Adventure fiction is one of the easiest narrative forms to recognize but one of the hardest to define because of its overlap with many other genres. This collection of essays attempts to characterize adventure fiction through the exploration of key elements--such as larger-than-life characters and imperialistic ideas--in the genre's 19th- and 20th-century British and American works like The Scarlet Pimpernel by Orczy and Captain Blood by Sabatini. The author explores the ...

Set amidst the tempestuous seas of the Spanish Main, this masterpiece plunges readers into a daring journey of love, redemption, and the pursuit of justice.Peter Blood is a physician and an English gentleman who becomes a pirate out of a rankling sense of injustice. Barely escaping the gallows after his arrest for treating wounded rebels who were fighting the oppressive King James, Blood flees England and becomes enslaved on a Barbados plantation of buccaneers. Whe...

One of literature’s first, greatest, and most dastardly gentleman rogues finally joins the Penguin Classics crime listFirst published in 1900, A Prince of Swindlers introduces Simon Carne, a gentleman thief predating both E. W. Hornung’s A. J. Raffles and Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin. The British Viceroy first meets Carne while traveling in India. Charmed, he invites the reclusive hunchbacked scholar to London, little suspecting that his guest is actuall...

An excellent addition to Penguin's crime classics: the tantalizing tale of Colonel Clay, literature's first gentleman rogue.Wealthy, confident and handsome, Sir Charles Van Drift spends his time jetting to exotic locales with his wife and in-laws. But on one fateful trip to the Riviera, Van Drift meets his match in Colonel Clay. Posing alternately as a seer, a curate, and a German professor, the master of disguise swindles Van Drift through three continents and pos...

Born into poverty with an abusive home life, Dean Koontz found a respite in books. As he began a writing career in the late 1960s, Koontz began injecting the dark experiences of his own life into his literature, and autobiography became a central thematic element of his thrillers, science fiction and horror stories. Even Koontz's earliest pieces, like Star Quest and Demon Seed, are tapestries of raw, varied and energetic storylines equally as worthy of examination as his ...

Eighteen humorous tales of the macabre and supernatural from W.W. Jacobs, including his classic, "The Monkey's Paw."Considered one of the foremost humorists in England at the turn of the century, W.W. Jacobs (1863–1943) is best known for his masterpiece of horror, "The Monkey's Paw." He was the author of thirteen volumes of short stories—all of which were commercially successful—and eighteen of these are included together for the first time in this gripping collecti...

Just before sailing off to war in the Sudan, British guardsman Harry Feversham quits his regiment. He immediately receives four white feathers-symbols of cowardice-one each from his three best friends and his fiancée. To disprove this grave dishonor, Harry dons an Arabian disguise and leaves for the Sudan, where he anonymously comes to the aid of his three friends, saving each of their lives. Having proved his bravery, Harry returns to England, hoping to regain the love and respect of his ...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made his name and cemented his literary reputation as the master of detective fiction with the Sherlock Holmes tales, but his wide-ranging interests led him to produce a remarkable array of books over the course of his career. This is his meticulously researched account of England's war with the Boers in South Africa, which he wrote while the conflict was still underway.

Elibron Classics. Replica of 1893 edition by Rowland Ward and Co., Limited, London.The edition comes with PDF maps available as a free download.This edition includes illustrations.Frederick Courteney Selous (1851 - 1917) was a British explorer, officer, hunter, and conservationist, famous for his exploits in South-East Africa. Selous was also a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Cecil Rhodes and Frederick Russell Burnham.The book narrates the story of eleven years of...

Becoming Zimbabwe is the first comprehensive history of Zimbabwe, spanning the years from 850 to 2008. In 1997, the then Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Morgan Tsvangirai, expressed the need for a 'more open and critical process of writing history in Zimbabwe. ...The history of a nation-in-the-making should not be reduced to a selective heroic tradition, but should be a tolerant and continuing process of questioning and re-examination.' Becoming Zimbabwe tracks ...

Koevoet! has been an global bestseller since its release over 20 years ago. This new edition goes far beyond the original in capturing the courage, fear and intensity of South Africa's deadly bush war. Never before had an outsider been given unrestricted access to Koevoet, the elite South West African Police counterinsurgency unit - also known as Operation K and officially as the South West Africa Police Counter Insurgency Unit (SWAPOL-COIN). Author Jim Hooper spent a total of five months ...

Toc Walsh was conscripted into intake 138 Depot Rhodesia Regiment on 18 April 1974 and endured a year of what he deemed to be ‘military mayhem’. In July 1976, he was drafted again with the 10th Battalion Rhodesia Regiment to continue his wild ride into the maniacal world of combat. The country was in a state of national emergency and all available men were called up on continuous service. Mampara is a no-holds-barred look at one man’s lived experience of war.The title of the book s...