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Willa Cather’s story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry—with an Introduction by A. S. Byatt. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian...
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"First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-- driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human...
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Sent by his fiancée to seek her son who has run away with an entrancing Parisian woman, Lambert Strether finds himself nearly as bewitched by the culture and women of Europe as his would-be son-in-law. Strether gets chased or dragged across provincial France by a slew of influences intent either on drawing the pair of bachelors home to Boston or showing him the world, and winds up testing his patience along with his own illusions.
4) Kim
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Classics - St. Charles Public Library
Historical Fiction Set in India
If you Like The Covenant of Water, try...
Historical Fiction Set in India
If you Like The Covenant of Water, try...
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Rudyard Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Born in India and growing into early manhood, Kim is the son of an Irish soldier born under British Imperial rule in 19th century India. Left in the care of a half-caste woman, Kim is free to explore the back allies and bazaars of Lahore. But when he meets with his father's old regiment he trades his native clothes for European suits and abandons his...
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When the miller Mr. Tulliver becomes entangled in lawsuits, he sets off a chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of his family and bring into conflict his passionate daughter Maggie with her inflexible but adored brother Tom. As she grows older, Maggie's discovery of romantic love draws her once more into a struggle to reconcile familial and moral claims with her own desires. Strong-willed, compassionate, and intensely loyal, Maggie...
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A monumental new translation--the first in more than twenty years--of Russia's greatest family drama, rendered with all the passion, humor, and soul of the original. Dostoevsky's final, greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, paints a complex and richly detailed portrait of a family tormented by its extraordinarily cruel patriarch, Fyodor Pavlovich, whose callous decisions slowly decimate the lives of his sons--the eponymous brothers Karamazov--and...
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This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...
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Edith Wharton’s classic story of one woman’s quest for wealth and status after the turn of the twentieth century
Beautiful, selfish, and driven, Undine Spragg arrives in New York with all of the ambition and naiveté that her midwestern, nouveau riche upbringing afforded her. As cunning as she is lovely, Undine has but one goal in life: to ascend to the upper echelons of high society. And so with a single-minded tenacity,...
Beautiful, selfish, and driven, Undine Spragg arrives in New York with all of the ambition and naiveté that her midwestern, nouveau riche upbringing afforded her. As cunning as she is lovely, Undine has but one goal in life: to ascend to the upper echelons of high society. And so with a single-minded tenacity,...
10) My Ántonia
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"Widely recognized as Willa Cather's finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Antonia details of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska. Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of...
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"Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame was written in 1831, at a time when the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was falling into disrepair. This epic novel helped spark a preservationist movement that led to the cathedral being restored to its full glory. Set in 1482, the story tells of how four men-the hunchbacked bell-ringer, Quasimodo; the archdeacon of Notre Dame, Claude Frollo; the dashing soldier Phoebus de Chateaupers; and the poet Pierre...
12) Jane Eyre
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In early nineteenth-century England, an orphaned young woman accepts employment as a governess and soon finds herself in love with her employer who has a terrible secret. Charlotte Bronte's novel about the passionate love between Jane Eyre, a young girl alone in the world, and the rich, brilliant, domineering Rochester has enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic, ever since...
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Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about...
14) Rob Roy
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By turns thrilling and comic, Rob Roy contains Scott's most sophisticated treatment of the Scottish Highlands as an imaginary space where the modern and the primitive come together. Newly edited from the 'Magnum Opus' text of 1830, this edition includes full explanatory notes and a critical introduction exploring the originality and complexity of Scott's achievement.
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"In the final days of World War II, four damaged lives converge in an abandoned Italian villa that is riddled with undetonated bombs the Germans have left behind and with the potentially explosive secrets of its current inhabitants. Hana, a grieving Canadian nurse; Caravaggio, a maimed former thief; and Kip, an emotionally detached Indian sapper--all three are haunted in different ways by the man they know as 'the English patient,' a nameless burn...
16) Catch-22
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Catch-22 is one of this century's greatest works of American literature. First published m 1961, Joseph Heller's profound and compelling novel has appeared on nearly every list of must read fiction. It is a classic in every sense of the word. Catch-22 took the war novel genre to a new level, shocking us with its clever and disturbing style. Set in a World War II American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of John Yossarian,...
17) The reef ;
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Everyman's library volume 201
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Written in 1912 and set in and around London, "The Reef" is a story of complex morality and its intricately woven place in society. This narrative primarily follows George Darrow and Anna Leath, a young gentleman and a widowed lady who plan to marry. Both of them experience doubts about their union, with surprising outcomes. Darrow has a brief liaison with the delicate, generous Sophy Viner, a kind woman of the working class. She later meets Anna's...
18) The adolescent
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The narrator and protagonist of Dostoevsky's novel The Adolescent" "(first published in English as A Raw Youth) is Arkady Dolgoruky, a naive 19-year-old boy bursting with ambition and opinions. The illegitimate son of a dissipated landowner, he is torn between his desire to expose his father's wrongdoing and the desire to win his love. He travels to St. Petersburg to confront the father he barely knows, inspired by an inchoate dream of communion and...
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Emily Bront's only novel, a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence, the Penguin Classics edition of Wuthering Heights is the definitive edition of the text, edited with an introduction by Pauline Nestor. Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place...
20) The Decameron
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Revised for the seven hundredth anniversary of the author's birth, this tale of medieval Italian life details how ten young Florentines retreat to the countryside to escape the plague-infested city and entertain themselves by telling stories.