The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories

The first of these two successful novels by Ethel Lina White was originally published in 1936 as The Wheel Spins but became famous as The Lady Vanishes when it was made into a film in 1938. The novel tells of a beautiful English tourist travelling by train in Europe who discovers that her elderly travelling companion seems to have disappeared from the train. After her fellow passengers deny ever h...

With an Introduction by Dorinda Guest, PhD, formerly of the University of Kent at Canterbury. Virginia Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day (1919), portrays the gradual changes in a society, the patterns and conventions of which are slowly disintegrating; where the representatives of the younger generation struggle to forge their own way, for ‘... life has to be faced: to be rejected; then acce...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue A Room of One’s Own (1929) has become a classic feminist essay and perhaps Virginia Woolf’s best known work; The Voyage Out (1915) is highly significant as her first novel. Both focus on the place of women within the power structures of modern society. The essay lays bare the woman artist’s struggle for a voice, since throughout history she...

With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Roger Cardinal. The author of dozens of adventure novels and fantastical tales, Robert Louis Stevenson was also an enthusiast of travel, whether wandering on foot through France in the company of a donkey, crossing the plains of North America in a train crammed with emigrants, or cruising under sail with his wife in the waters of the Pacific. A livel...

With An Introduction and Notes by Anthony Briggs Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the greatest novels ever written, did not emerge from a vacuum. They were preceded by at least twenty prose works of different kinds, some of them masterpieces in their own right. These stories may be viewed as a fascinating encounter with literary predecessors such as Rousseau and Pushkin, an...

The illegitimate and impoverished son of a dressmaker and a nobleman, Hyacinth Robinson has grown up with a strong sense of beauty that heightens his acute sympathy for the inequalities that surround him. Drawn into a secret circle of radical politics he makes a rash vow to commit a violent act of terrorism. But when the Princess Casamassima - beautiful, clever and bored - takes him up ...

At the end of the nineteenth century a stranger arrives in the Sussex countryside and mayhem ensues; in the sleepy county of Kent a miracle food brings biological chaos that engulfs and threatens the entire planet. 11. G. Wells's fertile and mercurial imagination never brought us more bizarre and unsettling stories than those revealed in The Invisible Man 11897) and The Food of the Gods, and How I...

Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, one of the collections Arthur Conan Doyle published at the end of his career, anthologizes some of his best short fiction outside of the Sherlock Holmes canon. As well as various tales of escapades in Egypt, London and the far-flung regions of northern Scotland, he included stories which deal with a subject that, as a physician himself, he had a unique perspect...