Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo travels to Johannesburg on an errand for a friend and to visit his son, Absalom, only to learn Absalom has been accused of murdering white city engineer and social activist Arthur Jarvis and stands very little chance of receiving mercy.

Relationships within the Pontifex family reflect the hypocrisy of middle-class life in Victorian England.

Charles Dickens was an English short story writer, dramatist, essayist, and the most popular novelist to come out of the Victorian era. Many of his novels, with their frequent concern for social reform, were first published in magazines in serial form under the pseudonym, Boz. Unlike authors who completed entire novels before serialization, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The continuing popularity of his novels and...

For Barbara Vaughn, a checkpoint between Jordan and the newly formed Israel is the threshold to painful self-discovery   Barbara Vaughn is a scholarly woman whose fascination with religion stems partly from a conversion to Catholicism, and partly from her own half-Jewish background. When her boyfriend joins an archaeological excursion to search for additional Dead Sea Scrolls, Vaughn takes the opportunity to explore the Holy Land. But this is 1960,...

Where Angels Fear to Tread is a novel that contrasts rigid English social conventions with the emotional openness of Italian life. The story begins when Lilia Herriton, a recently widowed Englishwoman, impulsively marries a much younger Italian man, Gino Carella, shocking her conservative family back in England. After Lilia's tragic death, her relatives attempt to intervene in Gino's life, convinced of their moral and cultural superiority. As the...

Twenty Years After - Alexandre Dumas - Twenty Years After (French: Vingt ans après) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, first serialized from January to August 1845. A book of The d'Artagnan Romances, it is a sequel to The Three Musketeers and precedes The Vicomte de Bragelonne (which includes the sub-plot Man in the Iron Mask). The novel follows events in France during the Fronde, during the childhood reign of Louis XIV, and in England near the end...

An Inspector Morse Mystery. The case seems so simple that Inspector Morse deems it beneath his notice. A wealthy, elderly American tourist has a heart attack in her room at Oxford's luxurious Randolph Hotel. Missing from the scene is the lady's handbag, which contained the Wolvercote Tongue, a priceless jewel that her late husband had bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum just across the street. Morse proceeds to spend a great deal of time thinking-and...

When Maud Marsh flings herself into George Bevan's cab in Piccadilly, he starts believing in damsels in distress. He traces his mysterious travelling companion to Belpher Castle where things become severely muddled.

It was the first war we could not win. At no other time since World War II have two superpowers met in battle. In this extensive history, preeminent military historian Max Hastings takes us back to the bloody, bitter struggle to restore South Korean independence after the Communist invasion of June 1950. Using personal accounts from interviews with more than two hundred vets-including the Chinese-Hastings follows real officers and soldiers through...

From the author of 1984, George Orwell narrates the journey of a writer among the down-and-out in two great cities in this sobering, truthful portrayal of poverty and society. Famous for its realistic and unsentimental description of poverty, Down and Out in London and Paris follows the adventures of a penniless British writer who finds himself rapidly descending into the seedy heart of two great European capitals. As a dishwasher in Paris, he describes...