Catalog Search Results
1) Bleak House
Author
Series
Description
Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack on an uncaring society more imaginatively embodied, but nowhere either is the mixture of comedy and angry satire more deftly managed. Bleak House defies a single description. It...
Author
Series
Description
Begun as an ambitious project by the versatile English courtier, diplomat, philosopher, and author Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century, The Canterbury Tales follows a group of people on their pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Saint Thomas Becket. The Prologue introduces all of the pilgrims in great detail, and through these descriptions Chaucer provides the entire spectrum of social classes and professions of his time. When the group stops at an inn...
3) Vanity Fair
Author
Description
Vanity Fair is an English novel by William Makepeace Thackeray which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. This limited edition includes the author's original illustrations.
Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society, she charms, hoodwinks, manipulates everyone she meets, rising in the world as she attaches...
Author
Lexile measure
1220L
Description
Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, the clash between their expectations and her desires is painfully played out as she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her proud and stubborn brother,...
Author
Series
Description
A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.
Author
Series
Description
Story of Egdon Heath and Eustacia Vye in late nineteenth century Wessex, England. Guy Fawkes night, Diggory Venn, a reddleman dyed red from his trade, transports a young woman, Thomasin Yeobright, to her aunt's house on Egdon Heath. Despite Venn's love for the sweet-natured Thomasin, he agrees to secure the man of her choice, the fickle innkeeper Damon Wildeve, who delayed his marriage to Thomasin earlier that day. Wildeve is still enchanted by the...
8) The prince
Author
Series
Description
"The Prince" is the most controversial book about winning power - and holding on to it - ever written. Machiavelli's tough-minded, pragmatic argument that sometimes it is necessary to abandon ethics to succeed made his name notorious. Yet his book has been read by strategists, politicians and business people ever since as the ultimate guide to realpolitik. How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? How do...
9) The jungle
Author
Series
Description
1906 best-seller shockingly reveals intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards as it tells the brutally grim story of a Slavic family that emigrates to America full of optimism but soon descends into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and despair. A fiercely realistic American classic that will haunt readers long after they've finished the last page. Published privately by Sinclair in 1906 after commercial...
Author
Description
A tour of Italy takes young Lucy Honeychurch out of her predictable life in Edwardian England and places her into a new world that even her chaperoning spinster aunt cannot control. Encountering everything from unlikely traveling companions to street violence, Lucy faces the greatest challenge in understanding her own shifting emotions toward a most unsuitable suitor.
Author
Series
Appears on these lists
Description
Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts...
14) O pioneers!
Author
Series
Description
The first of Cather's renowned prairie novels--a story that expresses Cather's conviction that "the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman". When Alexandra Bergson takes over the family farm after her father's death, she falls under the spell of the rich, forbidding Nebraska prairie.
15) Sons and lovers
Author
Series
Appears on these lists
Description
The Morel family, who live on the Nottinghamshire coalfields, are beset with conflict. Gertrude has become disillusioned with her inarticulate working-class husband and devotes her energies to her sons. Son Paul falls in love and seeks to escape his family ties.
Author
Description
Hank Morgan finds himself transported to Dark Ages Englandw̮here he is immediately captured and sentenced to death at Camelot. Fortunately, heś quick-witted, and in the process of saving his life he turns himself into a celebrity of the highest magnitudew̮inning himself the position of prime minister as well as the lasting enmity of Merlin.
Author
Series
Appears on these lists
Description
Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined...
Author
Series
Description
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...
19) Main Street
Author
Description
Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary...
20) Ethan Frome
Author
Series
Description
On a poor farm near Starkfield in western Massachusetts, Ethan Frome struggles to wrest a living from the land, unassisted by his whining and hypochondrialcal wife Zeena. When Zeena's young cousin Mattie Silver is left destitute, and only place she can go is Ethan's farm. An embittered and man and an enchanting young woman meeting in such circumstances unleash predictable consequences as passions are aroused between the three protagonists
In Inter-Library Loan System
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by VOKAL can be requested from other Inter-Library Loan System libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Make a purchase suggestion
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request