The Ringworld is a landmark engineering achievement, a flat band three million times the surface of the Earth, encircling a distant star. Home to trillions of inhabitants, not all of whom are human, and host to amazing technological wonders, the Ringworld is unique in all of the universe. Explorer Louis Wu, an Earth-born human who was part of the f...

Come back to the Ringworld-the most astonishing feat of engineering ever encountered. A place of untold technological wonders, home to myriad humanoid races, and world of some of the most beloved science fiction stories ever written. The human Louis Wu; the puppeteer known as the Hindmost; Acolyte, son of the Kzin called Chmeee: legendary beings...

Ringworld: the most stunning artefact in known space, an articficial world with three million times Earth's surface area. Who built it? And where are they? In this stunning sequel to Larry Niven's Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, Louis Wu (now a near-hopeless lirehead hooked on electrical ecstasy), the aged Kzin warrior, Speaker-to-Animals, and...

The Reef is a 1912 novel by American writer Edith Wharton. It concerns a romance between a widow and her former lover. The novel takes place in Paris and rural France, but primarily features American characters. While writing the novel, Edith Wharton visited England, Sicily, and Germany, among other locations. Anna Leath is a young widow, an Americ...

For twenty years, Anna Bouverie, as a priest's wife, has served God and the parish in a variety of ways. She has baked for the Brownies, delivered parish magazines, washed and ironed her husband's surplices and clothed herself and her children in jumble-sale items. When her husband fails to gain promotion to archdeacon and retreats into isolated bi...

The Portrait of a Lady tells the compelling and ultimately tragic tale of a beautiful young American woman's encounter with European sophistication. Set principally in England and Italy, we follow Isabel Archer's fortunes as a variety of admirers vie for her hand. Her choice will be crucial, and she is not wanting for advice, whether from the gener...

A classic love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. At 19, Anne Eliot is persuaded to jilt her suitor-Captain Frederick Wentworth-because he has neither rank nor fortune. When they encounter one another eight years later will she make the same mistake again?

Set among the elegant brownstones and opulent country houses of turn-of-the-century upper-class New York, Edith Wharton's first great novel is a precise, satiric portrayal of what the author herself called "a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers." Her brilliantly complex characterization of the doomed Lily Bart, whose stunning beauty and depen...

Hard Times is Dickens's most political novel. Set in the industrial north of England, in the fictional Coketown, he examines the lives of working people, who are taught by the capitalists Gradgrind and Bounderby to think only of the facts of life and not to indulge in imagination. Gradgrind's own children have been educated thus, and as a result ar...

Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen's most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is `handsome, clever and rich' and has `a disposition to think too well of herself'. When she decides to introduce the humble Harriet Smith to the delights of genteel society and to f...

Mr. Dombey is a successful businessman who looks forward to the day when his young son Paul will be old enough to join the family business. But Dombey also has a loving daughter, Florence, whom he ignores, lavishing all his attention on his precious son. Set in the 1840s, against a background of Britain's emerging industrial power, the world of com...

In the gentle world of one of England's beautiful old cathedral towns, crisis looms: funds are short, and the cathedral is in need of major repair. One faction of the community argues that the obvious solution is to abolish the expensive, and nowadays rather irrelevant, boys' choir. But of course, there are those who disagree: the choir school's he...

It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignmet-find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

Born to a prominent Chicago judge and his stifled socialite wife, Mia Dennett moves against the grain as a young inner-city art teacher. One night, Mia enters a bar to meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when he doesn't show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. With his smooth moves and modest wit, Colin Thatcher seems at first...

The beloved Confederate Captain Nate Starbuck returns to the front lines of the Civil War in this second installment of Bernard Cornwell's acclaimed Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles. It is the summer of 1862 and the northern army is threatening to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital. Captain Nathaniel Starbuck, born in Boston but a Confederate h...

Life is full of terrible things. In 1987, Sue Bowl's world changes for ever. Her mother dies, leaving her feeling like she's lost a vital part of herself. And then her father shacks up with an awful man-eater called Ivana. But Sue's mother always told her to make the most of what she's got - and what she's got is a love of writing and some eccentri...

Just 17 years old, King Henry IX, known as William, is anxious to prove himself. With the French threatening war and the Catholics' rebellion, he trusts only three people: his older sister Elizabeth; his loyal counsellor, Dominic; and Minuette, a young orphan raised as a royal ward by William's mother, Anne Boleyn. Against a tide of secrets, betray...

William Tudor, now King Henry IX, sits alone on the throne. But England must still contend with those who doubt his legitimacy. To diffuse tensions and appease the Catholics, William is betrothed to a young princess from France, but still he has eyes only for his childhood friend Minuette, which sends court tongues are wagging and assassins plottin...

The fourth book in The Starbuck Chronicles, The Bloody Ground follows Boston-born Confederate officer Nathaniel Starbuck as the Confederate army under Robert E. Lee invades the North, culminating in the Battle of Antietam Creek. It is only weeks after the Second Manassas in September 1862, and Robert E. Lee takes the war north, where he will be met...

After distinguishing himself at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Confederate Captain Nate Starbuck is persecuted by his jealous and suspicious brigade commander, the grandiose General Washington Faulconer. Their simmering enmity flares to life at Dead Mary's Ford, where Starbuck must fight the enemy as well as his own commanding officer. The outcome o...

For much of her life, Anne Morrow, the shy daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has stood in the shadows of those around her, including her millionaire father and vibrant older sister, who often steals the spotlight. Then Anne, a college senior with hidden literary aspirations, travels to Mexico City to spend Christmas with her family. There...