The mistress of the old estate – the Portgen Tower – dies, leaving a dying letter in which she makes a fatal confession. The discovery of this secret can have truly tragic consequences for all the inhabitants of the estate. But the maid, hoping to keep the peace of her masters, hides the letter in the old abandoned room of the castle – the Dead Room. Many years will pass before the Dead Room will part with its terrible secret.
There is literally no such thing as an evil genius, just a lot of depressed people who were not lucky enough to live in the 1800s. This is a historical family drama. A very abrupt end. It’s never quite clear who the evil genius is. But he certainly gave us a clear idea of just how devastating adultery can be.
Full of noble aspirations, a young graduate of the American Christian Community, Amelius Goldenhart, comes to his homeland in England. Here he falls in love with Regina, the niece of the wealthy merchant Farneby, but, having learned selfishness and cruelty, the hypocrisy of the world, he gives his heart to the destitute, lonely girl Sally – one of the representatives of the „fallen leaves” of bourgeois society.
This book is one of the most popular novels by Robert William Chambers and has been translated into several other languages around the world. A casual conversation with a model for his new project forces him to test his theories about creativity, society, and love, and he discovers that other people have their own ideas about how it should all work.
A tragic incident leaves a girl from an aristocratic family without the right not only to an inheritance, but even to a family name. But the talented and energetic beauty is not going to surrender to the will of fate – she will throw all her ingenuity and desperate audacity into the cause of restoring justice. True, for this you have to give up a lot...
An American classic about Swedish immigrants in the Midwest. There lived in Nebraska a clever and beautiful woman named Alexandra Bergson, and she had three brothers. The older ones were greedy self-satisfied people, the younger one was a spoiled egoist, and she devoted her whole life to making sure they had a good life. I thought only about crops, livestock and land plots, but I didn’t think about myself – for the time being
This is a historical novel describing the events of the Great Plague in London and the Great Fire of London. The protagonist is Leonard Holt, apprentice of our grocer Stephen Blundel, he is madly in love with the grocer’s daughter Annabelle, who is not madly in love with him, she is madly in love with Lord Rochester.
This story continues the fantastic stories of Dr. Percy, forever searching the world for zoological discoveries and love, and doomed to never find either. Our narrator, Dr. Percy, works at the Bronx Zoo. He is one of those brave adventurers who seek to dive into the depths of uncharted lakes and discover the remains of a tribe of cave dwellers or the existence of people with three eyes.
This is a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers. Green challenges his friend, the adventure novelist, to show him what can happen to him, that indeed romance is all around us, just waiting for us to notice it. This is the only story that dives into fantasy when Green discovers a girl trying to avoid a fortune teller’s prediction.
A typical gothic fantasy, Rookwood is a good read if you can stomach the songs, poetry, and flowery language. It features underground vaults, mummified corpses falling out of tombs, paranormal summonses, girls in great distress, a sinister gypsy old woman, adultery, death by lightning, and macabre prophecies.
The action takes place in Virginia five years before the Civil War. The story shows the impact of slavery on Saphira Colbert, a woman of spirit and common sense who is frighteningly capricious in dealing with the people she „owns”. The heroine Sapphira lacks moral qualities, she does not cause sympathy. However, the book was critically acclaimed and was a commercial success.
This is a historical fiction book depicting the French colonization of Canada and life in Quebec in the late 1600s. Euclid Auclair is a father and a widower. The little daughter took over the running of their home after the death of her beloved mother two years ago. She is twelve. Euclid and his family, wife and daughter, had come to Quebec eight years earlier, hired by the Governor General to be his physician.
Theodore Dreiser is a famous American prose writer, publicist and public figure. This is the story of the rise of the main character, the young provincial Caroline Meeber, achieved at the cost of numerous moral compromises, and the descent of the manager of a prestigious bar, George Hurstwood, to the bottom of life.
