Simon Prebble
Author
Language
English
Description
English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory. But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wildes story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the authors most popular work. The tale of Dorian Grays moral disintegration caused a scandal when it rst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novels corrupting inuence, he responded that there is, in fact, "a terrible moral in Dorian Gray."...
Author
Language
English
Description
The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking,...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
"Great Expectations" is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mastery and a profound examination of moral values. Here, some of Dickens's most memorable characters come to play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shaped Dickens's searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class.
Author
Language
English
Description
Unjustly imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, Dr. Alexandre Manette is reunited with his daughter, Lucie, and safely transported from France to England. It would seem that they could take up the threads of their lives in peace. As fate would have it though, the pair are summoned to the Old Bailey to testify against a young Frenchman Charles Darnay falsely accused of treason. Strangely enough, Darnay bears an uncanny resemblance...