"In North Kensington three orphaned mixed-race children are bounced from one home to another. The middle child Joel takes care of the youngest, Toby, who isn't quite right. When a local gang threatens Toby, Joel makes a pact with the devil that ends in the murder of Thomas Lynley's wife."--From source other than the Library of Congress

"With a specially commissioned Introduction and Notes by Kathryn White, Assistant Curator/Librarian of the Brontë Museum, Haworth, Yorkshire This novel is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally-starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-19th century. This is a deeply personal novel written from the author's own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which...

This novel, originally written in 1916, published in 1921, explores the lives of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their developing love affairs with Rupert Birkin, an intellectual, and Gerald Crich, an industrialist. The despair of one sister's relationship contrasts with the happiness of the other's as the four clash in thought, passion, and belief, in their search for a life that is truly complete. The novel is the sequel to The Rainbow....

"When A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843 it was an overnight success, and set a precedent that was to be followed by other Christmas books, including The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket (1845). Each book was published at the same time of year, in the same format, and extolled similar values about the virtues of love, charity and the family unit. But none would achieve the cult status of A Christmas Carol, a book so popular it has become part...

Walking to the shops one day in London's Notting Hill, fifty-year-old Eugene Wren discovers an envelope on the street bulging with cash. A man plagued by a shameful addiction, Wren hatches a plan to find the money's rightful owner. Instead of going to the police, or taking the cash for himself, he prints a notice and posts it around Portobello Road. This ill-conceived act creates a chain of events that links Wren to other Londoners--people afflicted...

In the height of a financial crisis, the residents of Pepys Road, London, receive menacing postcards threating them.

"Brought up by her widowed father in a remote English castle, Arabella resorts to reading the French novels popular in her mother's youth, and in the solitude of this Arcadia paints a picture of her life as adventurous and deeply romantic. When her father dies, however, she inherits a barbed legacy: if she is not to lose part of the estate it appears she must marry her cousin Glanville. But Arabella has developed a different, private code of conduct...

The story of Oliver Twist - orphaned, and set upon by evil and adversity from his first breath - shocked readers when it was published. After running away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble, Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull's Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements...