  He wrote too for various newspapers and other outlets, but his critics were many.  And growing. 
   
  When a Moscow's theatre director severely criticised Bulgakov, Stalin personally protected him, saying that a writer of Bulgakov's quality was above ‘party words’ like ‘left’ and ‘right’.   Indeed, it is said that Stalin watched ‘The Days of the Turbins’ at least 15 times. 
   
  It was not to last and by March 1929, Bulgakov's career was ruined when Government censorship stopped publication of any of his work and plays. 
   
  In despair, Bulgakov wrote a personal letter to Stalin.  He requested permission to emigrate.  He received a phone call from the Soviet leader, who asked the writer whether he really desired to leave. He replied that a Russian writer cannot live outside of his homeland.  Stalin thus gave him permission to continue working. In May 1930, he re-joined the theater, as stage director's assistant.  
   
  During the last stressful decade of his life, and in poor health, Bulgakov continued to work on ‘The Master and Margarita’, wrote plays, critical works, stories, and continued translations and dramatisations of novels.  Many of them were not published, others were derided by critics.  
   
  On 10th March 1940, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov died from nephrosclerosis.  He was 48. 
   
  ‘The Master and Margarita’ was not published in any form until the mid-1960’s 
   
  Here Bulgakov relates a story as told by a doctor describing the terrible things that humanity is capable of doing in times of war.

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  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under...

  Jules Verne

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  Published in 1870, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" is one of Jules Verne's most famous works. This science fiction novel takes readers on an underwater journey with Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus. The story is narrated by Professor Pierre Aronnax, who, along with his assistant Conseil and the harpooner Ned Land, becomes an unwilling guest of Captain Nemo. The trio experiences a series of adventures under the sea, encountering exotic sea creatures, exploring sunken ships, and discovering the wonders and dangers of the ocean depths. The book is renowned for its scientific foresight and imaginative storytelling.

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  The Beautiful and Damned

  F Scott itzgerald

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  The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in New York City, the novel's plot follows a young artist Anthony Patch and his flapper wife Gloria Gilbert who become "wrecked on the shoals of dissipation" while excessively partying at the dawn of the hedonistic Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald's second novel, the work focuses upon the swinish behavior and glittering excesses of the American social elite in the heyday of New York's café society.Fitzgerald modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Gilbert on his newlywed spouse Zelda Fitzgerald. The novel draws circumstantially upon the early years of Fitzgeralds' tempestuous marriage following the unexpected success of the author's first novel This Side of Paradise. At the time of their wedding in 1920, Fitzgerald claimed neither he nor Zelda loved each other, and the early years of their marriage in New York City were more akin to a friendship.Having reflected upon the criticisms of his debut novel This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald sought to improve upon the form and construction of his prose in The Beautiful and Damned and to venture into a new genre of fiction altogether. Consequently, he revised his second novel based on editorial suggestions from his friend Edmund Wilson and his editor Max Perkins. When reviewing the manuscript, Perkins commended the conspicuous evolution of Fitzgerald's literary craftsmanship.Metropolitan Magazine serialized the manuscript in late 1921, and Charles Scribner's Sons published the book in March 1922. Scribner's prepared an initial print run of 20,000 copies. It sold well enough to warrant additional print runs reaching 50,000 copies. Despite the considerable sales, many critics typically consider the work to be among Fitzgerald's weaker novels. During the final decade of his life, Fitzgerald remarked upon the novel's lack of quality in a letter to his wife: "I wish The Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves - I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other."

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  Clarissa (Unabridged)

  Samuel Richardson

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  Clarissa is of lower birth than her would-be lover: the Harlowes are indeed country gentry, but only recently enriched in the city, while the devious Lovelace is a young nobleman. This is a margin sufficient to breed suspicion on the one side and arrogance on the other; a story of male determination pitted against feminine principles and told in the form of letters. There is a post-script of approximately one hour to this story which for technical reasons we are unable to include.

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  Howards End

  E. M. Forster

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  Considered by many to be E. M. Forster's greatest novel, Howards End is a beautifully subtle tale of two very different families brought together by an unusual event. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes are practical and materialistic, leading lives of "telegrams and anger." When the elder Mrs. Wilcox dies and her family discovers she has left their country home-Howards End-to one of the Schlegel sisters, a crisis between the two families is precipitated that takes years to resolve.Written in 1910, Howards End is a symbolic exploration of the social, economic, and intellectual forces at work in England in the years preceding World War I, a time when vast social changes were occurring. In the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, Forster perfectly embodies the competing idealism and materialism of the upper classes, while the conflict over the ownership of Howards End represents the struggle for possession of the country's future. Forster refuses to take sides in this conflict. Instead he poses one of the book's central questions: In a changing modern society, what should be the relation between the inner and outer life, between the world of the intellect and the world of business? Can they ever, as Forster urges, "only connect"?

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