English Literature Great

Tig Costello has arrived in Darren, Kentucky, commissioned to paint a portrait honoring her grandfather Benjamin. His contributions to the rural Appalachian town and his unimpeachable war service have made him a local hero. But to Tig, he’s a relative stranger. To find out more about him, Tig wants to talk to the person who knew her grandfather best: Eloise Price, the woman who murdered him fifty years ago.

Everyone knew that Tom Fitzgerald, better known as the Great Brain, would get into trouble when he went off to boarding school at the strict Catholic Academy for Boys. But no one - including Tom - knew just how much! Whether he's running an illegal candy store or earning a reputation as the fastest potato peeler, Tom's great brain never falters while his money-making schemes rise to new heights!

Hugo Award nominee Steven Barnes is a successful novelist and scriptwriter who has created episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Stargate SG-1. With Great Sky Woman, he presents a meticulous, vividly imagined vision of the Ibandi - an ancient people striving to maintain their place in the shadow of Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro.

Every year, the village of Blubber competes against the neighbouring town of Gulp in the Viking Games, and every year, the Blubberers get thrashed. Convinced he can do better this time, Vulgar starts training – with comically catastrophic results – but worse is to come when he arrives at the Games to discover he and his friends have all been mistakenly entered into the goat hurdling! And when Vulgar's arch-enemy Gunnar turns up in the same event, the stage is set for the most ill-tempered and chaotic goat-hurdling race in Viking history.

One of Newbery Medalist Sid Fleischman's most beloved books, this rip-snortin' saga of a young man and his butler bound for California during the great Gold Rush was just made to be read by a full cast. Our collection of coots, codgers, geezers, and outlaws will have you laughing out loud...when you're not holding your breath in suspense!

In the second memoir of her Crosswicks Journals, Madeleine L'Engle chronicles a season of extremes. Four generations of family have gathered at Crosswicks, her Connecticut farmhouse, to care for L'Engle's ninety-year-old mother. As summer days fade to sleepless nights, her mother's health rapidly declines and her once astute mind slips into senility. With poignant honesty, L'Engle describes the gifts and graces, as well as the painful emotional cost, of caring for the one who once cared for you.

This is the story of Bull Meecham, the epitome of the Marine officer. Demanding, authoritarian, as tough a disciplinarian at home as at the base, Bull is a difficult man to please, and even harder to love. This is also the story of Ben Meecham, Bull’s oldest son. A gifted athlete whose best never satisfies his father, Ben must balance his own ambition with his father’s expectations – and decide what course he will chart for himself and what kind of man he will become.

Lights! Camera! Action! The latest book in the Big Book Series takes us behind the curtain to uncover the stories that became some of the greatest films of the silver screen. Among these are Robert Louis Stevenson's horrifying tale that was later turned into the iconic movie The Body Snatcher, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; and "Cyclists' Raid", the short story that formed the basis for the legendary Brando film The Wild One.

Chaucer wrote about everyday people outside the walls of the English court-men and women who spent days at the pedal of a loom, or maintaining the ledgers of an estate, or on the high seas. In Chaucer's People, Liza Picard transforms The Canterbury Tales into a masterful guide for a gloriously detailed tour of medieval England, from the mills and farms of a manor house to the lending houses and Inns of Court in London. In Chaucer's People, we meet, again, the motley crew of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.

Harry Flashman: the unrepentant bully of Tom Brown's schooldays, now with a Victoria Cross, has three main talents - horsemanship, facility with foreign languages and fornication. A reluctant military hero, Flashman plays a key part in most of the defining military campaigns of the 19th century, despite trying his utmost to escape them all. What caused the Indian Mutiny?

Samuel Pepys kept a diary in which he wrote with astonishing candour about the life he saw around him in London in the 1660s, and about his private desires and ambitions. The diary was kept for fewer than 10 years of his long life: Claire Tomalin tells the whole story of the Fleet Street tailor's son who made himself rich and powerful, an MP and adviser to royalty.

The Great Eggscape is when the Good Egg and his pals escape their carton and drop into the store for a morning of fun, enjoyed by everybody. Well, almost everybody. Shel (an egg) isn’t a huge fan of group activities, especially when he’s made to be “It” for a game of hide-and-seek. Nevertheless, Shel doesn’t want to let his friends down, so he reluctantly plays, anyway. But after a morning of hiding and seeking, somebody’s still missing. Will the dozen eggs friends ever be reunited?

Step into the glittering world of the Roaring Twenties with The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless masterpiece of love, ambition, and illusion. Set in the opulent mansions and jazz-fueled parties of Long Island, this novel follows the enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby and his obsessive pursuit of the elusive Daisy Buchanan. Through the eyes of narrator Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald weaves a haunting tale of wealth, desire, and the shattered American Dream. Both dazzling and tragic, The Great Gatsby captures the spirit of an era—and the cost of chasing dreams that may never come true.

He's at it again! T. D., better known as the Great Brain, is up to eight more schemes to earn some money.

After her mother's sudden death, Melaney Carter travels hundreds of miles to deal with the inherited property while seeking solace from her obsessed ex-boyfriend and her dreaded upcoming college exams. The neglected house, a result of her mother's hoarding, demands major work, but Mel is determined to clean it so she can sell it and move on.

Emi Vargas, whose parents helped save the world, is tired of being told how lucky she is to have been born after the climate crisis. But following the public assassination of a dozen climate criminals, Emi’s mother, Kristina, disappears as a possible suspect, and Emi’s illusions of utopia are shattered. A determined Emi and her father, Larch, journey from their home in Nuuk, Greenland to New York City, now a lightly populated storm-surge outpost built from the ruins of the former metropolis. But they aren’t the only ones looking for Kristina.

Dorothy Gale doesn’t know where she came from. She has only the vaguest memory of her life before landing in the dull, gray world of the vast Kansas prairie.

It is a secret the Chinese government has been keeping for 40 years. They have proven the existence of dragons - a landmark discovery no one could ever believe is real and a scientific revelation that will amaze the world. Now the Chinese are ready to unveil their astonishing findings within the greatest zoo ever constructed. A small group of VIPs and journalists has been brought to the zoo deep within China to see these fabulous creatures for the first time.

In Agatha Christie’s class mystery Murder on the Links, Hercule Poirot attempts to unravel the grisly conundrum of not one, but two dead bodies discovered on a French golf course.

An anthology of over 50 classic poems, read by some of our finest actors. This collection contains a selection of the very best poems, from verses inspired by love to war poetry, nature poems and children's rhymes.