1961. What a milestone year that would prove to be. Spook was happy before that time, with a creek to play in and Grandpa Doc to spoil him. But then his mum has to drag him down to Melbourne, to a crappy flat above a dress shop, and the dreadful Mrs Green, their landlady. For what? All because of that fuss about his father and a jumping tree? That makes no sense at all. Soon the sanctimonious Theodore and foul-mouthed Wocker are foisted on Spook as "friends" — and some fri...

1961. What a milestone year that would prove to be. Spook was happy before that time, with a creek to play in and Grandpa Doc to spoil him. But then his mum has to drag him down to Melbourne, to a crappy flat above a dress shop, and the dreadful Mrs Green, their landlady. For what? All because of that fuss about his father and a jumping tree? That makes no sense at all.Soon the sanctimonious Theodore and foul-mouthed Wocker are foisted on Spook as "friends" — and s...

This great, genre-bending novel nominally centres on the quest of the monomaniacal Captain Ahab to gain revenge for the loss of his leg to an apparently malicious white sperm whale known in the fishery as Moby Dick.At times the compulsive and bombastic Captain Ahab sounds more like a figure from grand guignol than a reincarnated Lear, and listeners may find themselves wondering if the story of Ahab's attempted revenge, as narrated by Ishmael, one of his crew members, is at least partly a p...

The Charterhouse of Parma is a historic novel by French author Stendhal and tells the life of a Lombard nobleman, born soon after the appearance of Napoleon's army in Italy.The tale is set in northern Italy in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The plot revolves around Fabrizio del Dongo, an idealistic young nobleman, his aunt Gina Sanseverina (who loves Fabrizio more than perhaps she ought) and a large cast of other figures (many of them associated with ...

Henry Whalley is a true sailor, earning years of experience as a ship's captain before his retirement. Faced with unexpected financial problems and a desire to help his married daughter earn her place in the world, Whalley is forced to sell his boat and buy his way back into service on a trade vessel. But Whalley is living so close to financial ruin that any small deviation from his course will put him over the edge . . . The End of the Tether is one of the many books that author Joseph Co...

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats, and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. Based on the text which Conrad's first E...

The Red and the Black is a historic novel by French author Stendhal and tells the life of young Julien Sorel, an ambitious young carpenter's son turned priest, who secretly models his behaviour after the heroics of Napoleon, in an era when the great man had only recently died at St Helena.Julien Sorel - intelligent, handsome and who is determined to rise above his humble peasant origins. Stendhal presents the reader with a satirical plot that will involve you in pa...

In these four stories, written between 1900 and 1902, Joseph Conrad bid gradual farewell to his adventurous life at sea and began to confront the more daunting complexities of life on land in the twentieth century. In 'Typhoon' Conrad reveals, in the steadfast courage of an undemonstrative captain and the imaginative readiness of his young first mate, the differences between instinct and intelligence in a partnership vital to human survival. 'Falk', the companion sea-story, contrasts, as C...

A brave Malay chieftain suffers from a surprising vulnerability. After giving birth to a series of unfortunate children, a farmer's wife is determined to bear no more. A spoonful of sugar brings a neophyte ivory trader to a moment of Nietzschean self-realisation. A pompous ass discovers that his wife has run off with another man. Secluded in an eerie lagoon, a Malay carries a guilty secret in his heart. "Tales of Unrest" was the first volume of short fiction Joseph Conrad published in his ...

I have been called a writer of the sea, of the tropics, a descriptive writer - and also a realist. But as a matter of fact all my concern has been with the 'ideal' value of things, events and people. That and nothing else - Joseph Conrad When Willems stepped off the straight and narrow path of his own peculiar honesty he thought it would be a short episode - a sentence in brackets, so to speak - in the flowing tale of his life. But Willems was wrong, for he was about to embark on a voyage ...

"Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages, the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon the very forces that, friendly to-day, without changing their nature, by the mere putting forth of their might, become dangerous to-morrow, make for that sense of fellowship which modern seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope to know." In this volume of essays, more than in any other single work, ...

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printe...