This romantic mystery - or mysterious romance - tells the tale of jilted lover, Jim Conrad, who discovers an unusual gold ring while on a visit to Paris. What is the story of the ring? Why is Clelia Vine so sad? Who is the nameless 'chief'? And how is a dour English barber in a Parisian salon mixed up in all this?The novel, published in 1896, was written by Justin McCarthy, an Irish nationalist, Liberal historian, novelist and politician. (Introduction by Ruth Golding)

In the South African wilderness, six men got together to mine for diamonds and become very rich. They agree that the wealth is to be split equally between them or their heirs after a few years and that the share of any one who died without leaving an heir or whose heir died before the time would be split between the remaining partners. Soon, all heirs are notified and wait expectantly for the first of January, on which the diamonds are to be divided between the partners. However, the diamonds are becoming increasingly blood stained, and January the first is still some time off...

A sweet, old fashioned Christmas romance set in an old New England meeting house.

A romantic comedy. A pretty young American girl tours English Cathedrals, with her very blue-blooded Aunt. Then boy meets girl. Boy chases girl. Boy loses girl. Boy finds girl. Finally, girl catches boy with the help of a mad bull.

A single woman from a family that is well-off, buys a house at a place that is looked down upon and disapproved by her family and friends alike. Her reason - she wants to live the life of and know people like that. (This book's got one of the cutest romantic endings I've ever read). What is surprising is this book is in the PD - there are quite a few modern expressions and comparatively less quaint, out-of-fashion expressions.

The Masquerader is one of two Katherine Cecil Thurston’s books that appeared on the Publisher’s Weekly best-sellers list in 1905. The Masquerader is part mystery, part romance and part political thriller – all tied up in one neat package. Nature has a way of sometimes making two people nearly indistinguishable in appearance. Such is the premise for this book. John Chilcote, a British politician, and John Loder, a man down on his luck meet by accident one night during one of London’s worst fogs...

This is a collection of the following short stories: The Ninth Vibration -- The Interpreter : A Romance of the East -- The Incomparable Lady : A Story of China with a Moral -- The Hatred of the Queen : A Story of Burma -- Fire of Beauty -- The Building of the Taj Majal -- How Great is the Glory of Kwannon! -- The Round-Faced Beauty. Many of them are romantic, some of them are fantasy and others are occult fiction.(Introduction by Linda Andrus)

Published anonymously during Baum's lifetime as he did not want his adult adventure stories to detract from his children's fantasy stories, the story takes the limited points of view of three protagonists in the field of Egyptology. A complex tale of intrigue, embezzlement, forgery, arranged marriages, bigotry and cheating keep the reader guessing the outcome until the last chapter.

Christina is a story of two people: Christina, a strong young and poor woman, who searches for work and finds more than she bargained for, and Rupert, a middle class man, who is pressured to marry and settle down. These two people meet frequently and start to confide in each other. But can they really help one another put their wounds from the past to rest and start a new life? And will their new life include one another? Lucy Gertrude Moberly was an English popular novelist whose wonderful writing style deserves attention.

Selma Lagerlöf was born in Vaermland, Sweden, in 1858 and enjoyed a long and very successful career as a writer, receiving the Nobel-Prize in Literature in 1909. She died in Vaermland in 1940. The Treasure (Herr Arnes penningar) is a fairly short Novel, both a Drama and a Ghost Story. Published in 1904 and the English translation in 1923. The story is set in Bohuslaen on the West coast of Sweden in the middle of the 16th Century. Herr Arne, the old Parson in Solberga and all his household are brutally murdered, and his great Treasure stolen...

Carrying out the last wishes of a comrade, mercenary Eric John Stark takes on the task of returning a stolen talisman to a walled city near the Martian pole; a city that guards the mysterious Gates of Death. Now all he has to do is get past the brutal clans of Mekh and the shadowy Lord Ciaran to get to Kushat where they’ll probably attempt to kill him. All while he tries to hold on to a talisman that imprints ancient memories of the Gates in his mind. That’s not easy for a human raised by Mercurian aborigines...

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace chronicles the lives of five Russian aristocratic families during Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Many considered this book to be the best Russian work of literature of all time and it is massive in scale. The book is divided in four volumes and the chapters don't just contain the narrative of the plot to the novel but philosophical discussions as well. This may be intimidating to average book readers but they shouldn't be discouraged to try reading War and Peace. After all, this book was written for all and not just for intellectuals...

This play is based on story told in Cervantes' Don Quixote, and some believe it is a reconstruction of a lost play by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Duke Angelo and his son Roderick are concerned about the activities of the duke's younger son, Henriquez. They enlist his friend, Julio, as a spy. Before Julio left for the court, he foolishly asks Henriquez to secure his marriage to Leonora.

Daphnis and Chloe is an Ancient Greek prose work, probably written during the second century CE, by Longus. It tells the story of two young people, Daphnis and Chloe, both abandoned at birth along with some identifying tokens. A goatherd named Lamon raises the boy Daphnis as his son, and a shepherd called Dryas finds Chloe, and also decides to raise her. They both grow up as neighbors herding the flocks in the island of Lesbos. They fall in love with each other, but have to go through many adventures and hardships, including abduction and pirate attacks, until they find their happy ending.

These are the last four Cantos of his mock epic that Byron completed in the year before his death at the age of 36 in Messolonghi, Greece, where he had gone to fight for the nationalists against the Ottoman Empire. Juan, now in England, is invited to spend the autumn with a hunting party at the ancient country seat of Lord Henry and Lady Adeline Amundeville. There, he meets the most intriguing of the Byronic heroines, Aurora Raby, and is visited by a ghost with ample breasts (!). That is the narrative outline but hardly the focus of the last Cantos...

"The Giaour" is a poem by Lord Byron first published in 1813 and the first in the series of his Oriental romances. "The Giaour" proved to be a great success when published, consolidating Byron's reputation critically and commercially.

23 year old Cornélie de Retz is a Dutch Divorcee who goes to Italy to start a new life and most part of the novel is filled with the details of romantic conversations, emotions and finally the Inevitable follows. Find out what the Inevitable is and immerse yourself in the explicit and delicate details of the author as he takes you round the world of Cornélie de Retz.

The Lone Wolf is the first of eight books in a series featuring the jewel thief turned private detective Michael Lanyard. With his identity betrayed and the police on his heels, he must fly from Paris, which is made much more difficult by his self-imposed duty to take care of the beautiful Lucia, who has a dark secret of her own...A large number of movies have been based on the books.

The Silent Barrier is a story of mystery and romance with Charles K. Spencer, a well-to-do young American mining engineer, as main character. Drinking his water in a hotel in London one day, he overhears a conversation between two young women, one of whom speaks of going to Switzerland. He decides to play "fairy godfather" and send the comparatively poor, but most amicable other girl there, without her knowing anything of him, under the pretext of furthering her career as a writer for a scientific journal. However, the girl is shadowed on her journey by the mysterious Mr. Mark Bower. Convinced from the first that Bower is a rogue, Mr. Spencer decides to follow them to protect the girl...

Set in nineteenth century New England, Little Women follows the lives of the four March sisters-Jo, Beth, Amy and Meg. The novel is a classic rites of passage story, that has often split literature critics but has been adored by many over the years. Intended as a book for young girls, the book is too sentimental for some but plenty of adults and young men have Little Women firmly featured in their best books of all time. The pace of the novel can be slow at times and the language almost too perfect but the overall sympathetic tone of Alcott wins over the reader...

Louisa May Alcott enthusiasts would be delighted to read this short novel published in 1867, just a year before the grand debut of her most famous Little Women trilogy. This is one of three books she wrote under the pseudonym AM Barnard. She used this name to pen tales that were meant more for adult readers, though younger people will find them quite interesting too. The Abbot's Ghost or Maurice Treherne's Temptation is a romance, mystery, ghost-story and novel of manners all rolled into one...

Jo’s Boys is the third book in the Little Women trilogy by Louisa May Alcott, published in 1886. In it, Jo’s “children”, now grown, are caught up in real world troubles. All three books – although fiction – are highly autobiographical and describe characters that were really in Alcott’s life. This book contains romance as the childhood playmates become flirtatious young men and women. The characters are growing up, going out into the world and deciding their futures.