Great Literature

As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville's "quasi-memoir" is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived.

Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court-men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer's People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills and farms of a manor house to the lending houses and Inns of Court in London. In Chaucer's People, we meet, again, the motley crew of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.

London Labour and the London Poor is a rare and fascinating insight into the lives and struggles of the 19th-century poor. Written by journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew, a founder and editor of the satirical magazine Punch, it collects hundreds of testimonials from the lower strata of Victorian society. We encounter street entertainers, 'pure finders', cabinetmakers, gingerbread sellers, 'screeve-fakers', swindlers, and burglars. We hear accounts from toshers finding items in sewers, people attempting to train pigs to dance, and witness the sale of everything from gilt watches and chickweed to needles, dog collars, and eel soup.

"The Great Divorce" by C. S. Lewis is a thought-provoking and imaginative exploration of the afterlife. The novel follows a group of souls who are given the opportunity to leave their miserable existence in Hell and travel to Heaven. Along the way, they encounter a variety of characters and obstacles that test their understanding of morality, redemption, and the nature of God.

Promoted to the elite Praetorian Guard in the thick of battle, a young legionary is thrust into a seedy world of imperial politics and corruption. Tasked with uncovering a plot against the newly crowned Emperor Commodus, his mission takes him from the cold Danubian border all the way to the heart of Rome, the villa of the Emperor’s scheming sister, and the great Colosseum. What seems a straightforward, if terrifying, assignment soon descends into Machiavellian treachery and peril as everything in which young Rufinus trusts and believes is called into question....

Julia Cummings has long been acquainted with loss - her mother, her brother, her sister, her friend, all gone too soon. But the loss that pushed her grief to the limit as a young girl was that of her best friend, Lucas Jonquil, who abandoned her without looking back. Now, eight years later, Lucas has returned to Lampton Park, and Julia has steeled herself - she will never forgive the man who broke her heart.

Chicago, 1923: Ten-year-old Dani Flanagan returns home to find police swarming the house, her parents dead. Michael Malone, the young patrolman assigned to the case, discovers there’s more to the situation—and to Dani Flanagan herself—than the authorities care to explore. Malone is told to shut his mouth, and Dani is sent away to live with her spinster aunts in Cleveland.

Edgar nominee Zilpha Keatley Snyder is a three-time Newbery Honor winner, and her book The Unseen was named as both a School Library Journal Best Book and Parents' Choice Silver Honor Winner. In William S. and the Great Escape, Snyder pens a middle-grade adventure sure to be ranked with her very best.

Alexander's beauty, strength and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son's loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle. His love for the youth Hephaistion taught him trust, while Aristotle's tutoring provoked his mind and Homer's Iliad fuelled his aspirations.

In a national contest, readers voted and decided that the next I Survived topic will be the Great Chicago Fire, 1871! In the next book of the I Survived series, one boy will struggle to stay alive as the great city of Chicago burns.

With a dynamic spirit, these great English poets made a conscious return to nostalgia and spiritual depth. Each chose a different path, but they are united in a love of moods, impressions, scenes, stories, sights and sounds. In this collection of more than forty poems are some of the finest and most memorable works in the English language.

After her mother's sudden death, Melaney Carter travels hundreds of miles to deal with the inherited property while seeking solace from her obsessed ex-boyfriend and her dreaded upcoming college exams. The neglected house, a result of her mother's hoarding, demands major work, but Mel is determined to clean it so she can sell it and move on.

It’s 1915, twenty years after the Martian invasion chronicled in the War of the Worlds failed. The aliens left behind advanced technology and weapons, and now humanity is on the brink of a catastrophic war. Caught in the middle of the chaos are two unlikely heroes: Emil Zimmerman, a young German soldier, and James Brogan, an introverted radio engineer. Emil dreamed of escaping his small village and making his way to the big city but finds himself in the trenches fighting for an army that indiscriminately wields deadly Martian weapons.

John Keats was largely unappreciated during his lifetime and died in Rome at the age of 26. Most of his 150 poems were written in just nine extraordinary months in 1819. This selection contains some of his finest works, including the principal "Odes", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", "Old Meg", and "Much Have I Travelled".

This volume contains a variety of imaginative stories from both famous and not-so-famous science fiction writers.

Philip is a good boy, a really good boy, who accidentally gets sent to hell to become the devil's heir. The devil, Lucifer, is dying and desperately in need of a successor, but there's been a mistake, and Philip is the wrong boy. Lucifer has no other choice than to begin the difficult task of training Philip in the ways of evil. Philip is terrible at being bad, but when he falls in love with the she-devil Satina and experiences the powerful forces of love and jealousy, the task becomes much easier.

The United States, stunned by the nuclear detonation in Washington, D.C., and further crippled by the EMP attack on the whole country, is on the brink of destruction. The unscrupulous leaders who have banded together to toss out the Constitution and divide the ruling of the world between themselves have all but achieved their objective. But they haven't factored in one thing. They haven't considered the chance, however slight, that good people remain who will continue standing up for what they believe in.

Beobrand is besieged in the action-packed instalment in the Bernicia Chronicles set in AD 647 Anglo-Saxon Britain. War hangs heavy in the hot summer air as Penda of Mercia and his allies march into the north. Caught unawares, the Bernician forces are besieged within the great fortress of Bebbanburg. It falls to Beobrand to mount the defence of the stronghold, but even while the battle rages, old and powerful enemies have mobilised against him, seeking vengeance for past events.

With an iron fist, the Great Library controls the knowledge of the world, ruthlessly stamping out all rebellion, forbidding the personal ownership of books in the name of the greater good. Jess Brightwell has survived his introduction to the sinister, seductive world of the Library, but serving in its army is nothing like he envisioned. His life and the lives of those he cares for have been altered forever. His best friend is lost, and Morgan, the girl he loves, is locked away in the Iron Tower and doomed to a life apart.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in the early 1920s, the American Dream was already on the skids. Originally based on the idea that the pursuit of happiness involves not only material success, but moral and spiritual growth, the dream had, by Fitzgerald's time, become increasingly focused on money and pleasure - a phenomenon with which the high-living writer was all too familiar.