• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8405722917

formats: ebook, Paperback, and Hardback

My Ántonia, published in 1918 is the last of the Prairie Trilogy novels, and may be Cather's most lasting work, in which a middle-aged man recounts his lost love, the plucky Boemian girl he grew up with in Nebraska and whose story he has kept up with over the years. My Ántonia was acclaimed a masterpiece upon publication. Along with each of the other members of the trilogy, it has been adopted for a television movie.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8799798048
• formats: ebook, Paperback, and Hardback
  

Awarded the fourth ever Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1923, One of Ours put Willa Cather on track to be one of the outstanding 20th Century American writers. Her career spanned 40 years. While this novel was criticized for being overly romanticized and lacking moral substance, Cather's fans made it one of her best-selling novels, and one that resonates down through the years as a popular choice for readers and book clubs. It is not properly a war story, but it cannot escape that subject, as well as the 1918 Influenza epidemic that spread throughout the U.S. armed services, as well as the general population.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8799191733
• formats: ebook, Paperback, and Hardcover
  

Song of the Lark is Cather's third novel and indicates one of her early and oft visited ideas. Characters have their own paths to get to a place (in their psyche) where they are who they need to be, despite all the discouragement from family, relatives, teachers, or whoever...In a sense this issue is the story of Cather's own life—not that she feels destined to become a singer of great renown, as Thea does in this novel, but like many of her characters, finding a place to fit in, doing a thing that one loves to do, being who one is, maybe even however surreptitiously one has to do it—achieving that thing is the goal.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8798175611
• Formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback
  

In this novel, while visiting northern France to attend the funeral of his aunt, Lewis Romayne, gets into a card game with a card sharp, a local gambler, and accuses him of cheating. Offended by the young Englishman, the General challenges Romayne to a duel, but at the appointed time and place, he sends his son in his stead. The General intends to dispatch the young Romayne quickly, since his son is a crack shot. But by happenstance and against the odds, Romayne—unaccustomed to fighting—manages to kill the boy, and saves his own life. The screams of the victim’s eleven-year-old brother, however, never leaves Romayne’s conscience—not as he returns to Yorkshire a changed man, not for the rest of his life. Once he is back home, he attempts to regain a sense of normalcy, caring for Vange Abbey, the family estate, and making social trips to London. In the city, he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Stella Eyrecourt, whom he marries.

But, true to Collin’s inimitable style and technique for intrigue, a vindictive priest looks to gain control of the Abbey, and he hatches a plan to convert Romayne to Catholicism, and then trick him into signing the property over in his will. Wracked with guilt and trusting to a fault, Romayne walks right into the villainous priest’s trap.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8797039334

Formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback

The Haunted Hotel is short and a quick read. The subtitle, A Mystery of Modern Venice gives little of the book away. Is there no explanation of the mystery of the haunted hotel? Is the book the tale of a haunting—or the tale of a crime? The ghost of Lord Montbarry haunts the Palace Hotel in Venice—or does it? Montbarry’s beautiful-yet-terrifying wife, the Countess Narona, and her erstwhile brother are the center of the terror that fills the Palace Hotel. In having another woman villain, of the darkest stain, this shorter novel compares well with Armadale’s female villain. Are the brother and sister’s sinister plots to enrich themselves at the root of the haunting—or is there something darker, something much less knowable at work? Doctor Wybrow a well-respected physician decides he will find out, after a visit from a stranger, a woman who asks him if she is insane, and then she tells her tale about meeting a woman, whose fiancé she is now set to marry; she wanted to find out if the woman really could be as accommodating about his jilting her in favor of the Doctor’s patient, whose case he agrees to take. The twist is that the doctor’s patient is not who she says, and he begins to suspect that she is a villain, and evil to the core, rather than merely insane.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8797721161
• Formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback
  

The moonstone in the title refers to a brilliant but flawed diamond (even though there is a gem called "the moonstone"). It was seized by a British officer in India. He took it back to England as a family heirloom—despite a supposed curse having been placed upon it. The officer bequeathed the stone to his niece, Rachel Verinder, for her to inherit when she turned 18. But on the night of her 18th cirthday, the Moonstone goes missing. Everyone connected with Rachel at her family estate in Yorkshire is under suspicion. It is up to the London detective, Sergeant Cuff to solve the crime.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8795338200
• Formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback
  

The Woman in White is what critics have called a sensation novel; others recognize Collins as an innovative writer who helped develop, if not define, the murder mystery/detective novel. It is perhaps Collins's most famous novel.

Walter Hartright is a young art teacher. One night in London, he sees a distressed woman dressed entirely in white. He gives her directions, and later finds out from the police that she had escaped from a nearby asylum. A little while after these events, he travels to his new position at Limmeridge House in Cumberland. When he arrives, the household is comprised of Frederick Fairlie, who is an invalid, and Hartright’s students, Laura and Marian Halcombe.

Laura bears a striking resemblance to the woman in white, and the household is acquainted with the woman, whose name is Anne Catherick, and who was devoted to Laura’s mother. Hartright and Laura fall in love over the next few months although she is engaged to another man, Sir Percival Glyde. Marion advises Walter to leave the house, and Laura receives a mysterious letter warning her not to marry Glyde. Walter discovers that Anne sent the letter, and he believes that it was Glyde who originally had Anne committed to the asylum.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8792418486
• Formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback
  

Joseph Contad's The Secret Agent was one of the three most referenced books following the Spetember 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Unites States—perhaps not for the technical and tactical apsects of such attacks, but certainly for the psychological "Fetish" with which American citizens were concerned—the money and power centers of the United States.

Conrad got his literary start with seafaring tales, but equally fascinating have been his political novels, like this one.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8794440614
• formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback
  

In Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, the metaphor of the guillotine as a monster that must have its red wine (the blood of the citizens who are losing their heads) in a three year period, amounting to almost three people a day beheaded around 2,600 deaths by guillotine. The rest were shot, starved, and died from numerous diseases, as The Vengeance, an anthropomorphic force roved through France, having also taken on an entity like power with intent it was assassination by unfettered mob violence.

This is the story of a train robber named Bill Gee who sneaks in and out of Geerusalem, Nevada, a mining camp, to visit his mother to assure her that he wants to give up his life of crime and that he will but at the moment the law is on his trail and he has to survive all that first, with multiple posses and train officials out to find him. He's a Robin Hood sort of thief and is supposedly a good young man, ahem...despite his avocation. Having written so many short stories, Fellom's book reads quicker than many novels of the early 20th century, but is about right in length for a western. It has the elements of cowboys, Indians, cattle rustlers, and pioneer people moving out west, but it also has elements of the era of the automobile, a kind of Roy Rogers quality. Fellom's writing is concrete, relatable, and his plot is complicated yet easy to follow.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8402385917
• Formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback
  

In Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba has a distinct issue deciding whom to love more, from three major prospects—a sheep farmer, a well-to-do older bachelor, and a sergeant in the army; she ends up marrying what might be considered her least likely prospect, Sergeant Troy, although there were things about him that she did not respect and wanted to change. And then William Boldwood, a neighboring farmer and one of Bathsheba’s suiters kills Troy when he shows up at a party after having been missing and Boldwood realizes that his new hope for winning Bathsheba’s hand is once again ruined. After this incident, Gabriel Oak the former sheep former and now shepherd who truly loves Bathsheba becomes her second husband. The story has many twists that make it a sensational romance that holds up well and which has enjoyed several film adaptations. It’s the kind of romance novel that readers of high emotional drama, twists of fortune, and unlikely winners love.

Such contradictory issues within a single character are always present in Hardy, between the vulnerable and doomed individual and their sought-after serenity of the natural world. When it comes to genres, he is also a classicist in a broad sense and meaning. But he put his own twists on every traditional writing convention he dabbled in, which makes his writing so special—from poetry to prose. As I said, he was accessible in his time and his writing was “modern” in ways that make it easily readable in the twenty-first century.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8403521093
• Formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback
  

Jude the Obscure got heavily cesored during its 1895 pre-book run as a serial. It is not clear that it was ever outight banned. Set in the late 19th Century, this is the story of Jude Fawley's "obscure" life, as he thinks of himself. He dreams of being a scholar, a man of letters, and while he has the ability to do just that he gets sidetracked by his marriage to a pig-farmer's daught, Arabella. They live chaotic lives, get divorced, marry other people, divorce them, and eventually remarry. Through it all there is hope and moments of happiness, but lasting joy is difficult in Jude's world to attain.

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8404493993
• Formats: ebook, paperback, and hardback
  

We let Thomas Hardy speak for himself for this "blurb" and so, herein Thomas Hardy takes a swipe at his censors.

"The present edition of this novel contains a few pages that have never appeared in any previous edition. When the detached episodes were collected as stated in the preface of 1891, these pages were overlooked, though they were in the original manuscript. They occur in Chapter X.

Respecting the sub-title, A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, I may add that it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final proofs as being the extimate left in a candid mind of the heroine's character—an estimate that nobody would be likely to dispute. It was disputed more than anything else in the book. But there it stands.

The novel was first published complet in three volumes in November 1891

T. H. March 1912