Real Reads Series

From its spectacular opening–the astonishing scene in which drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor at a county fair–to the breathtaking series of discoveries at its conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge claims a unique place among Thomas Hardy’s finest and most powerful novels. Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling in early nineteenth-century England, the story build into an awesome Sophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willful Henchard rises to a position of wealth and power–only to suffer a most bitter downfall. Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to his own destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, “Hardy’s Lord Jim…his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction.

York Notes on Jane Austen's Persuasion. This is a study guide, not the novel.

Though Aladdin's childhood had been full of beauty, comfort and happiness, without any trace of sadness or sorrow, he entirely failed to learn the lessons of hard work and responsibility.

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.

Pip is a poor young orphan, living with his sister and her husband Joe, a blacksmith. His life is changed forever by two very different meetings--one with an escaped convict and one with an eccentric old lady and the beautiful girl who lives with her. But who is the mysterious person who leaves him a fortune? -- p. 4 of cover.

A damning indictment of Utilitarianism and the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution, this novel is set in the Northern mill-town of Coketown, dominated by Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, a headmaster who epitomizes Utilitarian ideals. He feeds his pupils and family a diet of facts, banning imagination and wonder. This rigid upbringing leads his obedient daughter Louisa to marry the loveless businessman Mr. Bounderby, while his son Tom rebels, falling into gambling and crime. Their lives intersect with Sissy Jupe, a free-spirited circus girl, and Stephen Blackpool, a victimized weaver. Gradgrind ultimately confronts the importance of compassion in a materialistic age. This edition is based on the first volume published in 1854, with an introduction by Kate Flint that highlights the often-overlooked character dynamics in Dickens's critique of Victorian industrial society. Celebrated as one of the best-loved novelists, Dickens's works, including Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, have been adapted for stage and screen, reaching millions. If you enjoyed this novel, you may also appreciate Dickens's Bleak House, available in Penguin Classics. 'A masterpiece ... a completely serious work of art' - F.R. Leavis.

Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death--well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. the novel is modeled after the day's popular romances and Gothic thrillers, which it then proceeds to ridicule. The heroine is Catherine Morland, who encounters upper-crust society at Bath, falls in love, and becomes targeted by misinformed fortune-seekers. After moving to Northanger Abbey, her imagination goes to work and dreams up mysteries that lead to various social disasters.

If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the most famous of stories from India.

`It seems pretty clear to me that sooner or later we'll be at war with Germany, whether we like it or not.'

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

Can the path to the ultimate truth about human life be found by leaving behind wealth, comfort, family and security?

Begun in 1811 at the height of Jane Austen's writing powers and published in 1814, Mansfield Park marks a conscious break from the tone of her first three novels, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice, the last of which Austen came to see as "rather too light." Fanny Price is unlike any of Austen's previous heroines, a girl from a poor family brought up in a splendid country house and possessed of a vast reserve of moral fortitude and imperturbability. She is very different from Elizabeth Bennet, but is the product of the same inspired imagination.

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 to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.

Personal account of the life of the man who freed India from colonization through the Satyagraha (nonviolent protest)movement. His early boyhood life, legal studies, purification,and ultimate salvation of his homeland is carefully recounted in this inspiring and critical work of insurmountable importance.

If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the most famous of stories from India.

Here is a test, a puzzle for you. It is a faithful account of two most gruesome murders. Can you work out what actually happened in the early hours of one fateful morning in the Rue Morgue?

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.

Dickens wrote of David Copperfield: 'Of all my books I like this the best'. Millions of readers in almost every language on earth have subsequently come to share the author's own enthusiasm for this greatly loved classic, possibly because of its autobiographical form.

After ten long years of war and the fall of Troy, the Greek hero Odysseus sets sail for his homeland. His voyage, however, is destined to take much longer than he expects.

Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes mystery. This book also includes another Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Speckled Band.

Although Song Jiang is only a lowly local government official, he is loyal to the emperor and kind to all the citizens in his care. But Song is in trouble. A series of unfortunate incidents have led to him being arrested, and his political enemies are keen to see him sentenced to death.

The arrival of a gold bug leads the three men on an exciting adventure towards skeletons, a skull and a hunt for buried treasure.

The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. The intense darkness oppressed and stifled me so that I struggled for breath.

My darkness lifted, never to return. This man was truly the light of the world.

Makes a portrait of India. In this book, these unabridged observations of the British in India and Indian life were originally commissioned for The Civil and Military Gazette where the author worked as a journalist in the 1880s.

Catching fish. That's what I was doing on the day that changed my life for ever.

Follows the adventures of the self-assured and accomplished Emma, a twenty-one-year-old girl of privilege who believes she is immune to romance and has several chaotic and often humorous experiences

Every day the miserly Silas Marner works, and every night he takes his hoard of gold out from under his floorboards and counts it. Then his fortunes change abruptly. And when an abandoned child, Eppie, finds her way into his home, Silas is given a chance to transform his life forever.

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

`Send the brat home? Oh no we won't! Her mother must have met some rich man - we can make a load of money out of this.'

Rachel opened the box and lifted out the diamond. She held it up in a ray of sunlight that poured through the window, and cried out in amazement.

If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the most famous of stories from India.

A storm, a shipwreck, an enchanted island ...