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.
The hero of the novel is a talented artist Eugene Vitla overcomes a thorny path to his goal of becoming a recognized artist. Experiencing ups and downs, Eugene gives an assessment of the life of a creative person in a capitalist society. Describes the life of the American elite and ordinary workers, whom the hero has to face on the path of life, against the backdrop of difficult family relationships. However, he did not break down after he experienced mental and creative cris...
The narrator is a widower with two daughters, living happily into a rather troubling middle age and pushing away his daughter’s suitors so that his daughters would live with him a little longer. A younger neighbor persuades him to buy a pig and then bets that the boredom of life has so eclipsed his intelligence that he won’t be smart enough to stop someone from stealing it. If the narrator loses the bet, he will jump out of his rut by going to Paris.
The story is about a rich girl deserting her riches for the love of her life. She is an Irish Catholic and the boy for whom she leaves everything is related to German Protestantism. The life seems to be good. But when at the end of her life as the couple is reduced to abject poverty, she probes few questions relating to her life.
The story of a boy who grew up in a wealthy farming family, not avoiding hardships and always ready to lend a helping hand. The story of a love that didn’t happen, but rather happened, between the main character or Antonia, turns out to be more than growing up, more than just about the history of one country. This is a story about a change of mind.
This is a typical English Victorian novel. The action takes place in a women’s closed boarding house, the main characters are girls, one of them will turn out to be of aristocratic origin, the other will have a passionate affair with an unrecognized artist.. in a word, everything we expect from Victorian novels is passion, moralizing, trials, censure of vices and exaltation of virtues.
