Real Reads Series

Under the influence of rum, Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a sailor. Years later, the widowed wife returns to find her husband the Mayor of Casterbridge.

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank.

Well's science fiction of time travel, and his protagonist's adventures in the future.

I had been given a simple but enormous task. This was the role for which I had spent my whole life preparing.

In a gloomy, neglected house Miss Havisham sits, as she has sat year after year, in a wedding dress and veil that were once white, and are now faded and yellow with age. Her face is like a death's head ; her dark eyes burn with bitterness and hate. By her side sits a proud and beautiful girl, and in front of her, trembling with fear in his thick country boots, stands young Pip. Miss Havisham stares at Pip coldly, and murmurs to the girl at her side : " Break his heart, Estella. Break his heart ! "

In Hard Times, Dickens illustrates the condition of England through the fictional city of Coketown. Among its inhabitants are Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian headmaster who attempts to impose his rigid worldview on his family circle, and the uncaring businessman Mr Bounderby. Their materialist philosophies, as opposed to the world of fancy or imagination, are tested throughout the novel, which also explores workers’ conditions, trade unions and the spurious use of statistics. Perhaps the most polemical of his novels – in which hard-biting satire, moving drama and exuberant comedy find a very succinct and powerful expression – Hard Times is the ideal introduction to the world of Dickens.

Story follows the social and romantic trials of the book's heroine, Catherine Morland.

Dickens's classic tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.

As Fanny becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of her companions, she finds herself isolated and forced to face the conflict between her sense of integrity and social expectation.

Human foibles and early nineteenth-century manners are satirized in this romantic tale of English country family life.

Mohandas K. Gandhi is one of the most inspiring figures of our time. In his classic autobiography he recounts the story of his life and how he developed his concept of active nonviolent resistance, which propelled the Indian struggle for independence and countless other nonviolent struggles of the twentieth century. In a new foreword, noted peace expert and teacher Sissela Bok urges us to adopt Gandhi's "attitude of experimenting, of tesing what will and will not bear close scrutiny, what can and cannot be adapted to new circumstances,"in order to bring about change in our own lives and communities. All royalties earned on this book are paid to the Navajivan Trust, founded by Gandhi, for use in carrying on his work.

A strange figure stood in front of him, dressed from head to foot in white clothing. The moonlight showed her pale, youthful face.

In ancient China a magical monkey appears, creating chaos everywhere he goes. The only way to put his tricks and talents to good use is to make him protector of Xuanzang, a young and handsome monk determined to travel from China to India in search of the precious scriptures.

David Copperfield is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; his nemesis, the eternally humble Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora; and the magnificently impecunious Micawber, one of literature’s great comic creations. In David Copperfield – the novel he described as his ‘favourite child’ – Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of his most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure.

"A Study in Scarlet" provides the reader with a dramatic adventure which ranges from the gas-lit streets to the burning planes of Utah. The second story, "The Sign of the Four", presents Holmes with one of his greatest challenges - the theft of the Agra treasure in India.

READ BY DAVID SOUL Duration: 2 hours 28 minutes Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe’s full-blooded Gothic style influenced generations of writers, filmmakers and musicians, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Baudelaire to Roger Corman and Lou Reed. The five tales collected here range from the famous to the obscure, but each displays Poe's unique sense of the macabre and his love for the baroque. A victim of the Inquisition finds himself in a nightmarish torture chamber, a castle is besieged by plague, a man becomes obsessed by the evil eye of his fellow lodger, a mesmerist suspends a man's life at the point of death and a jester takes his revenge on his cruel employers.

Presenting a tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, this novel highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life.

Beautiful, rich, self-assured, and witty, Emma Woodhouse delights in match-making those around her with no apparent care for her own romantic life.

Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

zjednodušená anglická četba, vhodná při přípravě na zkoušku FCE jako doplňkový materiál ( úroveň B2 - Upper-Intermediate, slovní zásoba 2 200 slov)věk 16+