Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women’s ‘dirty work’, when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation.Despite its intr...

David Wilson has earned the unfortunate nickname "Pudd'nhead" from his fellow townspeople, who fail to understand his combination of wisdom and eccentricity. However, he is eventually able to redeem himself by simultaneously solving a murder mystery and a case of transposed identities.Two children, a white boy and a mulatto, are born on the same day. Roxy, mother of the mulatto and a slave, is given charge of the children; in fear that her son will be sold, she switches the babies....

Dick Heldar is a war correspondent and an artist, well known for the drawings he sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious artist and reencounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. Then he learns that a minor problem with his eyes is actually the onset of an incurable blindness, the result of a head injury during the war. As his vision fails, the light of everything around him—his ...

In April 1878, Mark Twain and his family traveled to Europe. Overloaded with creative ideas, Twain had hoped that the sojourn would spark his creativity enough to bring at least one of the books in his head to fruition. Instead, he wrote of his walking tour of Europe, describing his impressions of the Black Forest, the Matterhorn, and other attractions. Neglected for years, A Tramp Abroad sparkles with Twain’s shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World cultur...

Hank Morgan is a mechanic, an engineer, and a foreman at the Colt Arms Factory. One day he gets into an argument, "conducted with crowbars," with an employee known as "Hercules." A blow to Hank's head sends him back to King Arthur's England in the Sixth Century. Quickly becoming a newspaper tycoon, an inventor, a showman, politician, and one-man military industrial complex, Hank rises to a position of power second only to King Arthur himself, ultimately challenging all of knight errantry a...

“If you like the TV show Bones (I do) or Maximum Ride, you’ll love Virals.”—James PattersonAnother thrilling Virals adventure from New York Times bestsellers Kathy and Brendan Reichs.When twin classmates are abducted from Bolton Prep, Tory and the Virals decide there’s no one better equipped than them to investigate. But the gang has other problems to face. Their powers are growing wilder, and becoming ha...

Written in 1885, “King Solomon’s Mines” by Henry Rider Haggard is at first glance, very much a book of its time. Its narrator, Alan Quartermain, is the archetype Colonial white hunter and adventurer.He thinks nothing of bagging an elephant or two for its tusks or a giraffe for its meat, and his attitude towards the natives of South Africa is undoubtedly paternal at best. However, by the end of his exciting tale there is no doubting his admiration and affection for the brave warrior...

Count 'em–a dozen carrot topped, freckle-faced kids. Dad, a jovial optimist, successful inventor and efficiency expert is fond of doing his work at home. Mom, a psychologist, is busy putting everything she knows into practice.Listen along and discover the strange things that happen when Dad's experiments run awry…how Frank Jr. gets left behind at a roadside restaurant…how the whole clan has their tonsils out en masse…experience a first date with Dad in the backseat, or treeing a pe...

Telling a two-star general what she really thought of him was the mistake Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr made with General Morris. But as a battle-hardened professional, she took pride in doing her job and getting her troops back alive. So after she'd saved the mission to bring the Silsviss into the Confederation—instead of losing them and their world to the enemy known only as the Others—she let the general know exactly how she felt.And Torin's reward—or punishment—was to be s...

Rich in suspense and brimming with adventure, the New York Times-bestselling Underland Chronicles unfold the fate of the Underland and the great warrior, Gregor. Suzanne Collins is also the author of the bestselling Hunger Games trilogy.When eleven-year-old Gregor follows his little sister through a grate in the laundry room of their New York apartment, he hurtles into the dark Underland beneath the city. There, humans live uneasily beside giant spiders, bats, cockroaches,...

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was the surprise bestseller of 2011—an unprecedented mix of YA fantasy and vintage photography that enthralled readers and critics alike. Publishers Weekly called it “an enjoyable, eccentric read, distinguished by well-developed characters, a believable Welsh setting, and some very creepy monsters.”This second novel begins in 1940, immediately after the first book ended. Having escaped Miss Peregrine's island by the skin...

Sexual harassment, domestic violence and date rape had not been named, although they certainly existed, when Damned Whores and God's Police was first published in 1975. That was before the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984 and before large numbers of women became visible in employment, in politics and elsewhere across society. It's hard to imagine an Australia where these abuses were not yet fully understood as obstacles to women's equality, yet that was Australia in 1975. It was in ...