Family Life Classics

Maggie Tulliver, whose father owns a mill perched on the banks of the River Floss, is intelligent and imaginative beyond the understanding of her community, her relatives, and particularly her brother Tom. Despite their opposite temperaments, Maggie and Tom are united by a strong bond. But this bond suffers when Tom's sense of family honor leads him to forbid her to associate with the one friend who appreciates her intelligence and imagination.

Sam and Henny Pollit have too many children, too little money, and too much loathing for one another. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny watches in bleak despair, knowing the bitter reality that lies just below his mad visions. A chilling novel of family life, this work is acknowledged as a contemporary classic.

First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America - an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of the nation's peacetime optimism. With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naiveté of their own time in a work that endures as a valuable social document and one of America's most important satirical novels.

Viaggio alle radici della nascita del clientelismo politico e della mafia. Una vicenda familiare che si snoda attraverso le generazioni e diventa il paradigma di una società.Un’opera che facilita la comprensione del presente e delle radici psicologiche dell’illegalità mafiosa.Adatto a: tutti, in particolare ai cultori delle radici dei fenomeni storici italiani; ai cercatori di chiavi di lettura delle vicende del presente.

'You don’t mean you're going to divorce him?' Miss Spanner said with horror. A sophisticated, emotive novel, Chatterton Square concerns the complex web of relationships between two neighbouring families, the Blacketts and the Frasers. Framed by the advance of the Second World War, the subtle mechanics of marriage and love are laid bare through the observation of three of the marital options open to the mid-century woman: unmarried, separated, miserably married.

This is the story of the celebrated Pickwick Club. The members are to report to the club on their journeys, adventures, and observations of characters and manners. Dickens creates a vivid picture of England in taking his characters along the nostalgic highways and byways of this majestic isle. This remarkable first novel made Dickens famous and has remained one of the world's best-known works.

A raging flood in Missouri took the lives of a married couple who barely got their three-year-old son into a cradle that carried him downstream. The parents were drowned. A kind rancher managed to pull the makeshift device to shore and wound up calling the boy Dave and raising the youngster to manhood without a known family name. The savior didn’t officially adopt the boy but they behaved as a loving father and son in adult life. A scoundrel family discovered the truth and labeled the young man a “nameless nobody.”

A widow in her mid thirties, Alison has been in mourning for two years. She lives with her sister and brother-in-law in West Virginia, and they are urging her to get on with her life and move back home. Alison promises to leave--just as soon as she renovates a nearly-ruined 1976 Corvette rusting...

"You were named for Elvis. . . . Darlin', did you hear me? You were named for Elvis Presley. Not even your father knows that. Wouldn't you like to share a secret, just you and me?" Simone "Mimi" Page once dated Elvis--and will never let her daughter forget it...

Meet the Laments—the affably dysfunctional globetrotting family at the center of George Hagen’s exuberant debut novel. Howard is an engineer who dreams of irrigating the Sahara and lives by the motto “Laments move!” His wife Julia is a fiery spirit who must balance her husband’s oddly...

B.J. Harrison reads Louisa May Alcotts famous novella "Behind a Mask", which is widely considered to be Alcotts masterpiece in sensation fiction. A wealthy Victorian-era family recruits Jean Muir as sixteen-year-old Bellas governess. But soon enough, Jean Muir appears to have everyone under her spell, and to have the power to do everything as she pleases. This novella from the late 19th century was initially published under Louisa May Alcotts pseudonym A. M. Barnard...

Young Cedric Errol lives in poverty in New York with his mother. When his father, who was disinherited for marrying an American, dies, Cedric is summoned to his grandfather's English estate. While the crotchety old Earl planned to transform the boy into a docile, traditional lording, it is Little Lord Fauntleroy who does the converting.

Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel takes place over the course of a single June day in the lives of some very different Londoners: wealthy society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing for a party; her old friend Peter Walsh, recently returned from India, whose proposal of marriage Clarissa rejected years ago; Septimus Warren Smith, a WWI veteran suffering from shell shock; and his Italian-born wife, Rezia, who is trying to care for him as best she can. Woolf's beautiful prose captures the minds and souls of these vivid characters.

Mackenzie Fraser witnesses a drunk driver mow down her seven-year-old sister and her mother blames her. Then she ends up in juvie on a trumped-up drug charge. Now she’s in the fight of her life...on the inside! And she’s losing. From the ashes rises the phoenix. As a family descends into an abyss of pain, so Mackenzie fights to discover her own way out of the overwhelming circumstances of her sibling's death.

Catherine Sloper, the heroine of this tragicomic tale set in mid-19th century New York, is absolutely ordinary in every way except for her exceptional capacities in love and loyalty. These latter qualities are of no interest to her father, the successful society Doctor who is constantly disappointed by his daughter's failure to be brilliant, either physically or intellectually. For this reason, he is highly suspicious when Morris Townsend begins to woo her and is convinced the handsome young man's interest is only in the fortune Catherine will eventually inherit.

Annotated. Study guide. Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to An Annotated Version of Almond-Blossom and experience the compelling world of this classical fictional story.

Pregnant with her second child, Martha King finds her marriage to lawyer Austin King more and more frustrating when her husband befriends his young foster cousin, Nora, and, in the process, unwittingly jeopardizes his marriage, career, and place in the community.

It starts with a simple wish, and Emma Davies hardly notices when it comes true. She’s too preoccupied with a life she isn’t happy in - the spark in her marriage has fizzled, her career is headed nowhere and her boss is a misogynist. Her teenage daughter has grown distant, and her heart breaks daily for her teenage son with cerebral palsy. But soon Emma discovers her wishes are coming true, and she realizes that she has been given the power to change her life. Either that, or she’s going insane.

À Fordham, par une nuit d'hiver, Ruth, la jeune apprentie de Mrs Mason n'a pas le temps de s'ennuyer : demain, c'est le grand bal de la ville et toutes les couturières sont mobilisées ! Choisie pour sa beauté, elle se tiendra dans le vestibule de la salle de bal afin de réparer les accrocs aux robes des danseuses et fera la connaissance de M. Bellingham. Ils sympathisent puis naît une relation qui vaut à Ruth d'être congédiée. Malgré le jugement de la société, ils passent des jours heureux dans le pays de Galles.

The novel provides insight and a bit of satire regarding the everyday humdrum in small towns. Cranford is separated into 16 chapters, opening with a snapshot of Captain Brown and his two daughters who live in the book's namesake town: Cranford. The gossipy women of the town are slow to accept Brown socially, but they eventually welcome him into their circles. Captain Brown is later injured, and the responsibility of the house falls on his younger daughter.