Diane Mowat Books

Solicitor Jonathan Harker embarks on a journey to the castle of Count Dracula in Transylvania, becomes imprisoned there and experiences a host of horrors until he finds an escape.

The adventures of Robinson Crusoe who was marooned on a desert island for twenty years.

This additional series of "Oxford Bookworms" offers young readers at an elementary level of the English language the chance to enjoy accessible adaptations of classic and modern fiction. This is the tale of a sand fairy who grants five children a daily wish

Nicola Ferris, on leave from her job as a secretary in Athens, has been looking forward to a quiet week's holiday in Crete, enjoying the wild flowers and the company of her cousin Frances. But before she even reaches her destination Nicola stumbles on evidence of a murderous crime involving a young Englishman and a group of people tied together by blood and the bonds of greed. For the first time in her life Nicola meets a man and a situation she cannot deal with . . .

Matty is fifteen and is leaving school in a few weeks' time. He wants to work with animals, and would like to get a job on a farm. But his parents say he's too young to leave home - he must stay in the town and get a job in ship-building, like his father. They also say he can't go on a campingholiday with his friends. And they say he can't keep his dog, Nelson, because Nelson barks all day and eats his father's shoes. But it is because of Nelson that Matty finds a new life . . .

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 10,710 Bestseller

'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'.

Pack of ten best-selling iBookworms/i and– ideal for building up class libraries. Each Pack contains one copy of each listed title.liThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer/libr / liThe Elephant Man/libr /liA Little Princess/libr / liLove or Money?/libr / liThe Monkey's Paw/libr / liThe Phantom of the Opera/libr / liThe President's Murderer/libr / liSherlock Holmes and the Duke's Son/libr / liWhite Death/libr / liThe Wizard ofOz/li

"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