Patrick Tull

From the Publisher: When David Copperfield's widowed mother remarries, David suffers from his stepfather's abuse. At age 8, David is sent away to a harsh school where the principal routinely beats the students. David's circumstances become even worse when he is removed from school and, at age 10, forced to labor from morning to night in a London warehouse. David then decides to take desperate action. He will run away to his great-aunt, who lives in...

Eustacia Vye longs to escape from Egdon Heath, but the man she chooses to save her longs to stay. Out of their struggle, the unfulfilled passion of his heroine, and the daily rhythms of late-nineteenth-century rural life, Hardy builds a drama fully worthy of the magnificent stage on which he places it. The Return of the Native is dominated by the brooding presence of Egdon Heath, located in Thomas Hardy’s imaginary Wessex, and in no other book...

This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind...

First Published in 1903, Erskine Childers' "The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service", is one of the earliest examples of an espionage novel and was immensely influential in the creation of this popular genre. Childers led an interesting and adventurous life, becoming an amateur sailor as a young man before enlisting in the military and serving in the Boer War and eventually the First World War. In "The Riddle of the Sands", a gripping...

Brother Cadfael is confounded when his own potion is used to kill his former love's new husband Gervase Bonel is a guest of Shrewsbury Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul when he suddenly takes ill. Luckily, the abbey boasts the services of the clever and kindly Brother Cadfael, a skilled herbalist. Cadfael hurries to the man's bedside, only to be confronted with two surprises: In Master Bonel's wife, the good monk recognizes Richildis, whom he loved...