Frederick Davidson

Les Miserables is the great epic masterpiece of the mid-nineteenth century. Begun in 1845, the year Louis Philippe conferred a peerage and a lifetime seat in the Senate upon Victor Hugo, it was completed when the author was living in exile in the Channel Islands. Les Miserables is a product as well as a document of the political, social, and religious upheaval that followed the Napoleonic Wars and Europe's great democratic revolutions....

" 'Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!' Treasure Island is a tale of pirates and villains, maps, treasure and shipwreck, and is perhaps the best adventure story ever written. When young Jim Hawkins finds a packet in Captain Flint's sea chest, he could not know that the map inside it would lead him to unimaginable treasure. Shipping as cabin boy on the Hispaniola, he sails with Squire Trelawney, Captain Smollett, Dr...

When a bumbling holy man mistakenly baptizes a colony of penguins, God endows the animals with souls and their formerly peaceful community declines into a maelstrom of violence and sin. This witty allegory lampoons French history from ancient to modern times, taking satirical swipes at socialists, royalists, industrialists, militarists, and even the Dreyfus affair, and concluding with a remarkably prescient view of the future. Indeed, more than a...

Mr. William Whittlestaff was strolling very slowly up and down the long walk at his countryseat in Hampshire, thinking of the contents of a letter, which he held crushed up within his trousers' pocket. He always breakfasted exactly at nine, and the letters were supposed to be brought to him at a quarter past. The postman was really due at his hall-door at a quarter before nine; but though he had lived in the same house for above fifteen years, and...

Featuring ten works of comedic short fiction, P.G Wodehouse's The Clicking of Cuthbert is comprised of stories about golfers that teach a lesson is an odd and amusing way. In A Woman is Only a Woman, the friendship between two men is threatened when they both fall in love with the same woman. Since she claims to like them equally, the two men decide to challenge each other to a game of golf, agreeing that the best golfer gets the woman's hand in marriage....

Step into a world of witty banter and romantic misunderstandings in P. G. Wodehouse's classic comedy, "A Damsel in Distress." From the bustling streets of London to the charming manor of Belpher Castle, this delightful tale whisks you away on a rollercoaster of mishaps and merrymaking. Meet George Bevan, a lovelorn American composer, and Lady Maud Marsh, a spirited damsel yearning for adventure. When fate throws them together in a taxi cab, a...

George Orwell's documentary report on conditions among the unemployed in the north of England and what he considers to be wrong with Socialism and Socialists

Inspector Morses' abilities are taxed to their fullest with a theft, murder, and bus load of American tourists.

One of Sir Walter Scott's most popular and influential works, "Ivanhoe" is the story of one of the last remaining Saxon noble families. At the beginning of the novel we find its titular character, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who has been disinherited by his father for his allegiance to the Norman king, Richard the Lionheart, and for falling in love with the Lady Rowena, returning from the Third Crusade. Wilfred's father, Cedric, had planned to marry Lady...

Youthful rebellion, romantic entanglements, and actual espionage collide in this comic coming-of-age novel by the author of My Man Jeeves. Twenty-one-year-old James Braithwaite Crocker is developing a reputation as a bit of a wild man. He used to write for the New York Sunday Chronicle. But now that he's home in London, he's getting written up in it-and his family is none too pleased with the antics of "Piccadilly Jim." So relatives from New York...