In 1985 southern Sudan is ravaged by war. Rebels and government forces battle for control, with ordinary people . . . people like the boy, Salva Dut . . . caught in the middle. When Salva's village is attacked, he must embark on a harrowing journey that will propel him through horror and heartbreak, across a harsh desert, and into a strange new lif...

A touch of computer keys, a blast of heat, and suddenly the Murry twins, Sandy and Dennys, are gasping in a shimmering desert land. If only the brothers had normal parents, not a scientist mother and a father who experiments with space and time travel. If only the Murry twins had noticed the note on the door of their mother's lab: Experiment In P...

In the maze-like dungeons of Castle Grotteskew, the frightfully insane Professor Erasmus conducts his bizarre experiments on living things. His very first creation has been long forgottena small, almost-human creature, known only as Stitch Head. Poor Stitch Head has spent years pining for attention amongst a menagerie of freakish monsters. When a t...

Fifteen-year-old Charles Wallace and the unicorn Gaudior undertake a perilous journey through time in a desperate attempt to stop the destruction of the world by the mad dictator Madog Branzillo. They are not alone their quest. Charles Wallace's sister, Meg--grown and expecting her first child, but still able to enter her brother's thoughts and emo...

W B Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the great and innovative poets of the twentieth century. Much of his most vigorous verse on love, sex, Irish and international politics, the complexites of the occult and the 'sedentary toil' of poetry was produced in the years between his fiftieth birthday in 1915 and his death in 1939. Timothy Webb is Professor of...

On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer, is forced to confront the events that made up his life. His host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man whose time is running out, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendrick...

'We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.' Huck Finn escapes from his alcoholic father by faking his own death and so begins his journey through the Deep South, seeking independence and freedom. On his travels, Huc...

The Illustrated Man is a 1951 book of eighteen science fiction short stories by Ray Bradbury that explores the nature of mankind.

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year.

Treated badly as a child by both her aunt and school, Jane leaves to become a governess to the daughter of the mysterious Mr Rochester. Gradually she falls in love with him, but things are not what they seem and life is not straightforward for the rebellious heroine.

Everyone knows Madeleine and Jack Hunter. Maddy is an award-winning TV anchorwoman. Jack is the head of her network. To the world, theirs is a storybook marriage. But behind the doors of their lush Georgetown home a different story emerges. Maddy has always tried to deny Jack's subtle put-downs, control, and jealousy. She has no bruises, only the d...

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurks the shameful secret of his past and a personality pr...

Dorothea Brooke is a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage with a pedantic scholar. Tertius Lydgate is a charming but tactless doctor. His marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and his pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career. Their interweaving tales reveal a complex...

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her prou...

'Moby Dick' follows the fortunes of Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod, a 19th century whaling ship. The Pequod is on its last voyage in pursuit of Moby Dick, the great white whale which has been Ahab's bitter adversary for many years. This classic story of high adventure, manic obsession and metaphysical speculation is packed with drama, and...

Clarissa Dalloway is civilised - without the ostentation of a socialite, but with enough distinction to attract them to her parties. She finds excess offensive, but surrounds herself with the highest quality and has an abhorrence for anything ugly or awkward. We spend a day with Clarissa as she interacts with servants, her children, her husband, an...

This is one of the earliest novels of British industrial alienation, tellingly linked to the plight of 19th-century women. It tells of the relationship between Margaret Hale, a girl from the old rural south, and John Thornton, a mill owner from the new industrial north.

Little Nell cares for her grandfather in the gloomy surroundings of his curiosity shop. Reduced to poverty, the pair are forced to flee London and Nell finds herself uprooted from a secure and innocent childhood and cast into a world where evil takes the form of characters such as Swiveller, Nubbles and the grotesque and lecherous Quilp.

A workhouse orphan, Oliver escapes by running away to London. He gets drawn into the treacherous underworld of pickpockets and thieves headed by Fagin. His companions are ultimately destined for gruesome ends. Will Oliver emerge unscathed from the darkness of the underworld?

It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignmet-find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

A complex plot of love and inheritance is set against the English legal system of the mid-nineteenth century, with all its tortuous avenues and disguised resolutions. Here is the firm, Jarndyce & Jarndyce, the young orphan and ward of court Ester Summerson (who tells much of the story). As always, it is the skilled pen of Dickens himself that c...