Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, C...

Lucina of Greece was orphaned at a young age and brought up by foster parents. Now aged 13 she is sent to be educated by her philosopher guardian in the place he calls Elysium. There she finds herself the only female in a masculine world: while she proves herself an intellectual equal she cannot accept the rigidity of the scientific scepticism that disallows her intuition, psychic talents and capacity for love.Lucina flees to Rome to become a priestess and the founder of a mystic c...

In Winged Pharaoh, Joan Grant tells the story of Sekeeta, the Pharaoh’s daughter. The ancient Egyptians reserved the title of Winged Pharaoh for ruler priests who possessed extrasensory powers. When Sekeeta demonstrates psychic abilities, she is sent to the temple and trained to heal others and recall past lives. Upon the death of her father and her initiation as Priestess of Anubis, she becomes a Winged Pharaoh, a coruler with her brother—she is both priestess and pharaoh—and lea...

Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864-1865, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting the book's character Bella Wilfer, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life".Most reviewers in the 1860s continued to praise Dickens's skill as a writer in general, but did not review this novel in detail. Some fou...

“During the last twenty years, seven books of mine have been published as historical novels which to me are biographies of previous lives I have known. Far Memory is the autobiography of my first thirty years in the twentieth century. From early childhood, I was sometimes aware beyond the usual range of the five senses. I tried to ignore the implications of this awareness, but it was too insistent; so in an attempt to understand what was happening I laboriously trained the faculty...

The second of Joan Grant’s Far Memory novels, Life as Carola gives a fascinating glimpse into life in Italy just before the height of the Renaissance.As a child growing up in Edwardian England, Joan Grant became aware of an astonishing ability to remember previous lifetimes. As an author, she professed her seven novels to be based on her personal recollections of other incarnations, male and female.Carola was the illegitimate daughter of an Italian nobleman, the Lo...

Follow the life of Piyanah, daughter of a clairvoyant Indian mother, in Scarlet Feather.Piyanah demanded new freedom and an end to her tribe’s sexual segregation and brutality. Trained and educated with the young braves, she develops strength and courage, and soon she will succeed the tribal chief―that is if she can at last overcome a series of ordeals which prove her worthy of the Scarlet Feather.This book in the author’s Far Memory series brings to life the intri...

The third of Joan Grant’s “Far Memory” novels, Eyes of Horus is set in Egypt at the close of the dark XIth dynasty and is a profound commentary on the power of fear and the unlimited ability of light to shatter it.Eyes of Horus is the story, told in the first person, of Ra-ab, heir to the Nomarch of the Oryx, one of eighteen provinces in Egypt. He comes to learn that the Oryx is different from the rest of Egypt, in that it is still in touch with the light. The res...

The Old Curiosity Shop is one of two novels (the other being Barnaby Rudge) which Charles Dickens published along with short stories in his weekly serial Master Humphrey's Clock, from 1840 to 1841. It was so popular that New York readers stormed the wharf when the ship bearing the final instalment arrived in 1841. The Old Curiosity Shop was printed in book form in 1841.The plot follows the life of Nell Trent and her grandfather, both resi...

The seventh of Joan Grant’s “Far Memory” novels, So Moses Was Born, is set in Egypt, in the time just before the birth of Moses. The story is a familiar one: found in the bulrushes, Moses’s upbringing in the court of Egypt gave him the influence and power to set the Israelites free. Joan Grant enlarges the picture by depicting the events that led up to the discovery of the baby Moses, convincingly portraying the man she believed was his father, Ramoses II, through the words of his...

Dombey and Son is a novel by English author Charles Dickens. It follows the fortunes of a shipping firm owner, who is frustrated at the lack of a son to follow him in his footsteps; he initially rejects his daughter's love before eventually becoming reconciled with her before his death.The story features many Dickensian themes, such as arranged marriages, child cruelty, betrayal, deceit, and relations between people from different British social classes. The novel ...

GREAT EXPECTATIONS is Charles Dickens' thirteenth novel and his penultimate completed novel; a bildungsroman which depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. It is Dickens's second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes....