Boris Pasternak - Doctor Zhivago

[unabridged audiobook with text]

 

Dr. Zhivago is an epic novel by Russian poet and writer Boris Leonidovich Pasternak. The novel follows the romance between Yuri Zhivago and Larissa Antipova amid the social upheavals during and after the Russian Revolution. Complex and multi-faceted, Doctor Zhivago is more than a great tragic love story or a panoramic social and political chronicle. It is a novel deeply imbued with humanism and poetic vision.

When Isabella Swan moves to the gloomy town of Forks and meets the mysterious, alluring Edward Cullen, her life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. With his porcelain skin, golden eyes, mesmerizing voice, and supernatural gifts, Edward is both irresistible and impenetrable. Up until now, he has managed to keep his true identity hidden, but Bella is determined to uncover his dark secret...

Beautifully rendered, this first installment of Twilight: The Graphic Novel is a must-have for any collector’s library.

The Way We Live Now is the essence of Trollope. If he had written no other novel, it would have ensured his immortality. He paints a picture as panoramic as his title promises, of the life of 1870s London, the loves of those drawn to and through the city, and the career of Augustus Melmotte, who is one of the Victorian novel's greatest and strangest creations, and is an achievement undimmed by the passage of time. Trollope's 'Now' might, in the 21st century, look like some distant disenchanted 'Then', but this is still the yesterday which we must understand in order to make proper sense of our today.

The Tennant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

  Anne Bronte's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was described as "coarse" and "brutal" at the time it was written (1848). Nineteenth century convention was that women belonged in the home, under their husbands thumb. (Indeed, the idiom "rule of thumb" comes from the law that a man could not beat his wife with anything thicker than his thumb). Bronte, however, goes against custom in this novel of perseverance and pride.

Villette by Charlotte Bronte

Villette is Charlotte Brontë's last novel, published in 1853. After an unspecified family disaster, protagonist Lucy Snowe travels to the fictional city of Villette to teach at an all-girls school where she is unwillingly pulled into both adventure and romance. However, the novel is celebrated not so much for its plot as in its acute tracing of Lucy’s psychology, particularly Bronte’s use of Gothic doubling to represent externally what her protagonist is suffering internally.