Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.`The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.\\''Centred around a glorious yellow diamond that carries with it a menacing history, The Moonstone tells the story of Rachel Verinder, who inherits the stone on her eighteenth birthday. That very evening, the diamond is stolen and there begins an epic enquiry into hunting down the thief. At the same time, three Indian me...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.''The quality of mercy is not strain''d,It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven''Bassiano, a noble Venetian, hopes to woo the beautiful heiress Portia. However, he requires financial assistance from his friend Antonio. Antonio agrees, but he, in turn, must borrow from the Jewish moneylender Shylock. As recourse for past ills, Shylock stipulates that the forfeit on the loan must be a pound of Antonio''s fl...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.`The movements of his mind seemed to tend to the thought that some power was working against him.''When Henchard, an out-of-work hay-trusser gets drunk and sells his wife at a country fair, his life will never be the same. Eighteen years later, his wife and daughter return to Casterbridge to find that Henchard has become Mayor. Although he''s spent most of his life attempting to repent for his actions, he remains a...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.`I''ve worn that mask so long I don''t feel safe without it.`The Man in the Iron Mask sees D''Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis return to meet their destinies in their final adventure. D''Artagnan still remains in the service of King Louis XIV while Aramis is a priest at the Bastille prison. Upon listening to a confession from an iron-masked prisoner who tells him that he is the twin brother of the King of France...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Now seen as one of the great English comic novels, `Tristram Shandy'' caused a stir on publication in polite 18th-century English society. The novel broke with conventions of form and structure, foreshadowing postmodern authors by 200 years, and scandalized with bawdy descriptions and rambling prose. Hugely influenced by Francis Bacon, Rabelais and Jonathan Swift, clergyman Lawrence Sterne manages to both el...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.`There was a contagion in the very air that blew from that haunted region; it breathed forth an atmosphere of dreams and fancies infecting all the land.''Featuring `The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'' and `Rip Van Winkle'', this collection of inspired essays, stories and sketches established Washington Irving''s reputation as one of America''s foremost authors. Irving''s timeless characters, including Ichabod Cran...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.`They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.''The lights of Hollywood do little to distract Cecelia as she watches Monroe Stahr, wunderkind studio executive and object of her desire, descend into a reckless and ardent love affair with an auspicious starlet - an affair that threatens to destroy his reign as the Silver Screen''s golden boy. In this tragic tale Fitzgerald exposes the cor...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.`Death and honour are thought to be the same, but today I have learned that sometimes they are not.''Set in frontier America in the midst of the French-Indian war, as the French are attempting to overthrow an English fort, Cooper''s story follows Alice and Cora Munro, pioneer sisters who are trying to find their way back to their father, an English commander. Guided by an army major and Magua, an Indian from the Huron ...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.`I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn''t give myself.''Heralded as one of the first instances of feminist literature and rejected at its time of publication by the literary set on grounds of moral distaste, Kate Chopin''s The Awakening caused consternation in 1899.Constrained and confined by the limitations surrounding marriage and motherhood in the ...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.`Sleep went quite away. I used to rise in the night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. A rattle of the window, a cry of the blast only replied - Sleep never came!''Based on Charlotte Bronte''s own experiences as a governess in Brussels, her last novel tells the story of lonely Lucy Snowe who finds employment at a girls'' boarding school in the town of Villette. Finding the students challenging and ex...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.`The girl he had come across ... that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.\\''Damaged by his father\\''s nihilistic philosophy, Axel Heyst has withdrawn from the world to live in near-isolation on the island of Samburan. His solitude ends when he rescues an English girl from her preying patron, but their heady existence ...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.`Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts...\\''Self-serving social climber and anti-heroine Becky Sharp will do anything to raise her status and attain wealth and standing with smart Society. Clever, lively and resourceful, orphan Becky is the the total opposite of her naive and sentimental schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a pampered, yet good-natured girl fr...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.`One thing is certain, - that there is a mustering among the masses, the world over; and there is a dis irae coming on, sooner or later.''Viewed by many as fuelling the abolitionist movement of the 1850s and laying the groundwork for the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe''s sentimental and moral tale of slaves attempting to secure their freedom was one of the most popular books of the nineteenth century. Centred round t...

The shocking first-hand account of one man\\''s remarkable fight for freedom; now an award-winning motion picture.`Why had I not died in my young years - before God had given me children to love and live for? What unhappiness and suffering and sorrow it would have prevented. I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman\\''s chain was round me, and could not be shaken off.\\''1841: Solomon Northup is a successful violinist when he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Taken from his family in New York St...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.`If music be the food of love, play on;Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,The appetite may sicken, and so die.\\''A comedic romance of mistaken identity, Twelfth Night begins with a shipwreck, splitting up Viola and her twin brother, Sebastian. Alone in a strange land, Viola disguises herself as a male servant, Cesario, in order to work for the Duke Orsino. Orsino is in love with Lady Olivia, but it is Cesario ...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.\\''I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,\\'' said the Spirit. \\''Look upon me!\\''A celebration of Christmas, a tale of redemption and a critique on Victorian society, Dickens\\'' atmospheric novella follows the miserly, penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge who views Christmas as \\''humbug\\''. It is only through a series of eerie, life-changing visits from the ghost of his deceased business partner Marley and the spi...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.`\\"For,\\" said he, \\"there never was nor is there one chaste woman upon the face of earth.\\"\\''A collection of Persian, Arabian and Indian tales dating from the 9th century, Sir Richard Burton\\''s most well-known translation of Arabian Nights brings together ancient folklore and stories passed down from generation to generation.Featuring tales about love, history, tragedy and comedy as well as fables and fair...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Hugely ambitious in its historical focus and vast geographical scope, Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare''s most astonishing tragedies. The drama centres on the relationships between his main protagonists, Octavius Ceasar, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and the highly charged affair between Mark Antony and the Egyptian queen that forms the backdrop to the pervading theme of struggle between East and West...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert are expecting a young orphan boy to help them with farmwork at Green Gables. But when a skinny, red-haired girl turns up instead, immediately certain she\\''s home, they get much more than they bargained for. Spirited, adventurous and imaginative, Anne Shirley quickly charms her way into the hearts of the Cuthberts, the entire town of Avonlea and, over 100 years later, the hearts...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.`People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbours.\\''An epic study of provincial life at a time when England was facing rapid industrialization and increasingly fluid social mobility, Eliot\\''s depiction of the small community of Middlemarch weaves an intricate web of different characters disparate lives as they strive to adapt to the changing world arou...