In this autobiographic novel, an aging man reflects on his past. We are witness to the relationships he has along the way, his mistakes, and finally- in the most unexpected and honorable way- the sudden developement of his belief in god.

This is one of the Victorian “Sensationist” Mary Elizabeth Braddon's many novels (best known among them: “Lady Audley’s Secret”). It is extremely well written, fluid, humorous and, in places, self-mocking: one of the main characters is a Sensation Author. The motifs of the-woman-with-a-secret, adultery, and death are classic “sensationist” material. Yet this is also a self-consciously serious work of literature, taking on various social themes of the day. Specifically, Braddon presents...

MANUAL OF SURGERY, OXFORD MEDICAL PUBLICATIONSBY ALEXIS THOMSON, F.R.C.S.Ed.PREFACE TO SIXTH EDITION Much has happened since this Manual was last revised, and many surgical lessons have been learned in the hard school of war. Some may yet have to be unlearned, and others have but little bearing on the problems presented to the civilian surgeon. Save in its broadest principles, the surgery of warfare is a thing apart from the general surgery of civil life, and the exhaustive literature now available on every aspect of it makes it unnecessary that it should receive detailed consideration in a manual for students...

This is a gentle, delightful story of life and love on the bayoux of Acadian Louisiana during the latter half of the 19th century. Bonaventure is a Creole raised among the Acadians. He loves learning, and through his calling as a teacher, and his own unique force of character, comes to have a lasting effect on the people around him. A word of warning: This story has occasional references to Jews and African Americans that the modern mind finds offensive. They are retained here in the interest of preserving the original text.

It is a fictional tale of cavalry actions during the U.S. Civil War, under General John Morgan.

Canadian journalist William Jarvis' gently fictionalized work recounts many of the countless fascinating tales of the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon. (Introduction by Cathy Barratt)

Clotel; or, The President's Daughter is a novel by William Wells Brown (1815-84), a fugitive from slavery and abolitionist and was published in London, England in December 1853. It is often considered the first African-American novel. This novel focuses on the difficult lives of mulattoes in America and the "degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the USA" (Brown). It is about the tragic lives of Currer, Althesea, and Clotel. In the novel, Currer is the former mulatto mistress of President Thomas Jefferson who together have two daughters, Althesea and Clotel...

Monsieur Lecoq is a captivating mystery, historical and love story : Around 11 o'clock, on the evening of Shrove Sunday 18.., close to the old Barrière d'Italie, frightful cries, coming from Mother Chupin's drinking-shop, are heard by a party of detectives led by Inspector Gévrol. The squad runs up to it. A triple murder has just been committed. The murderer is caught on the premises. Despite Gévrol's opinion that four scoundrels encountered each other in this vile den, that they began to quarrel, that one of them had a revolver and killed the others, Lecoq, a young police agent, suspects a great mystery...

A story about the Irish, just before the onset of the famine of 1847, with all the color and dialogue of a man who lived it.

Entry in the Rick Brant series by Goodwin under the name John Blaine, which began in 1947. 'Rick and Scotty travel to the Himalayas again, this time to stop nuclear materials from falling into the wrong hands.' says Wikipedia.

The author was raised as an American Indian and describes what it was like to be an Indian boy (the first 7 chapters) and an Indian Girl (the last 7 chapters). This is very different from the slanted way the white man tried to picture them as 'savages' and 'brutes.'Quote: Dear Children:—You will like to know that the man who wrote these true stories is himself one of the people he describes so pleasantly and so lovingly for you. He hopes that when you have finished this book, the Indians will seem to you very real and very friendly...

This is an unusual story of the English Civil War. There is a good account of the Battle of Newbury, and many historic figures appear: Cromwell (very prominent), Ireton, Prince Rupert, Charles I, Fairfax, and Lambert. The setting for this tale of men and arms is taken from the stirring days of the Bavaliers and the Roundheads, of Puritans and the so-called malignants; but the machines of war are rather in the background, while in the spotlight is a witching woman, a conqueror of hearts and a marker of destinies. The story tells of a woman's ambition that "urges valiant men to perilous deeds".

Edward Everett Hale (1822 – 1909) was an American author, historian and Unitarian clergyman. Hale first came to notice as a writer in 1859, when he contributed the short story "My Double and How He Undid Me" to the Atlantic Monthly. He soon published other stories in the same periodical. His best known work was "The Man Without a Country", published in the Atlantic in 1863 and intended to strengthen support in the Civil War for the Union cause in the North. Though the story is set in the early 19th century, it is an allegory about the upheaval of the American Civil War...

The Maid of Maiden lane is a wonderful love story in which Mrs. Barr intertwines the hot political and social issues that were occurring in America during the last decade of the 18th century with an excellent love story plot. Some of those issues include: the moral dilemma and debate over the French Revolution, and how that event touched the lives of the immigrants in America; the prejudices between the immigrants from England, and those from France or Holland, and how those animosities affected the ordinary lives of the people; and the political debate over titles, foreign policy, and such things(for example)as where the capital of the nation was to reside, New York or Philadelphia...

In The Marrow of Tradition, Charles W. Chesnutt--using the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina massacre as a backdrop--probes and exposes the raw nerves and internal machinery of racism in the post-Reconstruction-era South; explores how miscegenation, caste, gender and the idea of white supremacy informed Jim Crow laws; and unflinchingly revisits the most brutal of terror tactics, mob lynchings. (Introduction by James K. White)

Like many soldiers at the beginning of their military careers, Harry Penrose has romantic ideas of climbing the ranks and attaining hero status. However, while stationed at Gallipoli, the realities of war begin to take their toll on Penrose, not only physically, but also mentally where the war has become a 'battle of the mind.' This is his story as related by a fellow soldier, as well as the story of the campaign at Gallipoli which is vividly portrayed from the author's own personal experiences.During his tenure as an officer, Penrose slowly asserts himself; the war takes a toll on his personality, but he begins to live up to his early dreams of heroism...

A fictionalized biography of George Mackay (1844-1901), an influential Presbyterian missionary in northern Taiwan.

Norrie Ford, having been unfairly convicted of murder, has escaped. A lucky chance finds him being rescued by a mysterious girl (the Wild Olive of the title), who sets him up with a new life under a new name in Argentina. He makes such a success of his time there that he is posted back to New York by the company he works for – but not before he has become engaged to be married. Back in New York, he meets up again with the Wild Olive . . .

Tempest and Sunshine is the first book written by Mary Jane Holmes. Set in the pre-Civil War south, it follows the struggles and romances of two sisters, as different as night and day; blonde Fanny and dark haired Julia. (Introduction by jedopi)

These are a collection of humorous "letters" written by a fictional character to a relation in the north during the Civil War. They were published regularly in the New York Mercury Sunday newspaper for the four years of the war. In the letters, Newell pokes fun at northern generals, politicians, and has hard things to say about southerners. Although Newell is rarely serious, I imagine the letters reflect the bitterness and frustration of many northerners at the time. (Introduction by Margaret)

The second book in a trilogy of the Reconstruction era - The Leopard's Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907), this novel was the basis for the 1915 silent movie classic, "The Birth Of A Nation". Within a fictional story, it records Dixon's understanding of the origins of the first Ku Klux Klan (his uncle was a Grand Titan during Dixon's childhood), recounting why white southerners' began staging vigilante responses to the savage personal insults, political injustices and social cruelties heaped upon them during Reconstruction...

Troy, Athens, Rome... each has its founding legend. So too does the Lincolnshire town of Grimsby, once the largest fishing port in the world. Havelok the Dane probably derives from a folk-tale, orally passed down before assuming written form - first in Anglo-Norman French, later in Middle English verse (c. 1280-1300). It tells of the rescue of the Danish prince from a wicked regent, who has tried to procure Havelok's murder. Grim the fisher, the appointed hit-man, thwarts the plan by spiriting the lad to England, where Grim settles with his family on the coast, adopting Havelok as his foster-son and naming the new community after himself...

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (1884 – 1941) was an English novelist. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, intended for a career in the church but drawn instead to writing. Among those who encouraged him were the authors Henry James and Arnold Bennett. His skill at scene-setting, vivid plots, and high profile as a lecturer brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, but has been largely neglected since his death...

When an agriculture professor wanders into a wicked Kansas cowtown in order to experiment raising wheat, both the professor and the town get more than they bargain for. A wild and wooly Western.

This is the story of Iola Leroy, a free-born, mixed-race woman who passed as white. Her true racial identity eventually discovered, she was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Later freed by the Union Army, she journeyed to find others of her family who had been disunited from each other and strewn across the south by the forces of slavery. In the process she also struggled to improve the economic and social station of African Americans. Iola Leroy is a story about race and gender roles during the antebellum and post-Civil War eras, "passing" and the associated socio-political consequences.

The Pharaoh and the Priest (Polish: Faraon) is the fourth and last major novel by the Polish writer Bolesław Prus. It was the sole historical novel by an author who had earlier disapproved of historical novels on the ground that they inevitably distort history. Pharaoh has been described by Czesław Miłosz as a "novel on mechanisms of state power and, as such, probably unique in world literature of the nineteenth century.... Prus, in selecting the reign of 'Pharaoh Ramses XIII' in the eleventh century BCE, sought a perspective that was detached from pressures of topicality and censorship...

Sylvia Fulton is a ten-years-old girl from Boston who stayed in Charleston, South Carolina, before the opening of the civil war. She loves her new home, and her dear friends. However, political tensions are rising, and things start to change. Through these changes, Silvia gets to know the world better: from Estrella, her maid, she starts to understand what it is to be a slave, from her unjust teacher she learns that not all beautiful people are perfect, and from the messages she carries to Fort Sumter she learns what is the meaning of danger. However, this is a lovely book, written mostly for children.

Plucky eight year old Anne Nelson, living in Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod, is determined to bring the Revolutionary War to an end so that she can be reunited with her soldier father. Will she succeed in carrying an important message from Boston to Newburyport, warning the American troops to be prepared, or will she be caught by the English ships patrolling the harbor?

The First Crusade provides the backdrop for a rich tapestry of political machinations, military conflicts, martial rivalries, and love stories, some of which are complicated by differences in religion. The supernatural plays a major role in the action. Partly on this account, and partly because of the multilayered, intertwined plots, the poem met with considerable contemporary criticism, so Tasso revised it radically and published the revision under a new name, La Gerusalemme Conquistata, or "Jerusalem Conquered," which has remained virtually unread, a warning to authors who pay attention to the critics...

"Well, Robin, on what folly do you employ yourself? Do you cut sticks for our fire o' mornings?" Thus spoke Master Hugh Fitzooth, King's Ranger of the Forest at Locksley, as he entered his house.Robin flushed a little. "These are arrows, sir," he announced, holding one up for inspection.Dame Fitzooth smiled upon the boy as she rose to meet her lord. "What fortune do you bring us to-day, father?" asked she, cheerily.Fitzooth's face was a mask of discontent. "I bring myself, dame," answered he, "neither more nor less...

Brother Stephen has the heart of an artist and wishes to leave the abbey to travel and see the world. However, King Louis has decreed that an "hour book" be made for his bride, Lady Anne, which in turn causes the Abbott to refuse Brother Stephen's request to leave the brotherhood as his illuminations are the most beautiful, and as such, he desires that Brother Stephen should be the one to make the hour book. This decision angers Brother Stephen. Will Brother Stephen stay at the abbey and carry out his task or will he refuse and bring about a ban against him, a serious matter indeed...