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The old man Sage taught Maurice Farinet many things and one of them was the location of a secret vein of gold. After Sage died, Farinet began to make coins. This story commences with Farinet's second escape from prison, hiding from the police in his beloved mountains, aided and abetted by the locals, in particular the waitress Josephine. It was she who smuggled file and rope into prison for him. But the law closes in and Farinet understands he...

A mountain falls down and an alpine village is frozen in its summer state. When a ghostly figure appears beyond the last house, the villagers are terrorised. Is it a soul trapped in limbo, come to make his baleful complaint? Only one of them recognises him as a survivor, her husband in flesh and blood. The village rejoices, but when the survivor declares his intention to return beneath the rubble, the old doubts resurface. Swiss writer Charles...

Jean-Michel Olivier's novel, L'Enfant secret, winner of the Swiss Dentan prize, is a profound exploration of those secrets we all inherit as part of our DNA. It is a foray into the hidden deeds and misdeeds of our ancestors about which we know little but sometimes discover through the inadvertent confession of a distant cousin or a box of photos.The Secret Child narrator attributes his becoming an artist to life experiences inherited from his ...

A decidedly Russian adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, set in the countryside. It concerns the disrespectful treatment the protagonist Kharlov receives from his ungrateful daughters and the revenge he eventually wreaks upon them.

A young man declared insane by the machinations of his own mother. This book sows the seeds of stream of consciousness writing and of all that was to come in the best of twentieth-century fiction. It is deliberately experimental - and quite genuinely 'impressionist'. The young author died only weeks after its publication.

Swann in Love is a study of sexual jealousy that forms a fully self-contained crucial component of the vast, unfolding structure of Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. Swann, owner of large estate and at ease in Parisian high society falls obsessively and publicly in love with the courtesan Odette.

The novella opens in Paris on the Rue Saint-Denis with a description of a very old house. Opposite the house, a young man stands in the pouring rain. He stares at the house, waiting for a glimpse of a young girl.In this story, Balzac examines how class differences impact the relationship between men and women and asks the question 'does it take a particular kind of woman to live with a man of genius?

Andreyev depicts the fates of five failed leftist revolutionaries and two common peasants who have received death sentences. The condemned await execution by hanging. In prison, each of the prisoners deals with his fate in his or her own way.This is the book that inspired a group of Bosnian revolutionaries to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, triggering the crisis that led to World War I.

Tsar Alexander I of Russia, while visiting England with his servant Platov is shown a number of impressive modern inventions. Platov insists that things in Russia are much better but then they are shown a mechanical flea as small as a crumb with a key to wind it up that can only be seen through a microscope. Nicolas orders Platov to find a Russian to beat the English at this game and Platov travels to Tula to find a gunsmith to do the job.This...

Katerina is stifled by her loveless marriage to a bitter man twice her age, whose family are cold and unforgiving. When she embarks on a passionate affair with a young worker on her husband's estate, a force is unleashed inside her, so powerful that she will stop at nothing to get what she wants.Leskov's wrote the novella in the Kiev university's punishment room. He described how his hair stood on end as he worked on it alone in that cold plac...

The Dead is one of the twentieth century's most beautiful pieces of short literature. The story centres on Gabriel Conroy, a teacher and part-time book reviewer, and explores the relationships he has with his family and friends.The story ends "… snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This classic novel of self-discovery has inspired generations of seekers. With parallels to the enlightenment of the Buddha, Hesse's Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin's quest for the ultimate reality. His quest takes him from the extremes of indulgent sensuality to the rigors of ascetism and self-denial. At last he learns that wisdom cannot be taught - it must come from one's own experience and inner struggle.

The history of Australian and New Zealand Bushrangers from first settlement of Australia to the death of Ned Kelly in 1880. Includes an extensive index of place and person names and the full transcript of Ned Kelly's famous Jerilderie Letter.

Born Anna Constantia von Brockdorff in 1680, this German noblewoman rose from a minor lady-in-waiting to become the mistress of the King of Poland and finally, the most famous prisoner in Saxony.In her youth, she had an affair and the scandal was covered up. Then she made a respectable marriage but that proved inconvenient once she caught the King's attention. She withstood his advances until she had gained everything, title, position and powe...

Count Henryk Brühl (1700-1763) was a statesman at the court of Saxony and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth who rose meteorically from a Dowager Countess' page to Prime Minister of the King. With determination and ruthless cunning he managed to despatch his rivals and control the King and through him, Saxony and Poland. He was the presiding genius of the regime, much like Thomas Cromwell to Henry the VIII. But his ambition and greed exceeded ...

In 1896 Marmaduke Pickthall arrived in Palestine and spent the next couple of years in native dress wandering the hinterlands. English expatriates were alarmed the young man had gone native, but Marmaduke was having the time of his life.He said "'When I read The Arabian Nights I see the daily life of Damascus, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Cairo, and the other cities as I found it in the early nineties of last century. What struck me, even in its decay a...

The Comédienne draws on Nobel Prize winner, Wladyslav Reymont's, own experiences as an actor in a struggling provincial theatre at the fin de siecle, at time of massive social upheaval in Europe. Reymont depicts, in a slow burning tragedy, a young provincial Janina, the comédienne of the title, who joins a Warsaw theatre company and struggles toward what was then a very modern notion of personal freedom. A 'Comédienne' also played drama and tr...

The title of John Dos Passos' evocative early novel alludes to Don Quixote's horse in that most celebrated of Spanish novels that follows the adventures of a wandering dreamer. Dos Passos spins a tale of two travellers making their way by foot from Madrid to Toledo in post-World War I Spain. Along the way, they encounter simple, earthy folk on the trail and in taverns, providing a convenient backdrop for Dos Passos's observations on the tensio...

One Man's Initiation-1917 "the greatest writer of our time" Jean-Paul Sartre John Dos Passos' first novel, a barely disguised autobiography of his withering experiences in France in 1917, was written from diaries he kept when a volunteer in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, the Red Cross and finally the American Army. A series of sharp, vivid, disconnected impressions written with beautiful, powerful simplicity, conveying the urgency and imme...

The ironic satire of a decaying German duchy and its rejuvenation by the appearance of an independent-minded American woman. Peopled with a range of characters from aristocrat to mad woman, this novel is a microcosm of Europe before the Great War. The book's driving force is the development of a love between the young Prince, hidebound by tradition, and the exotic beautiful Imma. Written by Nobel Prize winning author, Thomas Mann, his careful ...