It's an ordinary Thursday lunchtime for Arthur Dent until his house gets demolished. The Earth follows shortly afterwards to make way for a new hyperspace express route, and Arthur's best friend has just announced that he's an alien. At this moment, they're hurtling through space with nothing but their towels and a book inscribed in large, friendly letters: Don't panic. The book is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the weekend has only just begun... Douglas Adams's mega-selling pop-culture classic sends logic into orbit, plays havoc with physics and twists time, but most importantly ... |
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Famously written in free verse and brimming with sensuous imagery and an unbridled love of nature and life in all its forms, and containing celebrated poems such as the ebullient Song of Myself - described by Jay Parini as the greatest American poem ever written - and the elegiac When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, Leaves of Grass is not only the finest achievement of a highly unique poet, but a founding text for American literature and modern poetry. First published in 1855 and extended by the author over the course of more than three decades, Leaves of Grass embodies Walt Whitman's lifetime ambition to ... |
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When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a ... |
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In this classic Victorian Bildungsroman, David Copperfield makes his way through life, from his happy Suffolk childhood and his subsequent adventures in London, where he is dispatched by his unsympathetic stepfather, through to his first steps as a writer and his search for love and happiness. Along the way he encounters a vast array of characters - among them, some of Dickens's most memorable ones - such as the eccentric aunt Betsey Trotwood, the deluded optimist Wilkins Micawber and the obsequious villain Uriah Heep. Much admired by Freud and Dostoevsky, and cited by Dickens as the favourite among his own ... |
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Bound by blood. Tempted by desire. Unleashed by destiny. Bryce Quinlan loves her life. Every night is a party, and Bryce is going to savour all the pleasures Lunathion - also known as Crescent City - has to offer. But when a brutal murder shakes the very foundations of the city, Bryce's world comes crashing down. Two years later, Bryce still haunts the city's most notorious nightclubs - but seeking only oblivion now. Then the murderer attacks again. And when an infamous Fallen angel, Hunt Athalar, is assigned to watch her every footstep, Bryce knows she can't forget any longer. As Bryce and Hunt fight to ... |
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After years of fierce battle, the Emperor Charlemagne's army is finally on the brink of victory over the Saracens in Spain. Having proposed his stepfather Ganelon for the perilous task of serving as Charlemagne's envoy in the negotiations over the surrender of the Saracen king Marsile, Count Roland gets a taste of his own medicine when, with peace secured, Ganelon suggests that Roland should lead the rearguard of the army on the difficult return journey over the mountain passes to France. Yet Marsile's forces are massing, and Roland is unaware of just how deep Ganelon's treachery runs. Probably written ... |
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If I told you that I'd killed a man with a glance, would you wait to hear the rest? The why, the how, what happened next? Monster. Man-hater. Murderess. Forget everything you've been told about Medusa. Internationally bestselling author Jessie Burton flips the script in this astonishing retelling of Greek myth, illuminating the woman behind the legend at last. Exiled to a far-flung island after being abused by powerful Gods, Medusa has little company other than the snakes that adorn her head instead of hair. Haunted by the memories of a life before everything was stolen from her, she has no choice but to make ... |
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In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with his notes and extracts from his letters to relatives and associates. Highly valuable both as a detailed depiction of the Tsarist system of penal servitude and as an insight into Chekhov’s motivations and objectives for visiting ... |
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Fyodor Dostoevsky's later novels, The Adolescent occupies a very special place: published three years after The Devils and five years before his final masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, the novel charts the story of nineteen-year-old Arkady - the illegitimate son of the landowner Versilov and the maid Sofia Andreyevna - as he struggles to find his place in society and become a Rothschild against the background of 1870s Russia, a nation still tethered to its old systems and values but shaken up by the new ideological currents of socialism and nihilism. Both a Bildungsroman and a novel of ideas, dealing with themes ... |
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I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane? Patrick Bateman has it all: good looks, youth, charm, a job on Wall Street, and reservations at every new restaurant in town. He is also a psychopath. A man addicted to his superficial, perfect life, he pulls us into a dark underworld where the American Dream becomes a nightmare... Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is one of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time. A multi-million-copy bestseller hailed as a modern classic, it is a violent and outrageous black comedy about the darkest side of human nature. With an introduction by ... |
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Old Arkhip sits every day by the roots of a wizened, hunchbacked willow, fishing and exchanging whispered stories with the ancient tree. One of these takes Arkhip three decades back in time, to a quiet day in early spring when a strange encounter shook him momentarily from the rural bliss in which he lived, catapulting him into a world of crime, corruption, violence and murder. A quintessential example of Chekhov's artistry, The Willow is here accompanied by thirty-two other short stories - some of them never or rarely translated into English - which are representative of the three main phases of the author’s ... |
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When a stray dog dying on the streets of Moscow is taken in by a wealthy professor, he is subjected to medical experiments in which he receives various transplants of human organs. As he begins to transform into a rowdy, unkempt human by the name of Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, his actions distress the professor and those surrounding him, although he finds himself accepted into the ranks of the Soviet state. A parodic reworking of the Frankenstein myth and a vicious satire of the Communist revolution and the concept of the New Soviet man, A Dog's Heart was banned by the censors in 1925 and circulated only in ... |
