Orem Library

Nell Trent lives with her grandfather, the proprietor of the Old Curiosity Shop. Grandfather (who is never named in the story) has a disquieting secret a gambling addiction fed by high-interest loans from the bully Daniel Quilp. The villainous Quilp wants to get possession of the shop and Nell. In league with his lawyer Samson Brass and Samson's sister Sally, Quilp seizes Grandfather's assets. But Nell organizes an escape from the...

Although originally classified as one of Shakespeare's comedies, All's Well That Ends Well is now more commonly classified as one of his ambiguous problem plays, so called because they defy neat classification as either comedy or tragedy. Helena, a servant harbors a secret love for Betram her mistresses' son. When the king becomes ill Helena promises to heal him if she is allowed to marry any man of her choosing. Helena's father is a renowned

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The Heart of Mid-Lothian, set between the two Jacobean insurrections in 1736 and during the Porteous Riots, marks the peak of its author's achievement; many consider it to be Scott's national epic.

A very powerfully moving novel of a young woman caught between the attractions of two very different men, Sylvias Lovers is set in the 1790s in an English seaside town. England is at war with France, and press-gangs wreak havoc by seizing young men for service. One of their victims is a whaling harpooner named Charley Kinraid, whose charm and vivacity have captured the heart of Sylvia Robson. But Sylvias devoted cousin, Philip Hepburn,...

The Diary of John Evelyn (1620-1706) is one of the principal literary sources for life and manners in the English seventeenth century. Evelyn was one of an influential group of men which included Wren, Pepys and Boyle; a founding member of the Royal Society, he was also a friend of Charles II, a Commissioner for sick seamen and prisoners of war during the Dutch Wars, a prime mover behind Chelsea and Greenwich Hospitals, and a prolific author who wrote...

A revolutionary plot hinges on the secret identity of a prisoner in the conclusion to the epic adventures of d'Artagnan and the three Musketeers In the darkest depths of the Bastille, a man has been robbed of his freedom and identity, denied any knowledge of the nature of his crimes. Only a handful of people, including the corrupt King Louis XIV and his mother, Queen Anne, know who the prisoner is and why he has been locked away. But the secret of...

"Ovid's sensuous and witty poem brings together an array of mythological tales, linked by the idea of transformation, often as a result of love or lust, in which men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best known myths and legends of ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus,...

This collection brings together seventeen of Kipling's early stories, written between 1885 and 1888, when Kipling was working as a journalist in India. Wry comedies of British officialdom alternate with glimpses into the harsh lives of the common soldiers and the Indian poor, revealing Kipling's legendary powers of observation, and in "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" his own miserable childhood. From Mrs. Hauksbee's Simla drawing-room to Mulvaney's cot in barracks,...

"In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from the vast historical sweep of War and Peace to tell, with extraordinary understanding, the story of an aristocratic woman who brings ruin on herself. Anna's tragedy is interwoven...