Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
Faithful family employee Thady Quirk recounts the decline, over four generations, of the Rackrent family. Through gambling, hapless litigation, and general extravagance the Rackrent's ruin is accomplished, but Thady is steadfast in defence of his masters.
With the short novel Castle Rackrent, Maria Edgeworth is said to have originated a number of literary genres and subgenres, including the historical novel, the Anglo-Irish novel and the "Big House"...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
When her handsome new neighbor encourages her to confront her fears, Catherine Bailey, the victim of a violent attack at the hands of a man whose good looks hid a violent nature, finally believes in the possibility a normal life until one phone call changes everything.
3) The Absentee
Author
Language
English
Description
Lord Colambre can see that his pretentious mother's social ambitions earn her nothing but contempt from London's fashionable society. And it's come to his attention that his father's finances have suffered a good deal underwriting his wife's extravagances.
Anxious about his family's fortunes, Colambre departs Cambridge for Ireland to assess his father's estates firsthand. There he finds his absent father's tenants sorely put upon by the estate's agent....
4) Adam Bede
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Originally published in 1859, "Adam Bede" is the first novel by George Eliot, which was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. Eliot was one of the leading British writers of the Victorian era, as well as a noted journalist, poet, and translator. "Adam Bede" concerns a small, tight-knit, and fictional rural community called Hayslope and the romantic drama that develops between four of its young residents: the title character Adam, a young carpenter, the...
5) Dead Souls
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
First published in 1842, "Dead Souls" is the story of Chichikov, a young middle-class gentleman who comes to a small town in Russia with a dubious plan to improve his wealth and position in life. He begins by spending beyond his means on the premise that he can impress the local officials and gain standing and connections in the community. At the heart of his plan is the idea of acquiring "dead souls" or more explicitly serfs of landowners who have...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: MG - BL: 2.9 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Description
The Phantom of the Opera (1910) is a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux. Originally serialized in Le Galois, the novel was inspired by legends revolving around the Paris Opera from the early nineteenth century. Originally, a journalist, Leroux turned to fiction after reading the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. Despite its lack of success relative to Leroux's other novels, The Phantom of the Opera has become legendary through several...
7) The American
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
This early work by Henry James was originally published in 1877 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. Henry James was born in New York City in 1843. One of thirteen children, James had an unorthodox early education, switching between schools, private tutors and private reading.. James published his first story, 'A Tragedy of Error', in the Continental Monthly in 1864, when he was twenty years old. In 1876, he emigrated...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
First published serially between January and December of 1878 in the sensationalistic monthly London magazine "Belgravia", Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native" is the author's sixth published novel. Set in Egdon Heath, an area of Thomas Hardy's fictionalized Wessex known for the thorny evergreen shrubs, called furze or gorse, which are cut there by its residents for fuel. When the story begins, on Guy Fawkes Night, we find Diggory Venn, a merchant...
9) Nana
Author
Series
Rougon-Macquart volume 9
Language
English
Formats
Description
We first meet Nana in the Variety Theatre, where the captivating eighteen-year-old is appearing in the lead role of a musical-even though she can't act or sing. "Nana has something that makes up for everything else," the theater owner explains, and he's right. Instead of booing her off the stage, the crowd howls with admiration. She has disrobed by the third act, and her career as a femme fatale is off to a sensational start. Nana crawls out of the...
10) The Sea Wolf
Author
Language
English
Description
Jack London's 1904 novel "The Sea Wolf" is the story of Humphrey van Weyden, an effete gentleman, who finds himself shipwrecked when the San Francisco ferry his is aboard collides with another ship in the fog. Adrift in the bay, Humphrey is rescued by Wolf Larsen, the brutish captain of a seal-hunting schooner, the "Ghost". However, his relief in being saved is short-lived, for he is soon put to work, essentially enslaved as a cabin boy forced to...
11) The Double
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Advised by his doctor to become more sociable, Golyadkin, a low-level bureaucrat, arrives uninvited at a birthday party his office manager is having for his daughter. After a number of socially awkward and increasingly uncomfortable moments, Golyadkin is asked to leave and flees the party. While making his way home through a snowstorm, an extraordinary thing happens: Golyadkin meets his double.
At first the two are friendly, but it quickly becomes...
12) Nostromo
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Nostromo, A Tale of the Seaboard" is set in the South American country of Costaguana, and more specifically in that country's Occidental Province and its port city of Sulaco. Though Costaguana is a fictional nation, its geography as described in the book resembles real-life Colombia. Costaguana has a long history of tyranny, revolution and warfare, but has recently experienced a period of stability under the dictator Ribiera. Charles Gould is a native...
13) McTeague
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
First published in 1899, this graphic depiction of urban American life centers around its title character, McTeague, a dentist practicing in San Francisco at the turn of the century. While at first content with his life and friendship with an ambitious man named Marcus, McTeague eventually courts and marries Trina, a frugal young woman who wins a large sum of money in a lottery. The greed of the majority of the characters in the novel creates a chain...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Notes from the Underground is Fyodor Dostoevsky's ninth novel, and considered to be one of the first examples of the existential novel. In this radically inventive work, an alienated former minor administrator in nineteenth-century Russia has broken away from society and withdrawn into an underground identity. With its piercing insight into political, social, and moral issues, this classic is one of the most provocative work of literature ever written.
In...
15) Fathers and Sons
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
First published in 1862, Ivan Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" is widely considered to be the author's greatest literary achievement. It is a novel about the clash of ideologies of two generations. The older generation, the fathers, represents an upper class whose power and influence is fading and giving way to the younger generation, the sons, who represent an increasing objection to the status quo. This conflict is embodied in the characters of Arkady...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Peter Willems is down on his luck. The Dutch clerk has been fired for embezzlement from his job in the Indonesian port city of Makassar, and his scornful wife has abandoned him. Willems' despair lifts after an encounter with Tom Lingard, a sea captain who operates a remote trading post. Lingard hires the drifter to act as his agent, entrusting Willems with knowledge of the secret route across dangerous waters to the post. Once installed in his new...
17) Mercury: a novel
Author
Language
English
Description
A taut emotional thriller about love, obsession and the secrets that pull a family apart.
Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optician in suburban Boston, he rests assured that he and his wife, Viv, who works at the local stables, will live out quiet lives with their two children. Then Mercury-a gorgeous young racehorse-enters their lives and everything changes.
Viv's friend Hilary has inherited Mercury from her brother...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The greatest writer of his time."-Edmund Wilson
"One of the great poets of the novel, a genius of his art"-Edgar Johnson
"His characters are marvelous, his insights wonderful…you don't expect reality but you get something bigger and better."-Ruth Rendell
The Old Curiosity Shop was initially published in a weekly serial, "Master Humphrey's Clock", between 1840 and 1841. Charles Dickens' story of the frail and innocent orphan had become such...
19) The Rainbow
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Spanning over a period of sixty-five years, from the 1840s to 1905, The Rainbow by D.H Lawrence follows three generations of the Brangwen family, mapping the change in their romantic relationships amid the industrialization of Great Britain. Their story begins when Tom Brangwen meets a Polish widow named Lydia. The two soon fall in love and get married, though they find that their cultural differences cause more issues than they imagined. Due to a...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Into the Darkest Corner comes another page-turning novel of "gripping suspense" - The Wall Street Journal Genevieve has finally escaped the stressful demands of her sales job and achieved her dream: to leave London and begin a new life aboard a houseboat in Kent. Not many people know that she financed her fresh start by working weekends as a dancer at a gentlemen's club called the Barclay,...
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Penticton Public Library can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup. Items must be over 1 year old.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service for new books published this year. Submit Request