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The night before he leaves London for a temporary engagement in the North of England, drawing instructor Walter Hartright walks home on an empty, moonlit road. Suddenly a hand reaches out of the darkness and touches him on the shoulder. Terrified, he turns to find a woman, dressed all in white, who begs him for help in getting to a friend’s place in the city. By a strange coincidence, the woman knows Limmeridge House, the country estate to which Walter is traveling in the morning. Stranger still, she refuses to reveal anything else about herself, including her name. Only after he sees her safely into a cab does Walter learn the truth—the woman in white has just escaped from an insane asylum.
In Limmeridge, Walter falls in love with one of his students, the beautiful and virtuous Laura Fairlie. An orphan in the care of her invalid uncle, Laura is engaged to Sir Percival Glyde, a baronet. She follows through with the marriage despite her feelings for Walter, but soon realizes her mistake. Sir Percival will stop at nothing to gain complete control of Laura’s inheritance, and his diabolical plot hinges on her astonishing resemblance to the mysterious woman in white. It is up to Walter and Marian, Laura’s devoted half-sister, to rescue fair Laura from a fate worse than death.
With its shocking twists and spine-chilling suspense, The Woman in White charted a whole new course for popular fiction. Devilishly entertaining and deadly serious in its indictment of Victorian marriage laws that impoverished women, it is widely recognized as one the nineteenth century’s finest novels.
This ebook features a new introduction by Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
“Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.”—The New Yorker
In 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
Lionel Trilling said of Orwell’s masterpiece, “1984 is a profound, terrifying, and wholly fascinating book. It is a fantasy of the political future, and like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present.” Though the year 1984 now exists in the past, Orwell’s novel remains an urgent call for the individual willing to speak truth to power.
* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Collins’ life and works
* Concise introductions to the novels and other texts
* ALL 24 novels, with individual contents tables
* Includes rare novels often missed out of collections
* Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original Victorian texts
* Excellent formatting of the texts
* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the short stories
* Rare tales from periodicals and magazines, appearing here for the first time in digital publishing
* Easily locate the short stories you want to read
* Includes Collins’ rare plays – available in no other collection
* Includes Collins’ non-fiction – spend hours exploring the author’s rare magazine essays and articles
* Special biographical section, with essays and biographical pieces evaluating Collins’ literary and private life
* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres
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CONTENTS:
The Novels
ANTONINA
BASIL
HIDE AND SEEK
A ROGUE’S LIFE
THE DEAD SECRET
THE WOMAN IN WHITE
NO NAME
ARMADALE
THE MOONSTONE
MAN AND WIFE
POOR MISS FINCH
THE NEW MAGDALEN
THE LAW AND THE LADY
THE TWO DESTINIES
THE HAUNTED HOTEL
THE FALLEN LEAVES
JEZEBEL’S DAUGHTER
THE BLACK ROBE
HEART AND SCIENCE
“I SAY NO”
THE EVIL GENIUS
THE GUILTY RIVER
THE LEGACY OF CAIN
BLIND LOVE
The Short Story Collections
AFTER DARK
THE QUEEN OF HEARTS
MISS OR MRS.? AND OTHER STORIES IN OUTLINE
THE FROZEN DEEP AND OTHER STORIES
LITTLE NOVELS
MISCELLANEOUS SHORT STORIES
The Short Stories
LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
The Plays
THE FROZEN DEEP
NO THOROUGHFARE
BLACK AND WHITE
NO NAME
THE WOMAN IN WHITE
THE NEW MAGDALEN
MISS GWILT
THE MOONSTONE
The Non-Fiction
MEMOIRS OF THE LIFE OF WILLIAM COLLINS ESQ, RA
RAMBLES BEYOND RAILWAYS
MY MISCELLANIES
MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS AND ARTICLES
The Biographies
WILKIE COLLINS’ CHARMS by Olive Logan
MEN OF MARK: W. WILKIE COLLINS by Edmund Yates
WILKIE COLLINS by William Teignmouth Shore
Extracts from ‘MEMORIES OF HALF A CENTURY’ by Rudolph Chambers Lehmann
Extracts from ‘LIFE OF CHARLES DICKENS’ by John Forster
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At a party celebrating her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder wears the stunning yellow diamond she unexpectedly inherited from her uncle, Colonel John Herncastle.
She is not aware that the precious gem, known as the Moonstone, has been missing since it was plundered from a sacred Hindu shrine in southern India where her uncle had served with the British army fifty years ago.
But someone knows the secret of the Moonstone and will go to desperate measures to retrieve it. When it goes missing later that night, suspicions are raised and accusations fly. Could it be a trio of mysterious Indian jugglers seen near the house? Or a love-struck housemaid suddenly behaving strangely? And there is Rachel herself, who becomes furious when her paramour, Franklin Blake, directs attempts to find it.
As divergent accounts reveal more details, the diamond’s recovery is complicated by unexpected twists and turns. Sifting through a compelling list of suspects, the indomitable Sergeant Cuff must find the truth about the Moonstone and its mysterious disappearance.
The Moonstone features 66 black and-white woodcut illustrations throughout.
‘The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.’
One of the earliest works of ‘detective’ fiction with a narrative woven together from multiple characters, Wilkie Collins partly based his infamous novel on a real-life eighteenth century case of abduction and wrongful imprisonment. In 1859, the story caused a sensation with its readers, hooking their attention with the ghostly first scene where the mysterious ‘Woman in White’ Anne Catherick comes across Walter Hartright. Chilling, suspenseful and tense in mood, the novel remains as emotive for its readers today as when it was first published.
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father—a crusading local lawyer—risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
One woman's journey through madness, murder, and mistaken identity -- a classic work of Victorian sensationalism.
THIS ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES:
• A concise introduction that gives readers important background information
• A chronology of the author's life and work
• A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context
• An outline of the key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations
• Detailed explanatory notes
• Critical analysis including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work
• Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction
• A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience
Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. the scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.
The critically acclaimed debut novel from Stephen Chbosky, Perks follows observant “wallflower” Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.
A #1 New York Times best seller for more than a year, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults (2000) and Best Book for Reluctant Readers (2000), and with millions of copies in print, this novel for teen readers (or “wallflowers” of more-advanced age) will make you laugh, cry, and perhaps feel nostalgic for those moments when you, too, tiptoed onto the dance floor of life.
Guarded by three Brahmin priests, the Moonstone is a religious relic, the centerpiece in a sacred statue of the Hindu god of the moon. It is also a giant yellow diamond of enormous value, and its temptation is irresistible to the corrupt John Herncastle, a colonel in the British Army in India. After murdering the three guardian priests and bringing the diamond back to England with him, Herncastle bequeaths it to his niece, Rachel, knowing full well that danger will follow. True to its enigmatic nature, the Moonstone disappears from Rachel’s room on the night of her eighteenth birthday, igniting a mystery so intricate and thrilling it has set the standard for every crime novel of the past one hundred fifty years.
Widely recognized, alongside the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, as establishing many of the most enduring conventions of detective fiction, The Moonstone is Wilkie Collins’s masterwork and one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century.
This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
When the letters from Italian servant to his wife in London suddenly cease, she is convinced he has been murdered.
In the darkened bedroom of a mouldering palazzo by the Grand Canal, an English lord sickens and suddenly dies.
How are these little mysteries connected? Spend the night in Room 14 of Venice’s finest hotel, and find out the truth – if you dare...
INCLUDES THE GHOST STORY ‘THE DREAM WOMAN’
Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.
When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.
A widowed lawyer named Griffith has been appointed legal guardian of Jessie, a lively young woman. In order for Jessie to claim her inheritance, her late father’s will stipulates that she must spend 6 weeks with Griffith each year. Consequently, Jessie travels to a remote part of Wales to the castle where the lawyer and his 2 brothers reside. To everyone’s surprise and delight, Jessie and the 3 men get along splendidly. Hoping that she will stay to meet Griffith’s son, who is on his way home from the Crimean War, the brothers devise a plan à la Scheherezade: Each night they will tell Jessie a new thrilling story that will enchant her into staying.
This ebook features a new introduction from Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Collins’s story revolves around a diamond stolen from a Hindu holy place. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder receives the diamond, but by the following morning the stone has been stolen again. As the story unravels through multiple eyewitness accounts, the elderly Sergeant Cuff—with a face “sharp as a hatchet”—looks for the culprit.
One of Collins’s best-loved novels, with an exciting plot moved along by deftly-drawn characters and elegant pacing, The Moonstone was also turned into a play by Collins; the play appears as an appendix to this edition.
69 Tales, including:
• The Tell-Tale Heart
• The Murders in the Rue Morgue
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• The Masque of the Red Death
• The Pit and the Pendulum
• The Purloined Letter
• The Black Cat
• Hop-Frog
• The Cask of Amontillado
74 Poems, including:
• The Raven
• The Conqueror Worm
• The Bells
• Tamerlane
• Al Aaraaf
• Lenore
• Eldorado
• Annabel Lee
In addition:
• Poe’s only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
• His incomplete novel, The Journal of Julius Rodman
• His unfinished tragedy in verse, Politian
• 11 significant essays & sketches, including “The Balloon-Hoax,” “The Rationale of Verse,” and Eureka
Also featuring:
• More than 90 large illustrations from Gustave Doré, Harry Clarke, Edmund Dulac, and others
• Annotated translations of passages in French, Latin, Greek or other foreign languages, along with Poe’s own notes
• Alphabetical, linked title index and detailed author biography
Whether you are new to Edgar Allan Poe or a student of his work, this illustrated/annotated edition is a must-have for your ebook library.
This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the definitive 1871 edition.
Over seventy-five years since its first publication, Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and taught novels. An unlikely pair, George and Lennie, two migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, grasp for their American Dream. They hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.
Of Mice and Men represents an experiment in form, which Steinbeck described as “a kind of playable novel, written in a novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands.” A rarity in American letters, it achieved remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films. This edition features an introduction by Susan Shillinglaw, one of today’s leading Steinbeck scholars.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.
Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order--all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history’s keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites.
"Aldous Huxley is the greatest 20th century writer in English." —Chicago Tribune
"In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people, they have no lawyers." — Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars
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The John Carter of Mars Collection includes seven of Edgar Rice Burroughs works:
A Princess of Mars
The Gods of Mars
Warlord of Mars
Thuvia, Maid of Mars
The Chessmen of Mars
The Master Mind of Mars
A Fighting Man of Mars
Bonus: A Glossary of Names and Terms Used In the Martian Books
Audiobook Links: Links to download free, full-length audiobooks for The John Carter of Mars Collection by Edgar Rice Burroughs (books 1-5) can be found at the end of the book.
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Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides—who would become known as Muad’Dib—and of a great family’s ambition to bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.
A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what is undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.
This collection includes 160 of H.P. Lovecraft's works. The collection is grouped by Early Writings, Fiction, Collaborative Works, Poetry and Essays. The groups are organized in chronological order by the date that each work was written.
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* Active table of contents accessed by the "go to" or "menu" button
* Links to download full-length audiobooks included FREE!
Early Writings:
The Little Glass Bottle (1897)
The Secret Cave (1898)
The Mystery Of The Graveyard (1898)
The Mysterious Ship (1902)
The Beast in the Cave (1905)
The Alchemist (1908)
Fiction:
The Tomb (1917)
Dagon (1917)
A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1917)
Sweet Ermengarde (1917)
Polaris (1918)
Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919)
Memory (1919)
Old Bugs (1919)
The Transition of Juan Romero (1919)
The White Ship (1919)
The Doom That Came to Sarnath (1919)
The Statement of Randolph Carter (1919)
The Terrible Old Man (1920)
The Tree (1920)
The Cats of Ulthar (1920)
The Temple (1920)
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family (1920)
The Street (1920)
Celephaas (1920)
From Beyond (1920)
Nyarlathotep (1920)
The Picture in the House (1920)
Ex Oblivione (1921)
The Nameless City (1921)
The Quest of Iranon (1921)
The Moon-Bog (1921)
The Outsider (1921)
The Other Gods (1921)
The Music of Erich Zann (1921)
Herbert West--Reanimator (1922)
Hypnos (1922)
What the Moon Brings (1922)
Azathoth (1922)
The Hound (1922)
The Lurking Fear (1922)
The Rats in the Walls (1923)
The Unnamable (1923)
The Festival (1923)
The Shunned House (1924)
The Horror at Red Hook (1925)
He (1925)
In the Vault (1925)
The Descendant (1926)
Cool Air (1926)
The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Pickman's Model (1926)
The Silver Key (1926)
The Strange High House in the Mist (1926)
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1927)
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)
The Colour Out of Space (1927)
The Very Old Folk (1927)
The Thing in the Moonlight (1927)
A History Of The Necronomicon (1927)
Ibid (1928)
The Dunwich Horror (1928)
The Whisperer in Darkness (1930)
At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
Discarded Draft of The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)
The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931)
The Dreams in the Witch House (1932)
The Thing on the Doorstep (1933)
The Evil Clergyman (1933)
The Book (1933)
The Shadow Out of Time (1934-1935)
The Haunter of the Dark (1935)
Collaborative Works:
The Green Meadow (1918)
Poetry and the Gods (1920)
The Crawling Chaos (1920)
The Horror At Martin's Beach (1922)
Under the Pyramids (1924)
Two Black Bottles (1926)
The Last Test (1927)
The Curse Of Yig (1928)
The Electric Executioner (1929)
The Mound (1929)
Medusa's Coil (1930)
The Trap (1931)
The Man Of Stone (1932)
The Horror In The Museum (1932)
Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1932)
Winged Death (1933)
Out of the Aeons (1933)
The Horror In The Burying-Ground (1933)
The Hoard Of The Wizard-Beast (1933)
The Slaying of the Monster (1933)
The Tree On the Hill (1934)
The Battle That Ended the Century (1934)
Till A' the Seas... (1935)
Collapsing Cosmoses (1935)
The Challenge From Beyond (1935)
The Disinterment (1935)
The Diary Of Alonzo Typer (1935)
In the Walls of Eryx (1936)
The Night Ocean (1936)
Poetry:
Poemata Minora, Volume II (1902)
On Receiving a Picture of Swans (1915)
March (1915)
Unda; or, The Bride of the Sea (1915)
An American to Mother England (1916)
Lines on Gen. Robert Edward Lee (1916)
The Rose of England (1916)
The Poe-et's Nightmare (1916)
The Teuton's Battle-Song
Fact and Fancy (1917)
Pacifist War Song—1917 (1917)
A Garden (1917)
The Peace Advocate (1917)
Ode for July Fourth, 1917 (1917)
Nemesis (1917)
Astrophobos (1917)
Sunset (1917)
Laeta; a Lament (1918)
Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme (1917-1918)
The Conscript (1918)
Despair (1919)
Revelation (1919)
The House (1919)
The City (1919)
To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany (1919)
The Nightmare Lake (1919)
On Reading Lord Dunsany's
Book of Wonder (1920)
Christmas (1920)
Sir Thomas Tryout (1921)
Waste Paper (1922)
Providence (1924)
The Cats (1925)
Festival (1925)
Hallowe'en in a Suburb (1925)
The Wood (1929)
The Outpost (1929)
The Ancient Track (1929)
The Messenger (1929)
Fungi from Yuggoth (1929-1930)
Little Sam Perkins (1934)
Dead Passion's Flame (1935)
Arcadia (1935)
In a Sequester'd Providence Churchyard Where Once Poe Walk'd (1936)
To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq., upon His Phantastick Tales, Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures (1936)
Life's Mystery (No date)
Nathicana (No date)
Christmas Greetings (No date)
Essays:
Metrical Regularity (1915)
The Allowable Rhyme (1915)
At the Root (1918)
The Despised Pastoral (1918)
The Literature of Rome (1918)
Americanism (1919)
Literary Composition (1920)
Winifred Virginia Jackson: A "Different" Poetess (1921)
Supernatural Horror In Literature (1925-1927)
Cats And Dogs (1926)
Notes On Writing Weird Fiction (1933)
Audiobook Links: Links to download 60 free, full-length audiobooks for H.P. Lovecraft's works can be found at the end of the book.
A scheming nobleman, a beautiful heiress, and, of course, the enigmatic woman in white—a mysterious figure confined to an asylum for the insane—are the featured players in an intricate, compelling story that was acclaimed by Henry James and T. S. Eliot. An instant success when it first appeared in 1860, the riveting tale has continued to enthrall readers ever since.
Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband.
In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters directly to God. The letters, spanning twenty years, record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment guided by the light of a few strong women. She meets Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress and a jazz singer with a zest for life, and her stepson’s wife, Sophia, who challenges her to fight for independence. And though the many letters from Celie’s sister are hidden by her husband, Nettie’s unwavering support will prove to be the most breathtaking of all.
The Color Purple has sold more than five million copies, inspired an Academy Award–nominated film starring Oprah Winfrey and directed by Steven Spielberg, and been adapted into a Tony-nominated Broadway musical. Lauded as a literary masterpiece, this is the groundbreaking novel that placed Walker “in the company of Faulkner” (The Nation), and remains a wrenching—yet intensely uplifting—experience for new generations of readers.
This ebook features a new introduction written by the author on the twenty-fifth anniversary of publication, and an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
The catalyst for the mystery is Walter Hartright's encounter on a moonlit road with a mysterious woman dressed head to toe in white. She is in a state of confusion and distress, and when Hartright helps her find her way back to London she warns him against an unnamed "man of rank and title." Hartright soon learns that she may have escaped from an asylum and finds to his amazement that her story may be connected to that of the woman he secretly loves. Collins brilliantly uses the device of multiple narrators to weave a story in which no one can be trusted, and he also famously creates, in the figure of Count Fosco, the prototype of the suave, sophisticated evil genius. The Woman in White is still passed as a masterpiece of narrative drive and excruciating suspense.
Introduction by Nicholas Rance
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
From the Hardcover edition.
When their beloved parents die in quick succession, Magdalen and Norah Vanstone find that their world has been torn asunder. Through a legal technicality, their father’s will renders them without a legitimate claim to their inheritance. All of their family’s money goes to their uncle, and the orphaned girls are left reeling. Reduced to utter poverty, Norah takes a job as a governess. But Magdalen is determined to win back what is rightfully theirs.
In this deft and moving story, Wilkie Collins weaves a powerful narrative of justice and familial bonds.
This ebook features a new introduction from Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Volume I includes the early novel A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the eccentric genius of Sherlock Holmes to the world. This baffling murder mystery, with the cryptic word Rache written in blood, first brought Holmes together with Dr. John Watson. Next, The Sign of Four presents Holmes’s famous “seven percent solution” and the strange puzzle of Mary Morstan in the quintessential locked-room mystery. Also included are Holmes’s feats of extraordinary deception in such famous cases as the chilling “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” the baffling riddle of “The Musgrave Ritual,” and the ingeniously plotted “The Five Orange Pips.”
Volume II begins with The Hound of Baskervilles, a haunting novel of murder on eerie Grimpen Moor, which has rightly earned its reputation as the finest murder mystery ever written. The Valley of Fear matches Holmes against his archenemy, the master of imaginative crime, Professor Moriarty. In addition, the loyal Dr. Watson has faithfully recorded Holmes’s feats of extraordinary detection in such famous cases as the thrilling “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” Holmes’s tragic and fortunately premature farewell in “The Final Problem,” and the twelve baffling adventures from The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle’s incomparable tales bring to life a Victorian England of horse-drawn cabs, fogs, and the famous lodgings at 221 B Baker Street, where for more than forty years Sherlock Holmes earned his undisputed reputation as the greatest fictional detective of all time.
‘The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.’
Centred around a glorious yellow diamond that carries with it a menacing history, The Moonstone tells the story of Rachel Verinder, who inherits the stone on her eighteenth birthday. That very evening, the diamond is stolen and there begins an epic enquiry into hunting down the thief. At the same time, three Indian men, Brahmin guardians of the diamond are attempting to reclaim the stone in order to return it to their sacred Hindu Idol.
Told from the perspective of 11different characters, Wilkie Collins’ tale of mystery and suspicion was considered the first modern English detective novel at its time of publication.
• All 4 Sherlock Holmes novels and 56 short stories, including the final 1927 collection, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
• More than 480 captioned illustrations, including all 357 Holmes illustrations by Sidney Paget
• Alphabetical index of titles & timeline of cases
• A helpful introduction, author bio, and bibliography
Presenting all of the stories in the order they were first published with the illustrations that accompanied the original Strand Magazine monthly editions, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Illustrated) brings the Sherlock Holmes adventures to you the way they were meant to be read.
When The Green Mile first appeared, serialized as one volume per month, Stephen King’s The Green Mile was an unprecedented publishing triumph: all six volumes ended up on the New York Times bestseller list—simultaneously—and delighted millions of fans the world over.
Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, home to the Depression-worn men of E Block. Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk the Green Mile, keeping a date with “Old Sparky,” Cold Mountain’s electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities in his years working the Mile. But he’s never seen anyone like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity. In this place of ultimate retribution, Edgecombe is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth about Coffey, a truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs...and yours.
When Valeria Brinton marries Eustace Woodville, both families object strongly. Before long, Valeria realizes that they may have been right to voice their concerns. Eustace, it seems, is living under an assumed name. This alone would be enough to rouse his new bride’s suspicions, but worse still, she discovers that he stood trial for the murder of his 1st wife! Although Eustace was not found guilty, the court was unable to find sufficient evidence to exonerate him. Determined to clear her husband’s name and prove—to herself and everyone else—that he is innocent, Valeria takes the sleuthing into her own hands.
Widely considered to be the 1st story featuring a female detective, The Law and the Lady is an intricate and classic tale.
This ebook features a new introduction from Otto Penzler and has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith joins a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
Animal Farm is Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution -- an account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones's Manor Farm into Animal Farm--a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. But are they?
When Rachel Verinder receives a gift of an astonishing yellow diamond from her bitter old uncle for her eighteenth birthday, she has no idea that the stone brings great danger with it. When the diamond goes missing during the night the ensuing investigations gradually bring to light the sinister history of the jewel and the passions and plots of those close to Rachel.
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.
The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years, East of Eden is a work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. Adapted for the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan introducing James Dean, and read by thousands as the book that brought Oprah’s Book Club back, East of Eden has remained vitally present in American culture for over half a century.
Collins’s story revolves around a diamond stolen from a Hindu holy place. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder receives the diamond, but by the following morning the stone has been stolen again. As the story unravels through multiple eyewitness accounts, the elderly Sergeant Cuff—with a face “sharp as a hatchet”—looks for the culprit.
One of Collins’s best-loved novels, with an exciting plot moved along by deftly-drawn characters and elegant pacing, The Moonstone was also turned into a play by Collins; the play appears as an appendix to this edition.
'Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond - bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man'
When Rachel Verinder's birthday present - the Moonstone, a large Indian diamond - is stolen at her party, suspicion and the diamond's mysterious curse seem set to ruin everyone and everything she loves. Only Sergeant Cuff's famous detective skills offer any hope of peace and a future for them all. The intricate plot and modern technique of multiple narrators made Wilkie Collin's 1868 work a huge success in the Victorian sensation genre. With a reconstruction of the crime, red herrings and a 'locked-room' puzzle, The Moonstone was also a major precursor of the modern mystery novel.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.
Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth’s inhabitants forever...
The story begins in 1846, at Combe-Raven in West Somersetshire, the country residence of the happy Vanstone family. When Andrew Vanstone is killed suddenly in an accident and his wife follows shortly thereafter, it is revealed that they were not married at the time of their daughters' births, making their daughters "Nobody's Children" in the eyes of English law and robbing them of their inheritance.
