In these two novellas and three short stories for adult readers, Hans Christian Andersen displays the imagination and descriptive brilliance familiar from his fairy tales, but turns his eye to subtler social themes: class mobility in a changing Europe; the unfairness with which talents and opportunities are meted out in this world; the struggle between nature's claims on humanity and civilization's.The title novella, The Ice Virgin, unites all these ideas in a piece of bea...

A shipwrecked sailor disturbs the life of a journalist in a late nineteenth-century English seaside town in this reimagining of Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea.After a ferocious storm shipwrecks young Norwegian sailor Hans Lyngstrand in the English Channel near Dengate, aspiring journalist Martin Bridges takes a job at the local newspaper. When Hans moves into Martin's boardinghouse to convalesce and Martin interviews the young sailor for the paper, it upend...

Eline Vere is a engrossing, brilliantly observed novel. Love, sorrow, madness and the tyranny of social snobbery are all laid bare in this classic of Dutch literature the book which made Louis Couperus, The Netherlands' answer to Oscar Wilde, famous. In 1889, Dutch society was enthralled by Eline Vere, published in instalments in the newspaper, which minutely described the conventions, manners and hypocrisies of society with richness of description and vivid characterizations. Eline Vere a...

In Paul Binding's 'After Brock', Pete, a talented and intelligent schoolboy, though an outsider in both home and school life, enters and wins a quiz show 'High Flyers' a name that is to resonate throughout the rest of his life. One December night after watching his mother perform in the Mikado with a local amateur dramati society he meets Sam, an attractive and flamboyant boy, somewhat of a misfit with whom his infatuation is instant. They begin a tempestuous friendship seeking a world rem...

After a ferocious early-springtime storm, young Norwegian sailor Hans Lyngstrand is shipwrecked in the English Channel near the coastal Kent town of Dengate—he is one of few survivors. Soon after, aspiring journalist Martin Bridges takes a job as a reporter at the local newspaper. A loner by nature, he’s a curiosity to the nosy townspeople, the gregarious editor of the paper, and his melodramatic landlady, whose own private life is fraught by the unexplained absence of her son and suspicio...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept comes an absorbing new novel about one woman's resistance during an époque that shook Paris to its very core.Paris, France: 1860's. Hundreds of houses are being razed, whole neighborhoods reduced to ashes. By order of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussman has set into motion a series of large-scale renovations that will permanently alter the face of old Paris, moul...

Immortalized in these famous stories, G. K. Chesterton's endearing amateur sleuth has entertained countless generations of readers. For, as his admirers know, Father Brown's cherubic face and unworldly simplicity, his glasses and his huge umbrella, disguise a quite uncanny understanding of the criminal mind at work. This edition includes seven tales from a number of G. K. Chesterton's 'Father Brown' books.

For readers of The Paris Wife and Z comes this vivid novel full of drama, passion, tragedy, and beauty that stunningly imagines the life of iconic fashion designer Coco Chanel—the ambitious, gifted laundrywoman’s daughter who revolutionized fashion, built an international empire, and become one of the most influential and controversial figures of the twentieth century.Born into rural poverty, Gabrielle Chanel and her siblings are sent to orphanage...

Mesdames et Messieurs, presenting La Petite Mort, or, A Little Death ... A silent film, destroyed in a fire in 1913 at the Path? studio, before it was seen even by its director. A lowly seamstress, who makes the costumes she should be wearing, but believes her talent - and the secret she keeps too - will soon get her a dressing room of her own. A beautiful house in Paris, with a curving staircase, a lake, and locked rooms. A famous - and dashing - creator of spectacular cinematic illusions...

A Scotland Yard detective probes a high-society house party for someone rotten when a government official is murdered in this classic British mystery.Preparations are underway for a grand party at Scamnum Court, the sweeping English country estate of the fabulously wealthy Duke of Horton. Some of the nation's elite are invited for dinner, and some are even set to star in a semi-amateur production of Hamlet on an authentic Elizabethan stage in the banqueting...

A "lavishly entertaining" ( Publishers Weekly) distillation of Waugh's genius--abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.Evelyn Waugh's short fiction reveals in miniaturized perfection the elements that made him the greatest satirist of the twentieth century. The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alterna...

From the groundbreaking author of The Second Sex "a book that will leave no one indifferent, and no one affected in quite the same way" ( New York Times ).A superb memoir by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an ...