The ​Wife of Bath's Tale

Agatha Christie - Poirot ​Investigates
First ​there was the mystery of the film star and the diamond ... then came the 'suicide' that was murder ... the mystery of the absurdly cheap flat ... a suspicious death in a locked gun-room ... a million dollar bond robbery ... the curse of a pharoah's tomb ... a jewel robbery by the sea ... the abduction of a Prime Minister ... the disappearance of a banker ... a phone call from a dying man ... and, finally, the mystery of the missing will. What links these fascinating cases? Only the brilliant deductive powers of Hercule Poirot! 'A capital collection ... ingeniously constructed, and told with an engaging lightness of style.' Literary Review

W. Somerset Maugham - Collected ​Short Stories 2.
This ​final classic collection reveals Somerset Maugham's unique talent for exposing and exploring the bitter realities of human relationships in tales of love, infidelity, passion and prejudice. The stories range from "The Lotus Eater" where a man envisions a life of bliss in the Mediterranean, to the astringent tales of "The Outstation" and "The Back of Beyond" in Malaya and South East Asia.

Ismeretlen szerző - The ​Feminine Future
"In ​addition to drawing attention to these overlooked female sci-fi authors, The Feminine Future is valuable for the perspective it provides on a period of transition for the genre." — Los Angeles Review of Books Featuring hard-to-find short stories published between 1873 and 1930, this original anthology spotlights a variety of important sci-fi pioneers, including Ethel Watts Mumford, Edith Nesbit, and Clare Winger Harris. Imaginative scenarios include a feminist society in another dimension, the east/west division of the United States with men and women on opposite sides, a man who converts himself into a cyborg, a drug that confers superhuman qualities, and many other curious situations. Editor Mike Ashley provides an informative introduction to the stories. Highlights include "When Time Turned" (1901), which centers on a grieving widower who contrives to relive his life backwards; "The Painter of Dead Women" (1910), the tale of a woman in thrall to a Svengali-like character who promises to preserve her beauty forever; "The Automaton Ear" (1876), in which an inventor struggles to create a machine to detect sounds from the distant past; "Ely's Automatic Housemaid" (1899), a lighthearted fable concerning a robot housemaid; and ten other captivating tales. "Glad that Mike Ashley and Dover Publications have put together early science fiction by women authors. Great resource for classes!" — University of Maine at Machias

Jane Austen - Love ​and Friendship and other early works
This ​is a collection of short stories, drama, humor, and other works written by Jane Austen at least a decade before her major novels. It is a series of letters and other works that Austen wrote, and they show a free spirited Austen, quite unlike her formula books that came later. As a read this is not what one would call great literature, but it is worthwhile to see a young Jane Austen writing without constraints, and writing as a young woman years before her fame.

Geoffrey Chaucer - The ​Pardoner's Tale
Ehhez a könyvhöz nincs fülszöveg, de ettől függetlenül még rukkolható/happolható.

John Fowles - The ​French Lieutenant's Woman
Of ​all John Fowles' novels _The French Lieutenant's Woman_ received the most universal acclaim and today holds a very special place in the canon of post-war English literature. From the god-like stance of the nineteenth-century novelist that he both assumes and gently mocks, to the last detail of dress, idiom and manners, his book is an immaculate recreation of Victorian England. Not only is it the epic love story of two people of insight and imagination seeking escape from the cant and tyranny of their age, _The French Lieutenant's Woman_ is also a brilliantly sustained allegory of the decline of the twentieth-century passion for freedom.

Agatha Christie - Witness ​for the Prosecution
Headlining ​this book is Witness for the Prosecution - Christie's highly successful stage play which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play. A stunning courtroom drama, it tells the story of a scheming wife testifying against her husband in a shocking murder trial. The wild beauty of a seaside house perched high on The Devonshire River Tern provides a stunning back-drop in Towards Zero - as a psychopathic murderer homes in on the unsuspecting victims. Passion, murder and love are the deadly ingredients in Verdict, making it one of Christie's more unusual thrillers and prompting her to label it "the best play I have written with the exception of Witness for The Prosecution". Go Back for Murder tells the story of the young and feisty Carla who, orphaned at the tender age of five, discovers her mother was imprisioned for murdering her father and determines to prove her innocence.

Lucy Maud Montgomery - Christmas ​with Anne
Sixteen ​stories from Canada’s best-loved author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. Christmas and New Year’s is a season of celebration and reflection, of taking stock of the months gone by and looking forward to the year to come. Above all it is an occasion to remember the values and concerns of a past that seems increasingly distant – except when that world is brought to life once more in the stories of L.M. Montgomery. The Anne stories in this collection—from Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Windy Poplars—are old favourites, but joining them are tales that are new to this generation of Montgomery fans. Written around the turn of the century, they have never before been published in book form.

William Shakespeare - The ​Sonnets
Like ​the plays in the Cambridge School Shakespeare series, The Sonnets has been specially prepared to help all students in schools and colleges. Each sonnet is presented with accompanying material which aims to enrich your own experience of the poem, whilst leaving you to make your own mind up about the sonnet rather than having someone else's interpretation and judgement handed down to you. You will find help with unfamiliar words, with imagery, and with other 'poetic' features, as well as suggestions for practical work.

Arthur C. Clarke - A ​Fall of Moondust
Time ​is running out for the passengers and crew of the tourist cruiser Selene, incarcerated in a sea of choking lunar dust. On the surface, her rescuers find their resources stretched to the limit by the mercilessly unpredictable conditions of a totally alien environment. A brilliantly imagined story of human ingenuity and survival, A FALL OF MOONDUST is a tour-de-force of psychological suspense and sustained dramatic tension by the field's foremost author.

Edgar Allan Poe - The ​Gold Bug
The ​discovery of a message in code on a shoreline formerly infested with pirates sends William Legrand and his friends on a hunt for buried treasure.

Frances Hodgson Burnett - Little ​Lord Fauntleroy
Little ​Lord Fauntleroy is a novel by the English-American writer Frances Hodgson Burnett, her first children's novel. It was published as a serial in St. Nicholas Magazine from November 1885 to October 1886, then as a book by Scribner's (the publisher of St. Nicholas) in 1886. The illustrations by Reginald B. Birch set fashion trends and the novel set a precedent in copyright law when Burnett won a lawsuit in 1888 against E. V. Seebohm over the rights to theatrical adaptations of the work.

Jane Austen - Northanger ​Abbey (Macmillan Readers)
England ​- 1802. Catherine Morland visits the city of Bath with Mr and Mrs Allen. She meets the Tilneys and falls in love with Henry Tilney. The Tilneys invite Catherine to their home, Northanger Abbey.

Tony Parsons - Departures
Seven ​short stories from bestselling author Tony Parsons, based on his week as Writer in Residence at Heathrow airport. Here is Heathrow as it has never been seen before - a secret city populated by the 75 million travellers who pass through every year, a place where journeys and dreams end - and begin. From the brilliant twenty-something kids who control the skies up in Air Traffic Control to the softly-spoken man who cares for the dogs, lions and smuggled rattlesnakes at Heathrow's Animal Reception Centre, from the immigration officers who have heard it all before to the firemen who hone their skills by setting the green plane on fire, from the armed police who watch for terrorist attacks to the pilots who have touched the face of god - Heathrow teems with life. In Departures, his first collection of short stories, Tony Parsons takes us deep inside the secret city.

Clive Barker - The ​Hellbound Heart
Clive ​Barker is widely acknowledged as the master of nerve-shattering horror. The Hellbound Heart is one of his best, one of the most dead-frightening stories you are likely to ever read, a story of the human heart and all the great terrors and ecstasies within.

Dezső Kosztolányi - Kornél ​Esti
Crazy, ​funny and gorgeously dark, Kornél Esti sets into rollicking action a series of adventures about a man and his wicked dopplegänger, who breathes every forbidden idea of his childhood into his ear, and then reappears decades later. Part Gogol, part Chekhov, and all brilliance, Kosztolányi in his final book serves up his most magical, radical, and intoxicating work. Here is a novel which inquires: What if your id (loyally keeping your name) decides to strike out on its own, cuts a disreputable swath through the world, and then sends home to you all its unpaid bills and ruined maidens? And then: What if you and your alter ego decide to write a book together?

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Selected ​Tales and Sketches
This ​book presents the short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, and, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: "The Scarlet Letter", "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Blithedale Romance". And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.

Edgar Allan Poe - The ​Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar ​Allan Poe invented the genre of detective fiction with these three mesmerizing stories of a young French eccentric named C. Auguste Dupin: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter. Years later Dorothy Sayers would describe these tales as 'almost a complete manual of detective theory and practice'. Indeed, Poe's short mysteries inspired the creation of countless literary sleuths, among them Sherlock Holmes. Today the unique Dupin stories still stand out as utterly engrossing page-turners. This edition reproduces the definitive text of these stories and an introduction and appendix on 'The Earliest Detectives' by the novelist Matthew Pearl.

Franz Kafka - The ​Metamorphosis
"When ​Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing -- though absurdly comic -- meditation on human feelings of inadequecy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the mosst widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."

Gabriel García Márquez - Bon ​Voyage Mr. President and Other Stories
`Bon ​Voyage, Mr President' is a short story collection from Marquez that offers a brief introduction to his style and which features four stories from his book `Strange Pilgrims'. The first story follows an ousted South American President as he receives medical treatment in Geneva, the second is a short episode about a beautiful woman on a plane and how a fellow passenger falls in love with her despite her aloofness, the third is a terrifying story about a woman who gets mistakenly admitted to a mental asylum and no-one will believe she is sane and wants to get out and the last story is a fantasy piece about some boys who swim and dive in electrical light! Each story is wonderfully written in Marquez's unique style and whilst they are not as fantastical as his novels (except the last story) they are all just as superbly crafted and written. This is a lovely collection to dip into at odd moments and offers a short introduction to Marquez's writing that will only serve to whet your appetite to go off and explore more.