He was indeed the nearest anybody ever got to Charlie Chaplin in print…the sentences skid and dance and hop on one leg or take a custard pie right on the chin or duck and weave and leave you gasping behind. But he is more for the wry smile than the belly laugh…' This was how Sid Chaplin described Jack Common, author of two of the finest working-class novels of the 20th century, and 'the finest prose writer to come from the North-East of England'. Kiddar's Luck, his first novel, was a comme...

"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public RadioWhen Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and...

I was born in a tenement flat in the East End of London in the year in which Queen Victoria died.'FOUR MEALS FOR FOURPENCE is Grace Foakes's memories of her girlhood in Wapping in the early 1900s. With a child's uncluttered eye, she describes the small details - shopping in the market, men waiting for work at the dock gates, the rituals of washday, the sights, sounds and smells of the old East End of London. She also describes the fear - of illness, of unemployment, of the workhous...

1930-something: a professional hunter is passing through an unnamed Central European country that is in the thrall of a vicious dictator. The hunter wonders whether he can penetrate undetected into the dictator’s private compound. He does. He has the potential target in his sites and is wondering whether to pull the trigger when security catches up with him. Imprisoned, tortured, doomed to a painful death, the hunter makes an extraordinary and harrowing escape, fleeing through enemy territ...

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and proved so popular that Jerome reunited ...

'As a child I would sit on the stone wall as if hypnotised, imagining that the world ended where the moutains and the sky met and wishing I could stand at the top and touch the heavens.' This enchanting story tells of a young girl's magical childhood on a farm in the west of Ireland during the 1930s and 1940s. It looks at the mountain-village community, one that was poor, though never short of the necessities of life.

The enchanting childhood memoirs of bestselling author Miss Read.Miss Read's early days were spent with two remarkable grandmothers - one in Lewisham and one in Walton-on-the-Naze. EARLY DAYS is full of childhood memories of an extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins and their houses full of mystery and adventure, where Miss Read spent so much time, living in the shadow of the First World War.At the age of seven, Miss Read moved to the small village of...

H. G. Wells's Collected Works is contained 15 novels written by Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) A British writer best known for his science fiction novels, he was arguably one of the most prolific writers in the history of literature, and wrote works in nearly every genre, including short stories and nonfiction. These are the 15  novels of Herbert George Wells in this book. 1. The Time Machine, (Heinemann text) (1895) 2. The Wonderful Visit, (1895) 3. ...

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp is a vivid Edwardian account of itinerant life, poverty, self-fashioning, and hard-won artistic vocation. Blending memoir, picaresque adventure, social observation, and plainspoken lyricism, the volume ranges from British workhouses to North American railways, from casual labor to moments of startling beauty. Its episodes of tramping, begging, risk, and resilience place it within a broader literature of marginality while preserving an unmistakably persona...

"[This] beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on aging, marriage and loss, fictionalizes a well-known period in Thomas Hardy's life" ( The New York Times).A November morning in the 1920s finds an elderly man walking the grounds of his Dorchester home, pondering his past and future with deep despondence. That man is the revered novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and this is a fictionalized account of his final years from the celebrated author of The El...