Diane Mowat Orden de los libros

Now The Children of Green Knowe and River at Green Knowe are available in one edition. Children of Green KnoweTolly's great grandmother isn't a witch, but both she and her old house, Green Knowe, are full of a very special kind of magic.

Vanity Fair, Thackeray's panoramic, satirical saga of corruption at all levels of English society, was published in 1847 but set during the Napoleonic Wars. It chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family. Becky's fluctuating fortunes eventually bring her to an affair with Amelia's dissolute husband; when he is killed at Waterloo, Amelia and her child are left penniless, while Becky and her husband Rawdon Crawley rise in the world, managing to lead a high life in London solely on the basis of their shrewdness. (The chapter entitled "How to Live on Nothing" is a classic.) Thackeray's subtitle, "A Novel Without a Hero," is understating the case; his view of humanity in this novel is distinctly bleak and deliberately antiheroic. Critics of the time misunderstood the book, decrying it as (among other things) vicious, vile, and odious. But VANITY FAIR has endured as one of the great comic novels of all time, and a landmark in the history of realism in fiction.

Suitable for younger learners Word count 5,310

Suitable for younger learners Word count 10,710 Bestseller

CLASSIC FICTION (PRE C 1945). A historical romance, this novel tells of the adventures of the hot-headed young Gascon, d'Artagnan and his three companions Athos, Porthos and Aramis as they gallantly defend the Queen of France, using their wit and their swords.

'I did not intend to write a funny book, at first' wrote Jerome J. Jerome of Three Men in a Boat, which has since become a comic classic. When J. the narrator, George, Harris and Montmorency the dog set off on their hilarious misadventures, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts, imaginary illnesses, butter pats and tins of pineapple chunks. Denounced as vulgar by the literary establishment, Three Men in a Boat nevertheless caught the spirit of the times. The expansion of education and the increase in office workers created a new mass readership, and Jerome's book was especially popular among the 'clerking classes' who longed to be 'free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving, that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century life.' So popular did it prove that Jerome reunited his heroes for a bicycle tour of Germany. Despite some sharp, and with hindsight, prophetic observations of the country, Three Men on the Bummel describes an equally picaresque journey constrained only 'by the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started'.

A Daniel Defoe le cabe el raro honor de haber dado forma a uno de esos personajes literarios que se convierten en paradigmas de la condición humana. Si el Quijote encarna la fuerza paradójica de los ideales, si Ulises representa al hombre que se sobrepone al destino, y el capitán Nemo al rebelde enemistado con la sociedad, Robinson Crusoe es la expresión de la lucha del hombre por hacerse un lugar en el mundo [...] La sana reacción contra los excesos experimentales de los años sesenta y setenta y la irrupción de una literatura, sobre todo a partir de la publicación de Cien años de soledad, que vuelve a contar historias y a buscar la complicidad del lector, han permitido una revalorización de esos libros de aventuras con los que aprendimos a amar la lectura y que se han revelado no sólo como gratos entretenimientos sino también como sólidas obras literarias cuya influencia perdura hasta nuestros días. Ése es el caso [...] de las aventuras de Robinson Crusoe

Tras el auge del romanticismo en Inglaterra, el misterio cae como la niebla sobre las calles de la mítica Albión. Proliferan novelas en las que los fantasmas se apoderan dl alma de los vivos hasta la obsesión, las vidas marcadas pro destinos infaustos, los personajes lejanos que buscan la inmortalidad y ganan por amor... al mismo diablo. No es sino el manierismo del gusto romántico por las novelas de misterio, por el amor a los parajes desconocidos y llenos de historia y ruinas. Pero Drácula, pese a beber de esta tradición y esta corriente, es mucho más que una novela gótica. Drácula, encarnación viviente de las fuerzas del mal, se apodera del lector para hacer del vampiro un héroe. En Drácula el mito del vampiro, asombrósamente bien documentado de acuerdo a las tradiciones más oscuras y demoníacas, entabla una lucha a muerte contra el espíritu racional capaz de vencer a las fuerzas del mal. Realmente no es una casualidad que Bram Stoker, su autor, fuese miembro alternativamente de sociedades literarias y científicas. El darwinismo imponía en la época su racionalidad, los mitos caían ante la fuerza de la lógica y la capacidad del hombre por descubrir, y Stoker se enfrentó a un mito, Drácula, con la fuerza del hombre de su tiempo, encarnado en Van Helsing.

"If you wake up in the night and hear a tap running somewhere in the house, what to you do? You get up, of course, and go and turn the tap off. A little later you hear the tap running again. You are alone in the house, and you know you turned the tap off. What do you think? The ghosts in these stories all have unfinished business with the living world. They come back from the grave to continue their work, to keep a promise, to look for something they have lost. Sometimes they want to help people, sometimes they want to punish them - or kill them."--Back cover

When a group of English schoolchildren are told that they are to be in a tetrathlon (swimming, running, shooting and riding) against the perfect Greycoats school, they are totally unenthusiastic but rally when a teacher encourages them.