Novels

After a very striking and very scary start indeed, in Dracula’s castle in the mysterious mountains of Romania recounted by one of his captives there, the scene shifts to England and to the diaries of his friends, male and female, and the pace slows somewhat. But the essential elements are still very much there: the ever-present and ever-changing and very menacing Dracula, the three evanescent females with very sharp teeth indeed, the mysterious trauma that seizes the strange man’s victims, (…)

Sir Willoughby is an enormously wealthy, well-educated and handsome young scion of an ancient family and he is immensely proud of himself: he is an admitted egoist and the whole book is dedicated to getting the reader and especially the key three young women in his life to penetrate his fearsome outer defenses to see through to his true, rather brutal, essential selfishness not to say shallowness.
Based on elegant, brilliant dialogues and framed in the author’s quite unique style of (…)

Margaret Hale is a 19-year-old who’s been living in the posh Harley Street quarters of her first cousin in London for a long nine years when her father, a clergyman in a picturesque southern country village, loses his faith and takes up work teaching classics to gentlemen in the very industrial town of Milton (read Manchester) in the north. When Margaret and her mother accompany him up there they all have a major culture shock, and Margaret in particular is distressed by the lowly status and (…)

One of the most important books ever published in the U.S.A., a story about the plight of the enslaved black population in the south – and the legal obligation for northern states to return escaped slaves back to their southern “owners” – powerfully written by a convinced abolitionist, a woman whose moral indignity at the outrage of the institution that was so movingly recounted in this famous book that it played a significant role in the formation of public opinion in the north in the years (…)

A young student decides to embark on a whaling vessel against the wishes of his family and with the collusion of a close friend, the son of the ship’s captain, he’s hidden in the hold of the ship with the intention of coming out after a few days once the ship is too far from shore to turn back. But the boyish adventure does not go to plan at all at all, as the young fellows did not take into account the possibility of a mutiny, of bloodshed galore, of shipwreck and hunger and thirst to the (…)

An American classic, an historical novel centred on the infamous Fort Henry massacre in 1757 during the Seven Years War when the English forces in that besieged fort surrendered to their French opponent Montcalm on the condition of safe conduct for their men and civilians – a condition that was immediately ignored by the Iroquois and Huron allies of Montcalm who massacred many hundreds of women and children as they left the fort.
At the beginning of the story the two lovely (…)

The original Frankenstein story about a Swiss chemist [1] in a German [2] university finally succeeding in understanding the secret of life and of actually developing a living human being – rather oversize and not what you would call a good-looker, but in fact most intelligent and capable of extraordinary physical and even intellectual feats. The scientist lives to bitterly regret his innovation and comes to a bad end trying to stop the monster from committing yet more evil deeds…
Written (…)

Goethe’s famous first novel about the plight of the intense and dreamy Werther, the artisically-minded lover of nature and Homer and Ossian who’s passionately in love with Charlotte, the sparkling bride-to-be and then wife of another.
Werther’s drama and sufferings form the framework for this book whose sensitive, soulful hero was a founding figure for the Romantic movement throughout Europe.
A selection of characteristic citations from this seminal work can be seen below. 42,600 words. (…)

At the beginning of this quite extraordinary saga the narrator recounts how, when he was 10 years old and could neither read nor write nor count beyond 5, he was captured by marauding soldiers while tending sheep and witnessed the devastation of his family home, managing to escape to the nearby forest with the screams of his mother and sister in his ears. Where he was taken in hand by an erudite hermit who baptized him Simplex/Simplicius/Simplicissimus [1] and taught him to read, write and (…)

This masterpiece will never cease to impress and to awe. Published in 1605, long before anything of similar stature was produced elsewhere in Europe [1], this rollicking tale of a man driven to the edge of folly by his passion for books (readers, beware!) and his immersion in the dream-world they project (video gamers, beware!) to go out into the wild world out there to combat its injustices (social reformers, beware!) and win the heart of his idealised Dulcina (lovers, beware!) is a (…)