EVERY DISASTER HAS A STORY, none more thrilling this one. Set during the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, this page-turning tale of political corruption, vendettas, romance, and rescue-and-murder, is based on recently uncovered facts that will forever change our understanding of what really happened. Told by Annalisa Passarella, a feisty young reporter, the novel paints a vivid picture of life in the post-Victorian city, from the gilded ballrooms of Nob Hill to the seedy bars of the Barbary Coast; from the slave ships in the bay, to the front row seats of Enriso Caruso's sold out performance.
William Crimsworth goes to Brussels to seek his fortune and takes a job teaching at a boarding school for girls. He begins a flirtation with the headmistress, Zoraïde Reuter, but later falls in love with the young pupil-teacher Frances Henri, only to have his courtship thwarted by the jealous Mlle. Reuter.
Deeply critical of a society in which relationships between men and women are reduced to power struggles, The Professor was Charlotte Brontë's first novel.
Far North: A Novel by Marcel Theroux (Audiobook, MP3)
by Marcel Theroux, 2009 National Book Award Finalist
My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He’d say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn.
In The Pickwick Papers, his first novel, Dickens displays the talents and skills that became his trademark; observational humour, pathos and social comment abound as we follow Mr Pickwick and Sam Weller, his sharp-tongued cockney servant, travelling around England with his friends in search of adventure and knowledge. Brilliantly comic scenes at the Eatanswill election, and the trial of Mrs Bardell vs Pickwick contrast with the horrors of the debtors prison. It was Thackeray who described the novel as ‘that great contemporary history’, and it presents a nostalgic view of England just before the coming of the railway.
It tells a story that explores just what is haunting the psyche of modern America. In today’s complex and interconnected world, there is no shortage of people telling us how to live, how to prosper, and how to be happy. But ironically, people seem more miserable and disillusioned than ever. Self-Esteem, a strange tale of the meltdown of a man who has profited from telling others how to live, is both a thriller and social satire that raises disturbing questions about the effects of popular psychology on the world. It is both thought-provoking and disturbingly hilarious.
