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<|novel|>The story begins as two strangers , Vianne Rocher , and her small daughter Anouk , move into the small French village of Lansquenet sous Tannes . They are brought by the wind during the last days of carnival , and they settle and open a chocolaterie , La Céleste Praline . The village priest , Francis Reynaud , is initially mystified , because Lent has just begun , but his confusion turns rapidly to anger when he understands that Vianne holds dangerous beliefs , does not obey the church , and flouts the unspoken rules that he feels should govern his flock . Vianne , we learn from her personal thoughts , is a witch though she does not use the word . Her mother and she were wanderers , going from one city to another . Her mother strove to inspire the same need for freedom in her daughter , who is more social and passive . They were born with gifts , and used a kind of domestic magic to earn their living . Throughout her life , Vianne has been running from the Black Man , a recurring motif in her mother s folklore . When her mother is killed by a cab , Vianne continues on her own , trying to evade the Black Man and the mysetrious force of the wind and settle down to a normal life . The chocolaterie is an old dream of hers . She has an innate talent for cooking and a charming personality . She tries to fit in and help her customers . She starts to build a group of regular customers , and , to Reynaud s dismay , she doesn t go out of business . Reynaud attempts to have Vianne run out of town , and he talks about her every Sunday at church . Some people initially stay away , but not for long . His conflict with her becomes his personal crusade . Vianne , however , announces a Grand Festival of Chocolate , to be held on Easter Sunday .

<|novel|>Prior , despite his new found peace of mind and engagement to munitions worker Sarah , has been affected by the war and therefore does not have a lot of concern for his safety . Prior has been cured of shell shock and is preparing to return to France . Once in France , experiences numerous and risky sexual encounters his only rule is that he never pays for sex a rule he eventually breaks . Rivers , concerned for Prior s safety , finally recognises that his relationship with Prior , and his other patients for that matter , is deeply paternal . In contrast with upper class officers like Sassoon , with whom Rivers has been able to form warm friendships , he has always found Prior to be a thorn in his side . As Prior returns to the front , Rivers continues to take care of his patients and his invalid sister , amid this he reminisces uncomfortably about his childhood and memories of his experience ten years earlier on an anthropological expedition to Melanesia now Eddystone Island . There , he befriended Nijiru , the local priest healer who took Rivers on his rounds to see sick villagers and also to the island s sacred Place of the Skulls . This episode is a symbolic capitulation to the inevitability of his death at the Western Front , a fate he shares with the poet , Wilfred Owen to which in a futile battle that takes place a few days before the Armistice , Billy and his friend Wilfred Owen are killed .

<|fantasy|>The book centers on Rosemary Woodhouse , a young woman who has just moved into the Bramford , an old Gothic Revival style New York City apartment building with her husband , Guy , a struggling actor . The pair is warned that the Bramford has a disturbing history involving witchcraft and murder , but they choose to overlook this . Rosemary has wanted children for some time , but Guy wants to wait until he is more established . Rosemary and Guy are quickly welcomed by Minnie and Roman Castevet , an eccentric elderly couple . Rosemary finds them meddlesome and absurd , but Guy begins paying them frequent visits . After a theatrical rival suddenly goes blind , Guy is given an important part in a stage play . Immediately following this event , Guy unexpectedly agrees with Rosemary that it is time to conceive their first child . Guy is noticed and cast in other , increasingly important roles , and he begins to talk about a career in Hollywood . After receiving a warning from a friend , who also becomes mysteriously ill , Rosemary investigates and confirms that her neighbors are the leaders of a Satanic coven , and she suspects they are after her child to use it as a sacrifice to the Devil . However , she is unable to convince anyone else to believe or help her and soon becomes certain that there is no one actually on her side , not even her own husband . In the end , Rosemary discovers she is wrong about the coven s reason for wanting the baby , but the truth is even more horrific than she could ever imagine . They plan to use Rosemary as a vessel to carry a child spawned from Satan himself .

<|action|>Yakov Liebermann is a Nazi hunter he runs a center in Vienna that documents crimes against humanity perpetrated during the Holocaust . The waning interest of the Western nations in tracking down Nazi criminals has forced him to move the center to his lodgings . Then , in September 1974 , Liebermann receives a phone call from a young man in Brazil who claims he has just finished eavesdropping on the so called Angel of Death , Dr . Josef Mengele , the concentration camp medical doctor who performed horrible experiments on camp victims during World War II . According to the young man , Mengele is activating the Kameradenwerk for a strange assignment he is sending out six Nazis to kill 94 men , who share a few common traits . All men are civil servants , and all of them have to be killed on or about particular dates , spread over several years . All will be 65 years old at the time of their killing . Before the young man can finish the conversation , he is killed . Liebermann hesitates about what to do , and wonders if the call was a prank . But he investigates and discovers that the killings the young man spoke of are taking place . As he tries to determine why the seemingly unimportant men are being killed , he discovers by coincidence that the children of two of the men are identical . It eventually transpires each of the 94 targets has a son aged 13 , a genetic clone of Adolf Hitler planted by Mengele . Mengele wishes to create a new Führer for the Nazi movement , and is trying to ensure that the lives of the clones follow a similar path to Hitler s . Each civil servant father is married to a woman about 23 years younger , and their killing is an attempt to mimic the death of Hitler s own father . Liebermann manages to work out who one of the intended targets is , and travels to warn him that his life may be in danger . However , Mengele reaches the man first , kills him , and then encounters Liebermann . Liebermann is shot but Mengele is killed by the targeted man s collection of dangerous dogs . The plan is halted , but 18 Hitler clones have already lost their fathers . The book ends with one of the Hitler clones developing delusions of grandeur .

<|fantasy|>Inspired by the Moskstraumen , it is couched as a story within a story , a tale told at the summit of a mountain climb in Lofoten , Norway . The story is told by an old man who reveals that he only appears old You suppose me a very old man , he says , but I am not . It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white , to weaken my limbs , and to unstring my nerves . The narrator , convinced by the power of the whirlpools he sees in the ocean beyond , is then told of the old man s fishing trip with his two brothers a few years ago . Driven by the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the heavens , their ship was caught in the vortex . One brother was pulled into the waves the other was driven mad by the horror of the spectacle , and drowned as the ship was pulled under . At first the narrator only saw hideous terror in the spectacle . In a moment of revelation , he saw that the Maelström is a beautiful and awesome creation . Observing how objects around him were pulled into it , he deduced that the larger the bodies , the more rapid their descent and that spherical shaped objects were pulled in the fastest . Unlike his brother , he abandoned ship and held on to a cylindrical barrel until he was saved several hours later . The old man tells the story to the narrator without any hope that the narrator will believe it .

<|mystery|>When working woman Kay Norris makes the acquaintance of a handsome and friendly young man who lives in the same sliver building , she does not know at first that he is the owner . While keeping a low profile himself , he turns out to know an awful lot about the other inhabitants including many of their secrets . It then turns out that he is a modern day Peeping Tom who , unknown to everyone , has had surveillance cameras and microphones installed in every single apartment of the house , with his own place in the building serving as his headquarters . The novel is also a murder mystery , and the beautiful heroine soon becomes a damsel in distress herself . de Sliver Film es Sliver película fr Sliver ja pl Sliver ru sv Sliver

<|novel|>The story starts out on April 18 , 1800 , in Port Mahon , Minorca , a base of the Royal Navy at that time . A shipless lieutenant wasting away in port , Jack Aubrey , meets Stephen Maturin , a poor half Irish and half Catalan physician and natural philosopher , at an evening concert at the Governor s Mansion . The two of them do not quite get along during this first encounter . A duel almost occurs when Jack Aubrey gets elbowed by Maturin to stop beating the time while the string quartet is playing . Later that evening , on his way back to his living quarters , Jack Aubrey finds out that he has been promoted to the rank of Commander and has been given command of the brig Sophie . His joy overcomes his animosity towards Stephen Maturin and they quickly become good friends in part due to their shared love of music . The ship s surgeon having left with the previous captain , Maturin is asked by Aubrey to sign on in that post . Although Maturin is a physician , not just a mere surgeon , he agrees , since he is currently unemployed . Also introduced into the story are Master s Mates Thomas Pullings , William Mowett , midshipman William Babbington , and James Dillon , the Sophies first lieutenant . Dillon and Stephen both have secret backgrounds as members of the United Irishmen . Aubrey improves Sophies sailing qualities by adding a longer yard which allows him to spread a larger mainsail . She then is sent to accompany a small convoy of merchant ships . During their journey east , the new captain , Aubrey , takes the opportunity to get to know his sailors and work them into a fighting unit . As he does this , he and the crew explain many naval matters to Maturin and to the reader since the doctor has never served aboard a man of war . After the convoy duties , Lord Keith allows Aubrey to cruise independently , looking for French merchants . After a number of prizes are taken , they meet and defeat the Cacafuego , a Spanish frigate , losing a number of crew , including Dillon , in the bloody action and gaining the respect of other naval officers . However , Captain Harte , the commandant at Mahon , has a grudge against Aubrey , who has been having an affair with his wife . Harte s malevolence ensures that the victory brings Aubrey and his crew no official recognition , promotion , or significant prize money , although Aubrey gains a reputation among members of the British Navy as one of its great , young fighting captains . On her following escort duty , Sophie is captured by a squadron of four large French warships after a pursuit and a brave but hopeless resistance . The Battle of Algeciras begins , and after a short period as prisoners of war , they are exchanged , missing the fighting . Back at Gibraltar , Aubrey must undergo a court martial over the loss of his ship , but he is cleared of the charges .

<|romance|>On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott , widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with both Italy and Gino , a handsome Italian much younger than herself , and decides to stay . Furious , her dead husband s family send Lilia s brother in law Philip to Italy to prevent a misalliance , but he arrives too late . Lilia had already married the Italian and becomes pregnant again . While giving birth to her son , she dies . The Herritons send Philip again to Italy , this time to save the infant boy from an uncivilized life and to save the family s reputation . Not wanting to be outdone or considered any less moral or concerned than Caroline for the child s welfare Lilia s in laws try to take the lead in traveling to Italy . In the public eye , they make it known that it is both their right and their duty to travel to Monteriano to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman . Secretly , though , they have no regard for the child only public appearances . Similarly to A Room with a View , both Italy and its inhabitants are presented as exuding an irresistible charm , to which eventually Caroline Abbott also succumbs . However , there is a tragic ending to the novel the accidental death of Lilia s child , which spurs a series of drastic changes within the story . Gino s physical outburst toward Philip in response to the news makes Philip realize what it is like to truly be alive . The guilt felt by Lilia s sister in law Harriet causes her to lose her mind . Finally , in Forster s novel , Philip realizes that he is in love with Caroline Abbott but that he can never have her , because she admits , dramatically , to being in love with Gino . The film by contrast , adds a positive ending to the story by hinting that Caroline s love for Gino may be just a passing fancy , with love between herself and Philip being possible . Forster , E . M . , Where Angels Fear to Tread , ed . by Oliver Stallybrass London , 1975 . Winkgens , Meinhard , Die Funktionalisierung des Italienbildes in den Romanen Where Angels Fear to Tread von E . M . Forster und The Lost Girl von D . H . Lawrence , Arcadia , 21 1986 , 41 61 . .

<|fantasy|>This story takes place in a town called , Q which is actually a fictitious version of Pakistan . In Q the 3 sisters Chunni , Munnee , and Bunny Shakil simultaneously pretend to give birth to Omar Khayyám Shakil . Therefore , it is impossible to know who Omar s true mother is . In addition , they are unsure of who Omar s father is as the three sisters got pregnant at a house party . While growing up , Omar becomes mischievous and learns hypnosis . As a birthday present , Omar Khayyám Shakil s mothers allow him to leave Q . He enrolls in a school and is convinced by his tutor Eduardo Rodriguez to become a doctor . Over time , he comes in contact with both Iskander Harappa and General Raza Hyder .

<|mystery|>Trent s Last Case is actually the first novel in which gentleman sleuth Philip Trent appears . The novel is a whodunit with a place in detective fiction history because it is the first major sendup of that genre Not only does Trent fall in love with one of the primary suspects mdash usually considered a no no mdash he also , after painstakingly collecting all the evidence , draws all the wrong conclusions . Convinced that he has tracked down the murderer of a business tycoon who was shot in his mansion , he is told by the real perpetrator over dinner what mistakes in logical deduction he has made in trying to solve the case . On hearing what really happened , Trent vows that he will never again attempt to dabble in crime detection .

<|novel|>The eponymous English protagonist , Edward Waverley , has been brought up in the family home by his uncle , Sir Everard Waverley , who maintains the family Tory and Jacobite sympathies , while Edward s Whig father works for the Hanoverian government in nearby London . Edward Waverley is given a commission in the Hanoverian army and is posted to Dundee , then promptly takes leave to visit Baron Bradwardine , a Jacobite friend of his uncle , and meets the Baron s lovely daughter Rose . When wild Highlanders visit the Baron s castle Waverley is intrigued and goes to the mountain lair of Clan Mac Ivor , meeting the Chieftain Fergus and his sister Flora who turn out to be active Jacobites preparing for the 45 Rising . Waverley has overstayed his leave and is accused of desertion and treason , then arrested . Highlanders rescue him from his escort and take him to the Jacobite stronghold at Doune castle then on to Holyrood Palace where he meets Bonnie Prince Charlie himself . Encouraged by the beautiful Flora Mac Ivor , Waverley goes over to the Jacobites and takes part in the Battle of Prestonpans , where he saves the life of a colonel who turns out to be a close friend of his uncle . Thus he escapes retribution and marries the Baron s daughter , Rose Bradwardine .

<|childrens|>Set in the late 18th century to the late 1980s , the story follows the 200 year long life of the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt , and his rise from humble beginnings as an impoverished aristocrat in the countryside of France to the city of Paris to become a vain and arrogant vampire . After escaping his family and running off to Paris with his friend and confidante Nicolas de Lenfent nicknamed Nicki by Lestat , Lestat is kidnapped and bitten by the rogue elder vampire Magnus , who orphans him on the night he is made . Later , his dying mother , Gabrielle , arrives to say goodbye to him . In order to save her , Lestat bites her , transforming her into his first companion . Lestat abandons Nicki for fear of causing him harm and shuns contact with his loved ones . He later turns Nicki into a vampire after Armand kidnaps him and they begin to grow apart because of Nicki s sullenness he later commits suicide by going into the fire , from severe depression . Armand shows Lestat the history of how he was made by Marius . Compelled by the idea of Marius , Lestat leaves markings carved into rock in numerous places while traveling with Gabrielle , hoping that one day , Marius will see them and find Lestat . Whilst in Egypt , abandoned by Gabrielle , Lestat sleeps in the ground after being burned by the sun , and is recovered by Marius who takes him to his Mediterranean island . Then , Marius shares his past with him , and shows him Those Who Must Be Kept , Akasha and Enkil . Once Marius has given his warning to Lestat not to go see them again and leaves on a short outing , Lestat takes Nicolas s old violin and plays for the King and Queen , awakening them . Akasha feeds from Lestat as Lestat feeds from her . Then , Enkil , furious as ever , nearly kills Lestat , who is saved by Marius , and sent away . The book ends on a cliffhanger after Lestat s debut concert in San Francisco , and leads directly into the third volume , the Queen of the Damned .

<|crime|>After stalking and killing Roger , a ruthless but enthrallingly passionate mobster , Lestat is approached by Roger s ghost . Roger s ghost asks him to take care of his daughter Dora , a devout and popular television evangelist , whom he wants to spare from embarrassment . At the same time , Lestat has become increasingly paranoid that he s being stalked by a powerful force . Eventually , Lestat meets the Devil , who calls himself Memnoch . He takes Lestat on a whirlwind tour of Heaven , Hell and retells of the entirety of history from his own point of view in an effort to convince Lestat to join him as God s adversary . In his journey , Memnoch claims he is not evil , but merely working for God by ushering lost souls into Heaven . Lestat is left in confusion , unable to decide whether or not to cast his lot with the Devil . After the tour , Lestat believes himself to have had a major revelation . Among other things , he believes that he has seen Christ s crucifixion and that he has received Saint Veronica s Veil . He has also lost an eye in Hell . He tells his story to Armand , David Talbot and Dora , who have joined him in New York . Dora and Armand are deeply moved upon seeing the veil . Dora takes it and reveals it to the world , triggering a religious movement . Armand goes into the sunlight and immolates himself in order to convince people that a miracle has occurred . At the end of the novel , Lestat and David go to New Orleans . There , Maharet returns Lestat s eye to him , along with a note from Memnoch that reveals Memnoch may have been manipulating Lestat to serve his own agenda . Lestat then loses control of himself and Maharet is forced to chain him in the basement of the St . Elizabeth s convent , which is owned by the vampires , so that he will not hurt himself or others . Although the novel fits into the storyline of The Vampire Chronicles , the vast majority of it consists of Memnoch s account of cosmology and theology . The novel follows up on claims made by David Talbot in The Tale of the Body Thief that God and the Devil are on better terms than most Christians believe . It also reinterprets biblical stories to create a complete history of Earth , Heaven and Hell that fit neatly with the history of vampires given in The Queen of the Damned .

<|fantasy|>The novel is set in a world that is tidally locked . Thus one side of the planet is always in light , and the other in darkness . Science rules on the dayside , while magic holds sway in the night . Powerful magical entities live on the night side of the planet , and for the most part the entities magical powers emanate from distinct loci . Jack of Shadows a . k . a . Shadowjack , the main character , is unique among the magical beings in that he draws his power not from a physical location but from shadow itself . He is nearly incapacitated in complete light or complete darkness , but given access to even a small area of shadow , his potency is unmatched . Jack s only friend , the creature Morningstar , is punished by being trapped in stone at the edge of the night , to be released when dawn comes . His torso and head protrude from the rock , and he awaits the sun that will never rise . Jack seeks The Key That Was Lost , Kolwynia . The Key itself and the consequences of its use parallel Jack s progress in his own endeavors . Ultimately , the Key will be responsible for Jack s salvation and his doom . Fleeing the dark side , Jack gets access to a computer and uses it to recover Kolwynia . This makes him unbeatable , but not all powerful . Having made a mess of ruling with his new powers , he seeks the advice of Morningstar , who advises him to destroy The Machine at the Heart of the World , which maintains the world s stability , and set it rotating . The novel ends with Jack falling , perhaps to his death , but Morningstar has been freed by the world s turning and rushes to rescue him . The fate of this ambiguous hero is left untold , with Jack wondering , as he falls , if Morningstar will reach him in time .

<|mystery|>Wimsey s mother , the Dowager Duchess of Denver , telephones to say that Thipps , an architect hired to do some work on her local church , has just found a dead body wearing nothing but a pair of pince nez in the bath in his flat . The official investigator , Inspector Sugg , suspects Thipps and his servant Wimsey starts his own enquiry . Sir Reuben Levy , a famous financier , has disappeared from his own bedroom , and there has been a flurry of trading in some Peruvian oil shares . Inspector Parker , Wimsey s friend , is investigating this . The corpse in the bath is not Levy , but Wimsey becomes convinced that the two are linked . The trail leads to the teaching hospital near the architect s flat , and to surgeon and neurologist Sir Julian Freke , who is based there . Wimsey discovers that Freke murdered Sir Reuben and staged his disappearance from home , having borne a grudge for years over Lady Levy , who chose to marry Sir Reuben rather than him . He also engineered the trading in oil shares , to lure Sir Reuben to his death . He dismembered Sir Reuben and gave him to his students to dissect , substituting his body for that of a pauper donated to the hospital for that purpose , who bore a superficial resemblance to Sir Reuben . The pauper s body , washed , shaved and manicured , was then carried over the roofs and dumped in Thipps bath as a joke . Freke s belief that conscience and guilt are inconvenient physiological aberrations , which may be cut out and discarded , are an explanation for his conduct . He attempts to murder both Parker and Wimsey , and finally tries suicide when his actions are discovered , but is arrested in time . The book establishes many of Wimsey s character traits for example , his interest in rare books , the nervous problems associated with his wartime shell shock , and his ambiguous feelings about catching criminals for a hobby and also introduces many characters who recur in later novels , such as Parker , Bunter , Sugg , and the Dowager Duchess . There is a passing reference in the book to Freddy Arbuthnot , Wimsey s friend and contact for the stock market , being in love with Sir Reuben Levy s daughter Rachel and wanting to marry her . This theme is picked up in Strong Poison , taking place seven years later , when Freddy at last manages to convince Rachel s family to consent to the match despite his being a gentile after Freddy compared his long wait with that of the Biblical Jacob for his Rachel . Whose Body ? is now in the public domain in the United States , but may still be copyrighted elsewhere .

<|mystery|>Overhearing a conversation in a restaurant between Wimsey and his friend Parker , a doctor tells the two of a death that affected his career . A terminal cancer patient , old and wealthy , died unexpectedly early the doctor provoked outrage when he queried the cause , and local opinion forced him eventually to move away . Wimsey is moved to investigate . Wimsey discovers that the patient s great niece popular locally had nursed her through her illness and was the intended heiress . The patient had a horror of contemplating death , however , and refused to listen to entreaties that she must make a will to be sure that her fortune would pass to her great niece as she wished . A change in the law was imminent and meant that a great niece would no longer inherit automatically and the estate would probably pass to the Crown . Killing her great aunt before the legislation came in allowed the niece to secure the fortune intended for her . When Wimsey begins investigating , using the recurring character Miss Climpson as his intelligence agent , the great niece is provoked into covering her trail . She kills a former servant , fakes a kidnap murder and tries to frame a distant relative with an interest in the Dawson estate , and almost kills Miss Climpson . Lord Peter exposes the great niece s motive and methods , including the false identity she has established in London , and she is eventually arrested and imprisoned on remand , where she commits suicide . The doctor from whom Lord Peter originally heard the anecdote has moved on and is not grateful to be vindicated .

<|mystery|>During a hiking holiday after her acquittal on murder charges in Strong Poison , Harriet Vane discovers the body of a man , with his throat cut and the blood still liquid , on an isolated rock on the shore . There are no footprints in the sand other than the man s and Harriet s . She takes photos and preserves some evidence , but the corpse is washed away before she can fetch help . Lord Peter arrives , and he and Harriet make investigations alongside the police . The dead man , Paul Alexis , a professional dancing partner at the local hotel , was of Russian extraction and engaged to a rich older widow . The death has been made to look like suicide , but Wimsey and Harriet discover that he was the victim of an ingenious and complex murder plot . The romantic Alexis believed himself a descendant of Russian royalty , and the widow s rather stupid son , appalled at the prospect of his mother s remarriage to a gigolo and the loss of his inheritance , conspired with a friend and his wife to play on Alexis s fantasies . Convinced that he was being called to return to Russia in triumph as the rightful Tsar , Alexis was lured to the rock and murdered by the son , who rode a horse along the beach through the incoming tide to avoid leaving tracks , whilst his friends supplied his alibi . The death was intended to look like suicide . However , Alexis suffers from haemophilia , and his unclotted blood leads to confusion over the time of death , which eventually assists with the unmasking of the conspirators .

<|mystery|>After an engagement of some months following the events at the end of Gaudy Night , Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane marry . They plan to spend their honeymoon at Talboys , an old farmhouse in Harriet s native Hertfordshire which Wimsey has bought for her , and they abscond from the wedding reception , evading the assembled reporters . Arriving late at night , they are surprised to find the house locked up and not prepared for them . They gain access and spend their wedding night there , but next morning they discover the former owner , Noakes , dead in the cellar with head injuries . The quiet honeymoon is ruined as a murder investigation begins and the house fills with policemen , reporters , and brokers men distraining Noakes s hideous furniture . Noakes was an unpopular man , a miser and it turns out a blackmailer . He was assumed to be well off , though it transpires that he was bankrupt , owed large amounts of money , and was planning to flee his creditors with the cash paid for Talboys . The house had been locked and bolted when the newly weds arrived , and medical evidence seems to rule out an accident , so it seems he was attacked in the house and died later , having somehow locked up after his attacker . The suspects include Noakes s niece , Mrs . Ruddle his neighbour and cleaning lady , Frank Crutchley , a local garage mechanic who also tended Noakes s garden and the local police constable , who was his blackmail victim . Peter s and Harriet s relationship , always complex and painfully negotiated , is resolved during the process of catching the murderer and bringing him to justice . In a final scene , in which almost the entire cast of characters is gathered in the front room of Talboys , reflecting the novel s origin as a work for the stage , the killer turns out to be Crutchley . He planned to marry Noakes somewhat elderly niece and get his hands on the money he had left her in his will . He set a booby trap with a weighted plant pot on a chain , which was triggered by the victim opening the radio cabinet after locking up for the night . Wimsey s reaction to the case his arrangement for the defendant to be represented by top defence counsel his guilt at condemning a man to be hanged the return of his shell shock dominate the final chapters of the book . It is mentioned that Wimsey had previously also suffered similar pangs of conscience when other murderers had been sent to the gallows . His deep remorse and guilt at having caused Crutchley to be executed leave doubt as to whether he would undertake further murder investigations and in fact Sayers wrote no further Wimsey novels after this one . The 1942 short story Talboys , the very last Wimsey fiction produced by Sayers , is both a sequel to the present book , in having the same location and some of the same village characters , and an antithesis in being lighthearted and having no crime worse the theft of some peaches from a neighbour s garden .

<|mystery|>It is 1936 . Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey , returned from a European honeymoon , are settling into their new home in London , where daily life is affected by the illness and then death of the king . The couple are personally happy , having resolved many of the problems in their relationship caused by character and circumstance , but must now tackle the practical details of bringing their lives together , including domestic and working arrangements , and social and family obligations . The couple become slightly acquainted with Laurence Harwell , a wealthy theatrical angel , and his beautiful wife , whom he has rescued from poverty following her rich father s disgrace and imprisonment . After two years marriage the Harwells are famously still devoted to one another , and when she is found dead at their weekend cottage in the country Wimsey is asked to help interview the distraught husband , and becomes involved with the investigation . He is also asked to undertake sensitive diplomatic duties connected with the problematic behaviour of the new king , and as the 1936 abdication crisis looms , he gloomily predicts the coming war with Hitler s Germany . Suspicion falls on a writer known to have been in love with Mrs Harwell , and a talented but bohemian painter who had been working on portraits of both Harriet and the murdered woman . Two men who knew Mrs Harwell s father in prison , and who have been blackmailing him with threats to harm her , are also suspected . Meanwhile Harriet straightens out her domestic situation , learning how to fulfill her new role whilst keeping her own identity , and finds a practical solution to allow Wimsey s devoted manservant Bunter to marry without having to leave the household . Harriet s unorthodox approach infuriates her sister in law who believes Harriet has an obligation to abandon her career , do her duty to the family and produce an heir but it allows her to solve most of the practical difficulties that might have stood in the way of a successful and happy marriage . She also discovers she is expecting a baby . After some plot twists , a second murder and a scene involving the hidden rivers and Victorian sewers that run under London , it is revealed that Harwell unintentionally killed his wife in a jealous rage , in the belief she was preparing to entertain a lover , although ironically her preparations had really been for him . Harwell might have gotten off with a manslaughter conviction , but except that he later committed the premeditated murder of an actress who was in a position to disprove his alibi and tried to blackmail him . Harriet visits Harwell in prison to comfort him with the knowledge that his wife had not , after all , been unfaithful . In doing so , she finally banishes the lingering ghosts of her own imprisonment and murder trial , and the effect they have had on her relationship with her own husband .

<|action|>Set in a near future earth , the West and the East have been at war for more than a decade , and resources are running thin . The West is stealing oil from the East with specialized nuclear submarines subtugs that sneak into the underwater oil fields of the East to secretly pump out the oil and bring it back . Each manned by a crew of four , these submarines undertake the most hazardous , stressful mission conceivable , and of late , the missions have been failing , with the last twenty submarines simply disappearing . The East has been very successful in planting sleepers in the West s military and command structures , and the suspicion is that sleepers are sabotaging the subs or revealing their positions once at sea . John Ramsey , a young psychologist from the Bureau of Psychology BuPsych , is trained as an electronics operator and sent on the next mission , replacing the previous officer who went insane . His secret mission is to find the sleeper , or figure out why the crews are going insane .

<|fantasy|>In the future , humankind has tried to develop artificial intelligence , succeeding only once , and then disastrously . A transmission from the project site on an island in the Puget Sound , rogue consciousness ! , was followed by slaughter and destruction , culminating in the island vanishing from the face of the earth . The current project is being run on the moon , and the book tells the story of the seventh attempt in a series of experiments to create an artificial consciousness . For each attempt the scientists raise a group of clones . These clones are kept isolated and raised to believe that they will be the crew of a spaceship that will colonize a planet in the Tau Ceti solar system Tau Ceti has no habitable planet , its choice should they manage to reach it is part of the planned frustration of the crew . The spaceship will take hundreds of years to reach the system and the crew will spend most of their time in hibernation . Along with the crew of six , the ship carries thousands of other clones in hibernation , intended to populate the new colony and , if necessary , provide replacements for any crew members who die along the way . The crew are just caretakers the ship is controlled by a disembodied human brain , called Organic Mental Core or OMC , that runs the complex operations of the vessel and keeps it moving in space . But the first two OMC s Myrtle and Little Joe become catatonic , while the third OMC goes insane and kills two of the umbilicus crew members . The crew are left with only one choice to build an artificial consciousness that will enable the ship to continue . The crew knows that if they attempt to turn back they will be ordered to abort self destruct . The clones have been bred and carefully selected for psychological purposes to reinforce each other , as well as to provide various specialized skills that will give them the best chance of success . The crew includes a chaplain psychiatrist , Raja Flattery , who knows their real purpose , and that the breakdown of the OMC s was planned . He s aware that six other ships have gone out before theirs , each one failing . He understands the nature of the test create a high pressure environment in which brilliance may break through out of necessity , and create in the safety of the void what humans couldn t safely create on Earth . Space Ship Earthling number Seven ultimately succeeds , and the consequences of their success form the basis of the plot for the novels which follow . fr Destination vide he Destination Void

<|fantasy|>In the far future , humankind has made contact with numerous other species Gowachin , Laclac , Wreaves , Pan Spechi , Taprisiots , and Caleban among others and has helped to form the ConSentiency to govern among the species . After suffering under a tyrannous pure democracy which had the power to create laws so fast that no thought could be given to the effects , the sentients of the galaxy found the need for a Bureau of Sabotage BuSab to slow the wheels of government , thereby preventing it from legislating recklessly . In Whipping Star , Jorj X . McKie is a saboteur extraordinary , a born troublemaker who has naturally become one of BuSab s best agents . As the novel opens , it is revealed that Calebans , who are beings visible to other sentient species as stars , have been disappearing one by one . Each disappearance is accompanied by millions of sentient deaths and instances of incurable insanity . Ninety years prior to the setting of Whipping Star , the Calebans appeared and offered jumpdoors to the collective species , allowing sentients to travel instantly to any point in the universe . Gratefully accepting , the sentiency didn t question the consequences . Now Mliss Abnethe , a psychotic human female with immense power and wealth , has bound a Caleban called Fannie Mae in a contract that allows the Caleban to be whipped to death when the Caleban dies , everyone who has ever used a jumpdoor which is almost every adult in the sentient world and many of the young will die as well . The Calebans begin to disappear one at a time , leaving our plane of existence or exiting our wave to save themselves . As all Calebans are connected , if all were to remain in our existence , when Fannie Mae died , all Calebans would die . As each Caleban exits , millions of the ConSentiency are killed or rendered insane . McKie has to find Mliss and stop her before Fannie Mae reaches , in her words , ultimate discontinuity , but he is constrained by the law protecting private individuals by restricting the ministrations of BuSab to public entities . McKie succeeds in saving Fannie Mae by opening a jumpdoor into space which shunts a large interstellar cloud of presumably hydrogen into her stellar body , rejuvenating her from her torture at the hands of the Palenki henchmen hired by Mliss Abnethe .

<|fantasy|>The novel is set in a distant future when humans are part of an interstellar civilization called the ConSentiency composed of many species . One , the Taprisiots , provide instant mind to mind communication between two sentient minds anywhere in the universe , and the Caleban provide jump doors which allow instantaneous travel between any two points in the universe . This is the glue that holds the far flung ConSentiency together . Unfortunately , one consequence of jump door technology is the possibility that large numbers of unsuspecting sentients can be diverted to destinations unknown for nefarious purposes . A government saboteur attempts to expose one such plot . Jorj X . McKie is a Saboteur Extraordinary , one of the principals of the Bureau of Sabotage , and the only human admitted to practice law before the Gowachin bar as a legum lawyer . While meditating in a park in BuSab headquarters McKie is mentally contacted by the Caleban Fannie Mae , a female member of a species of unparalleled power from another dimension whose visible manifestation in this universe is the star Thyone in the Pleiades cluster Generations ago , a secret , unauthorized experiment by the Gowachins was carried out with the help of a contract with the Calebans . They isolated the planet Dosadi behind an impenetrable barrier called The God Wall . On the planet were placed humans and Gowachin , with an odd mix of modern and old technology . The planet itself is massively poisonous except for a narrow valley , containing the city Chu , into which nearly 89 million humans and Gowachin are crowded under terrible conditions . It is ruled by a dictator , many other forms of government having been tried previously , but without the ability to remove such things as the DemoPol , a computer system used to manipulate populaces without their consent or knowledge . The culture of ordinary day to day power in Dosadi is very violent . Among other tools , addictive psychotropes are used for handling power among hierarchies in organisations . Senior Liator Keila Jedrik starts a war that will change Dosadi forever . Jorj travels to Dosadi and escapes with Keila after engaging in ego sharing . This gives them the ability to swap bodies and thus by using a hole in the contract sealing Dosadi they can escape via jump gate . Once free , by legal manoeuvring the Dosadi population is unleashed upon the ConSentiency for good or ill , whilst the people who set the project in motion try to deal with the consequences , having sent McKie there hoping a solution more in their interest could be found .

<|mystery|>After arriving at his London club at 10 30 am precisely , which he has been doing every morning for many years , Sir Eustace Pennefather , a known womanizer whose divorce from his current wife is pending , receives a complimentary box of chocolates through the post . Disapproving of such modern marketing techniques , Sir Eustace is about to throw away the chocolates in disgust but changes his mind when he learns that Graham Bendix , another member of the club whom he hardly knows , has lost a bet with his wife Joan and now owes her a box of chocolates . Bendix takes the box home and , after lunch , tries out the new confectionery together with his wife . A few hours later Joan Bendix is dead , whereas her husband , who has eaten far less of the chocolate , is taken seriously ill and hospitalized but later recovers . The police can establish a few facts beyond any doubt that the parcel was posted the previous evening near The Strand that the poison that was injected into each of the chocolates is nitrobenzene and that the accompanying letter was typewritten on a piece of stationery from the manufacturers of the chocolates but not composed or sent by them . Quite soon in the police investigations it becomes evident that the intended victim was Sir Eustace himself rather than the innocent Joan Bendix No criminal could have predicted Sir Eustace giving away the box of chocolates to a man he hardly knew who just happened to be present when it was delivered . However , at a loss as to the further details of the crime , Scotland Yard conclude that the sender must have been some maniac or a fanatic trying to rid society of one of its most immoral members . Worthy pillars of society including a barrister , a writer of detective novels , and a female author , the members of Roger Sheringham s Crimes Circle go about individually solving the case . After a week has passed , they present their findings on consecutive nights to their colleagues . Not surprisingly , they come up with various suspects Sir Eustace s estranged wife the father of a young lady whom Sir Eustace intended to marry after his divorce got through one of Sir Eustace s discarded mistresses and some more . While these discussions are going on , the murderer seems to feel safe with no need to cover up their tracks any further . At the very end of the novel , however , there is no doubt as to the identity of the perpetrator .

<|fantasy|>Vurt tells the story of Scribble and his gang , the Stash Riders , as they search for his missing sister lover Desdemona . The novel is set in an alternate version of Manchester , England , in which society has been shaped by Vurt , a hallucinogenic drug shared alternate reality , accessed by sucking on colour coded feathers . Through some never explained mechanism , the dreams , mythology , and imaginings of humanity have achieved objective reality in the Vurt and become real . Before the novel begins , Scribble and his sister lover take a shared trip into a vurt called English Voodoo , but upon awakening Scribble finds his sister has been replaced by an amorphous blob that Mandy , a fellow Stash Rider , nicknames The Thing from Outer Space . From that point on , Scribble is on a mission to find another copy of the rare and contraband Curious Yellow feather found within English Voodoo , so that he can exchange The Thing for Desdemona .

<|novel|>The book tells the story of a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart who , feeling bored and unfulfilled in life , starts making decisions about what to do based on a roll of a dice . Along the way , there is sex , rape , murder , dice parties , breakouts by psychiatric patients , and various corporate and governmental machines being put into a spin . There is also a description of the cult that starts to develop around the man , and the psychological research he initiates , such as the Fuck without Fear for Fun and Profit program .

<|novel|>The book is set 20 years after the end of The Dice Man , and Luke s dicechild , Larry Rhinehart , has grown up to become a hotshot investor on the stock market . He has totally rejected his father s reverence for chance he sees it as an adversary to be overcome , and has managed to create a stable , normal life for himself , in spite of his early abandonment . Indeed , he is due to wed the daughter of his boss , and live wealthily ever after . This state of affairs would make a dull story and soon his father s ghostly presence intervenes . He gets approached by the FBI , who are trying to trace his father s location , and find out whether he s alive or dead . Though Larry naturally refuses to have anything to do with the FBI , he soon starts to pursue his own investigations . He is financed in this by his fiancée s father , who wants to put the whole dice business to rest , and is accompanied by his fiancée s cousin , an unreformed hippy . It takes a long time a whole book in fact , but Larry eventually does complete his quest . Along the way , what he sees and hears change his views somewhat by the end of the book it is he who is trying to convince Luke , his father , to accept more chance into his life , rather than the other way round .

<|novel|>The book takes Luke s style to its logical conclusion , as the entire book is made up of sections taken from other , fictional books . The preface to the book claims that it was written in Deya , Majorca , in 2326 . According to the book , an entire industry has grown up publishing books about a Montauk named Wim including The Gospel According to Luke Luke Forth , not Luke Rhinehart and the screenplay of a movie . The screenplay is possibly in there as a result of Luke Rhinehart s continuing frustration in trying to get The Dice Man turned into a good movie . Adventures of Wim , then , is an effort to create a new interpretation of the story of Wim , drawing on the many previous efforts , and so providing a multi faceted and whimsical account of one of the greatest figures in the 20th and 21st Century . A boy is born of a virgin mother and is named Wim in Adventures of Wim or Whim in The Book of the Die and Whim Montauk for Wave Rider . He is pronounced to be the saviour of the Montauk nation by his tribe s navigator , and educated in their ways . Sadly , the humans steal him away and attempt to educate him in more useful skills , such as American Football . Wim , also known as He of Many Chances , proves to be an inefficient saviour , as God sends him on a quest for Ultimate Truth . This does not seem to be something that will benefit his tribe terribly , but the navigator isn t one to stare down the barrel of a lightning gun , and sends him on his way . After a long and arduous search , Wim finds ultimate truth in a tomato , and with it the cure for the sickness of the human condition .

<|novel|>Rob Fleming is a London record store owner in his mid thirties whose girlfriend , Laura , has just left him . At the record shop named Championship Vinyl Rob and his employees Dick and Barry spend their free moments discussing mix tape aesthetics and constructing top five lists of anything that demonstrates their knowledge of music . Rob , recalling his five most memorable breakups , sets about getting in touch with the former girlfriends . Eventually , Rob s re examination of his failed relationships and the death of Laura s father bring the two back together . Their relationship is cemented by the launch of a new purposefulness to Rob s life in the revival of his disc jockey career . Also , realizing that his fear of commitment a result of his fear of death of those around him and his tendency to act on emotion are responsible for his continuing desires to pursue new women , Rob makes a symbolic commitment to Laura .

<|mystery|>The setting is an English country house , where Mark Ablett has been entertaining a house party consisting of a widow and her marriageable daughter , a retired major , a wilful actress , and Bill Beverley , a young man about town . Mark s long lost brother Robert , the black sheep of the family , arrives from Australia and shortly thereafter is found dead , shot through the head . Mark Ablett has disappeared , so Tony Gillingham , a stranger who has just arrived to call on his friend Bill , decides to investigate . Gillingham plays Sherlock Holmes to his younger counterpart s Doctor Watson they progress almost playfully through the novel while the clues mount up and the theories abound .

<|childrens|>In Holland , poor but industrious and honorable 15 year old Hans Brinker and his younger sister Gretel , yearn to participate in December s great ice skating race on the canal . They have little chance of doing well on their handmade wooden skates , but the prospect of the race and the prize of the Silver Skates excite them and fire their dreams . Hans father , Raff Brinker , is sick and amnesiac , with violent episodes , because of a head injury caused by a fall from a dike , and he cannot work . Mrs . Brinker , Hans , and Gretel must all work to support the family and are looked down upon in the community because of their low income and poor status . Hans has a chance meeting with the famous surgeon Dr . Boekman and begs him to treat their father , but the doctor is expensive and gruff in nature following the loss of his wife and disappearance of his son . Eventually , Dr . Boekman is persuaded to examine the Brinkers father . He diagnoses pressure on the brain , which can be cured by a risky and expensive operation involving trephining . Hans offers his own money , saved in the hope of buying steel skates , to the doctor to pay for his father s operation . Touched by this gesture , Dr . Boekman provides the surgery for free , and Hans is able to buy good skates for both himself and Gretel to skate in the race . Gretel wins the girls race , but Hans lets a friend who needs it more win the precious prize , the Silver Skates , in the boys race . Mr . Brinker s operation is successful , and he is restored to health and memory . Dr . Boekman is also changed , losing his gruff ways , thanks in part to being able to be reunited with his lost son through the unlikely aid of Mr . Brinker . The Brinkers fortunes are changed further by the almost miraculous recovery of Mr . Brinker s savings , thought lost or stolen ten years ago . The Brinker parents live a long and happy life . Dr . Boekman helps Hans go to medical school , and Hans becomes a successful doctor . Gretel also grows up to enjoy a happy adult life .

<|fantasy|>In a nuclear war , the USSR will win . This is because the average Russian doesn t have a gun , so they can t all shoot each other and the army for food The story concerns a hypothetical World War III between the USSR and the United States , and graphically depicts the ensuing carnage . One family and some friends try to run away in a sailboat , and the story describes their battles with nuclear winter and fallout , and with the ensuing collapse of civilization .

<|fantasy|>Commander Caractacus Pott is an inventor who buys and renovates an old car after gaining money from inventing and selling whistle like sweets to Lord Skrumshus , the wealthy owner of a local confectionery factory . The car , a Paragon Panther , was the sole production of the Paragon motor car company before it went bankrupt . It is a four seat touring car with an enormous bonnet . After the restoration is complete , the car is named for the noises made by its starter motor and the characteristic two loud backfires it makes when it starts . At first Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is just a big and powerful car , but as the book progresses the car surprises the family by beginning to exhibit independent actions . This first happens while the family is caught in a traffic jam on their way to the beach for a picnic . The car suddenly instructs Commander Pott to pull a switch which causes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to sprout wings and take flight over the stopped cars on the road . Commander Pott flies them to Goodwin Sands in the English Channel where the family picnics , swims , and sleeps . While the family naps , the tide comes in threatening to drown them . Chitty Chitty Bang Bang wakes them just in time with a hiss of steam . At the car s direction , Commander Pott pulls another switch which causes it to transform into a hovercraft like vehicle . They make for the French coast and land on a beach near Calais . They explore along the beach and find a cave boobytrapped with some devices intended to scare off intruders . At the back of the cave is a store of armaments and explosives . The family detonate the cache of explosives and flee the cave . The gangsters gun runners who own the ammunition dump arrive and block the road in front of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang . The gangsters threaten the family , but Commander Pott throws the switch which transforms the car into an aeroplane and they take off , leaving the gangsters in helpless fury . The Potts stay overnight in a hotel in Calais . While the family sleeps , the gangsters break into the children s room and kidnap them and drive off towards Paris . Chitty tracks the gangsters route , wakes Commander and Mrs . Pott , and they drive off in pursuit . The gangsters are planning to rob a famous chocolate shop in Paris using the children as decoys . The Pott children overhear this and manage to warn the shop owner , Monsieur Bon Bon . Chitty arrives in time to prevent the gangsters from fleeing . The police arrive and the gangsters are taken away . As a reward Monsieur Bon Bon s wife shares the secret recipe of her world famous fudge with the Potts and the two families become good friends . Chitty flies the family away to parts unknown , and the book implies that the car has yet more secrets .

<|fantasy|>Despite the post apocalyptic scenario , and several action sequences , the book is largely about civilization and symbols . Each of the three sections deals with a different symbol . The first is the Postman himself , Gordon Krantz , who takes the uniform solely for warmth after he loses everything but his sleeping clothes . He wanders without establishing himself anywhere , and acts in scenes of William Shakespeare for supplies . Originally from Minnesota , he has traveled as far West as Oregon . Taking shelter in a long abandoned postal van , he finds a sack of mail and takes it to a nearby community to barter for food and shelter . His reputation as a real postman builds not because of a deliberate fraud at least initially but because people are desperate to believe . Later , in the second section , he encounters a community Corvallis , Oregon led by Cyclops , apparently a sentient artificial intelligence created at Oregon State University which miraculously survived the cataclysm . In reality , however , the machine had ceased functioning during a battle a group of scientists merely maintain the pretense of it working to try and keep hope , order , and knowledge alive . Eventually , in the third section , as the Postman joins forces with the Cyclops scientists in a war against an influx of hypersurvivalists , he begins to find that the hypersurvivalists are being pressed from the Rogue River area to the south as well . The hypersurvivalists are more commonly referred to as Holnists , after the founder of their ideal , Nathan Holn . Many times through the book , curses are uttered which damn Holn for his actions . Nathan Holn was an author who championed an extreme , violent , misogynistic and hypersurvivalist society . Holn is said to have himself been hanged in the novel , but in the time following what should have been a brief period of civil disorder , followers of Holn prevented the United States from recovering from the limited war , and the plagues that followed . As the story ends , and he comes close to the hypersurvivalist s southern enemy , he begins to find traces of them , primarily in the symbol that they rally behind the Bear Flag of California . The final scenes give the impression that the three symbols may rally together in an effort to revive civilization . Another message of the plot deals with the backstory of the post apocalyptic world specifically , that it was not the electronics destroying electromagnetic pulses , nor the destruction of major cities , nor the release of various bio engineered plagues that actually destroyed society rather , it was the hypersurvivalists themselves , those who maintained stockpiles of weapons and ammunition and who preyed on humanitarian workers and other forces of order .

<|novel|>Kino , a young , strong , poor pearl diver , lives in a small town , La Paz , with his wife Juana , and his baby son , Coyotito . When the baby , Coyotito , is stung by a scorpion , Kino must find a way to pay the town doctor so he will cure him . Shortly thereafter , Kino discovers an enormous pearl while out diving with Juana and he is ready to sell it for money to pay the doctor . Sadly , other forces work against Kino . Nearly as soon as he returns from sea , the whole town knows of the pearl . Everyone calls it the pearl of the world , and many people begin to crave it . That very night Kino is attacked in his own home . Determined to get rid of the pearl , the following morning he takes it to the pearl buyers in town . Nevertheless , the pearl buyers all collude and refuse to pay him what he wants , so he decides to go to the capital city over the mountains to find a better price . However , Juana , seeing that the pearl brings darkness and greed , sneaks out of the house late at night to throw it back into the ocean . When Kino catches her , furious , he attacks her and leaves her on the beach . Returning to the house with the pearl , Kino is attacked by an unknown man whom he stabs and kills . The pearl is dropped and hidden from view . He thinks the men have taken the pearl , but Juana shows him that she has found it . When they go back to the town , they find their home has been set on fire . Kino and Juana spend the day hiding in the house of Kino s brother Juan Tomás and his wife and gathering provisions for their trip to the capital city . Only there can they hope to sell the pearl for a decent price and finally help Coyotito with the scorpion sting . Kino , Juana , and Coyotito leave in the dark of the night . After a brief rest in the morning , Kino spots trackers who are following them . Well aware that they will be unable to hide from the trackers , they begin hiking into the mountains . They find a cave near a natural water hole , where the exhausted family hides and waits for the trackers to catch up to them . The trackers find the water hole and decided to rest there for the night . Kino realizes that he must get rid of the trackers if they are to survive the trip to the capital . He s getting ready to attack when the men hear a cry like a baby s though they decide it s more like a coyote with a litter . One of the men fires his rifle in the direction of the crying , where Juana and Coyotito lie . Kino tackles the man down , takes the gun and kills all of the trackers . Kino then realizes that something is wrong , he climbs back up to the cave to discover that the man s shot had killed Coyotito . Kino and Juana then return to La Paz , mourning , no longer wanting the pearl , with Coyotito s dead body . Kino throws the pearl back into the ocean and it then sinks to the bottom of the sea .

<|novel|>Kwei lan is put into an arranged marriage , but her husband is not what she expects . They do not live in her parents courts which was expected in China then . He is a medical doctor and does not seem to take interest in her until after she asks him to unbind her feet . After they bond , they have a son together . Kwei lan has an older brother who has been living in United States for a few years . He has a friend write back to his family that he has married an American woman his parents have already selected a Chinese woman for him to marry when he returns to China . Kwei lan s brother and his wife Mary go to China to see if they can convince his family to accept her . The family will not accept her , and tell him to give her money and send her back to America . Kwei lan s brother has not fulfilled his duty in his parents eyes , and soon his wife Mary is pregnant with their first child . The climax is when Kwei lan s mother dies , and the family tells him that if he does not send Mary back to America and marry his betrothed , then he will be disinherited . He refuses , leaves his family s courts for good , and live in an apartment near to Kwei lan s house . The baby is born , and ties together his parents hearts and two cultures . pt East Wind West Wind

<|mystery|>Ironweed is set during the Great Depression and tells the story of Francis Phelan , an alcoholic vagrant originally from Albany , New York , who left his family after accidentally killing his infant son while he may have been drunk . The novel focuses on Francis s return to Albany , and the narrative is complicated by Phelan s hallucinations of the three people , other than his son , whom he killed in the past . The novel features characters that return in some of Kennedy s other books .

<|novel|>In this story of New Zealand and Te Kooti s War during the year beginning November 10 , 1868 , the narrative coalesces around the development of its protagonist , George Fairweather , who in Shadbolt s historical epilogue is described as A composite character . . . yet still far from fictional . Fairweather is a competent but cynical former British officer in his early forties , who leaves the service under a cloud , turns landscape painter and cultivates an air of worldly detachment . Yet he finds himself drawn by love and humanity back into the world of colonial New Zealand and the maelstrom of the Māori Wars , not altogether disagreeably , as he finds to his surprise . Pursuing Te Kooti as an officer and commander in the colonial militia , while perfecting his ability to destroy Te Kooti s rebellious Jews Fairweather paradoxically finds his feelings of humanity expanding to include Englishmen , colonials and Māoris , coupled with a growing resentment of racism and injustice . In the end he almost throws his future away by struggling to save a Māori boy , Hamiora reminiscent of Melville s Billy Budd , unjustly charged with treason . With the hanging of Hamiora , November 10 , 1869 , and the conclusion of Fairweather s desperate attempts first to prevent and then to mitigate it , the book ends . The problem of Te Kooti is not resolved , except in the brief epilogue , further revealing the depths of Fairweather s and Shadbolt s ambivalence about the historical figure of Te Kooti , Fairweather s hated and admired nemesis and one time friend .

<|fantasy|>When an IRA bomb goes off , the wife and children of molecular biologist John Roe O Neill are killed on May 20 , 1996 . Driven halfway insane by loss , his mind fragments into several personalities that carry out his plan for him . He plans a genocidal revenge and creates a plague that kills women . O Neill then releases it in Ireland for supporting the terrorists , England for oppressing the Irish and giving them a cause , and Libya for training said terrorists he demands that the governments of the world send all citizens of those countries back to their countries , and that they quarantine those countries and let the plague run its course , so they will lose what he has lost if they do not , he has more plagues to release . After releasing the plague , he goes to Ireland to hide , planning to offer his services as a molecular biologist in the hopes of sabotaging whatever work is done there on finding a cure . When he arrives in Ireland , he is suspected of being O Neill whom the investigatory agencies of the world have deduced is responsible . To travel to the lab at Killaloe , he is forced to walk with a priest , a boy who has taken a vow of silence due to the death of his mother , and Joseph Herity , the IRA bomber who detonated the explosive that killed O Neill s wife and children their purpose is to confirm his identity , either through Herity s indirect questioning , or the possibility that he will confess to the priest when confronted with the pain his revenge has caused for the boy . Meanwhile , law and order have broken down in England and Ireland , and the old Irish ways are coming back . Local IRA thugs appoint themselves kings of old , and others recreate ancient Celtic pagan religions centered on the rowan tree . The IRA has effective control of Ireland , but as the governments of the world grow certain that O Neill is there and essentially in custody , they consider wiping out the three targeted countries to end the lingering threat .

<|fantasy|>A psychologist , Gilbert Dasein , is hired by corporate interests to investigate a town in a valley where marketing seems totally ineffective Outside businesses are allowed in , but wither quickly for lack of business . Santarogans aren t hostile , they just won t shop there neither are they xenophobic , instead appearing maddeningly self satisfied with their quaint , local lifestyle . Adding an element of danger , the last few psychologists sent in have all died in accidents that are seemingly perfectly plausible . Complicating matters further still , the psychologist s college girlfriend , Jenny , has returned to Santaroga . With this in mind , Dasein cautiously enters the town and quickly discovers Jaspers , an additive to the food and drink commonly ingested in Santaroga that seems to imbue the consumer with greater health and an expanded mind . Those who consume it don t become psychic instead , they re simply far more lucid than the average citizen of the U . S , although there are numerous hints at a group mind operating at a subconscious level . Their newspapers are vaguely subversive with their folksy , enlightened commentary on world affairs their dinner conversations knowledgeably reference great theories of psychology , politics , and cognitive science . Soon , Dasein is having narrow misses with perfectly plausible accidents A boy playing with a bow and arrow releases it the lift under his car in a garage collapses a waitress in a diner accidentally uses insecticide rather than sugar for his coffee . Knowing that Jaspers creates exceptionally perceptive , penetrating individual minds , Dasein realizes that he has offended a communal id that feels threatened by him . As Jenny tries to convince him to settle down with her there , he wonders whether he ll live long enough to decide .

<|romance|>The story concerns a young married woman , Constance Lady Chatterley , whose upper class husband , Clifford Chatterley , has been paralyzed due to a war injury . In addition to Clifford s physical limitations , his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple . Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper , Oliver Mellors . The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class . The novel is about Constance s realisation that she cannot live with the mind alone she must also be alive physically . This realisation stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors , suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body , not the mind .

<|novel|>The majority of The Sorrows of Young Werther is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther , a young artist of highly sensitive and passionate temperament , and sent to his friend Wilhelm . In these letters , Werther gives a very intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim based on the town of Garbenheim , near Wetzlar . He is enchanted by the simple ways of the peasants there . He meets Charlotte , a beautiful young girl who is taking care of her siblings following the death of their mother . Despite knowing beforehand that Charlotte is already engaged to a man named Albert , who is in fact 11 years her senior , Werther falls in love with her . Although this causes Werther great pain , he spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with both of them . His pain eventually becomes so great that he is forced to leave and go to Weimar . While he is away , he makes the acquaintance of Fräulein von B . He suffers a great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a friend on the day when the entire aristocratic set normally meets there . He returns to Wahlheim after this , where he suffers more than he did before , partially because Lotte and Albert are now married . Every day serves as a torturous reminder that Lotte will never be able to requite his love . Out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband , Lotte comes to the decision that Werther must not visit her so frequently . He visits her one final time , and they are both overcome with emotion after Werther s recitation of a portion of Ossian . Werther had realized even before this incident that one of them Lotte , Albert or Werther himself had to die . Unable to hurt anyone else or seriously consider committing murder , Werther sees no other choice but to take his own life . After composing a farewell letter to be found after he commits suicide , he writes to Albert asking for his two pistols , under a pretence that he is going on a journey . Lotte receives the request with great emotion and sends the pistols . Werther then shoots himself in the head , but does not expire until 12 hours after he has shot himself . He is buried under a linden tree , a tree he talks about frequently in his letters , and the funeral is not attended by clergymen , Albert or his beloved Lotte .

<|novel|>After her mother has died in childbirth , Laura Blundy is brought up by her loving and caring father , a merchant and shopowner who also pays for her schooling . One day , on her way to her ailing aunt , she is given a lift by a young man in a carriage who rapes her and then throws her out of the carriage again . She becomes pregnant , and when both her father and her aunt die she is left penniless . Unable to care for her baby son , she manages to have him raised in an institution . She occasionally goes there to inquire after him , but one day she is told that he has died and that he has been buried in an unmarked grave . The feeling of loss she experiences never leaves her again . Laura Blundy spends the following 18 years of her life in the streets of London . When another woman s baby dies in her care she is charged with murder and has to go to prison . Years later she is set free again but almost immediately after her release she is run over by a carriage whose driver does not stop . She is brought to hospital , where her leg is amputated . However , she falls in love with her surgeon . They get married , but Laura is attracted more by his cleanliness and moderate wealth than by his character or potency . When , in mid winter , Laura decides to commit suicide by drowning in the river Thames , she is rescued by Billy , a young worker employed in the building of the Victoria Embankment and London s sewage system . Although Billy has a wife and children , they start a love affair . Some time later Laura beats her husband to death in his own home , making Billy an accomplice after the fact . Laura cuts up her husband s body , and then she and Billy carry the body in several bags to the river . As the surgeon s head keeps bobbing up and being washed ashore they eventually have to burn it . At this point in her life Laura , already in her late thirties , may be pregnant once again . The lovers have plans of escaping to France .

<|childrens|>The premise is that Arthur s youth , not dealt with in Malory , was a time when he was tutored by Merlyn to prepare him for the use of power and royal life . Merlyn magically turns Wart into various animals at times . He also has more human adventures , at one point meeting the outlaw Robin Hood , who is referred to in the novel as Robin Wood . The setting is loosely based on medieval England , and in places it incorporates White s considerable knowledge of medieval culture as in relation to hunting , falconry and jousting . However it makes no attempt at consistent historical accuracy , and incorporates some obvious anachronisms aided by the concept that Merlyn lives backwards in time rather than forwards , unlike everyone else .

<|fantasy|>At the start of Children of the Mind , Jane , the evolved computer intelligence , is using her newly discovered abilities to take the races of buggers , humans and pequeninos outside the universe and back in instantaneously . She uses these powers to move them to distant habitable planets for colonization . She is losing her memories and concentration as the vast computer network connected to the ansible is being shut down . If she is to survive , she must find a way to transfer her aiúa or soul to a human body . Peter Wiggin and Si Wang Mu travel to the worlds of Divine Wind and Pacifica to convince the Japanese led swing group of the Starways Congress to revoke their order to destroy Lusitania . By tracing the decision making trail backwards , they are able to show a philosopher his influence on the Starways Congress . After some complications , the philosopher convinces the Starways Congress to stop the Lusitania fleet . The admiral at the head of the Lusitania fleet disobeys their order and does what he believes Ender Wiggin , the first Xenocide , would have done , and fires the Molecular Disruption Device MDD . Jane is granted possession of Young Val s body , and thus is not destroyed when the ansible shuts down . She is then able to continue transporting starships instantaneously by borrowing the vast mental capacity of the simple minded Pequenino mother trees . She gets Peter and Wang Mu close enough to the MDD to find her way back and transport the MDD itself to the Lusitania fleet , where it is then disarmed and disabled . Ender Wiggin s aiúa had left his body which then deteriorated to live in Peter . Jane falls in love with Miro , and Peter with Wang mu . Both couples get married under one of the mother trees of the pequeninos on the same day as Ender s funeral . Peter s efforts finally come to fruition , and the destruction of Lusitania is averted . The story ends with the two new couples being taken Outside by Jane herself and back In to an unknown destination .

<|novel|>The Silver Chalice takes place in Israel and other parts of the Roman Empire shortly after the death of Jesus . A young man , Basil , is adopted by a rich man , but loses his fortune when his father dies and his uncle defrauds him claiming he was purchased as a slave and sells him . As a slave he survives by working as an artist and silversmith . He gains his freedom , becomes a Christian and is commissioned to create an outer covering for the cup Jesus drank from at The Last Supper . The plot of The Silver Chalice centers on the Grail the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper . Tired of all the Arthurian tripe about the Holy Grail , Costain imagined his own version of the story . Joseph of Arimathea hires Basil of Antioch , a lowborn artisan , to fashion a beautiful silver casing to hold the plain original cup that Jesus used . The casing is to be decorated with the faces of Jesus and the twelve apostles . To fulfill the commission , Basil travels throughout the ancient Mediterranean world to meet these men and those who knew them intimately .

<|fantasy|>Chaplain s Assistant Billy Pilgrim is a disoriented , fatalistic , and ill trained American soldier . He does not like wars and is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge . The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse although there are animal carcasses hanging in the underground shelter in Dresden . Their building is known as Slaughterhouse number 5 . During the bombing , the POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar . Because of their safe hiding place , they are some of the few survivors of the city destroying firestorm . Billy has become unstuck in time and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively , following a nonlinear narrative . He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore . They exhibit him in a zoo with B movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate . The Tralfamadorians , who can see in four dimensions , have already seen every instant of their lives . They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates , but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives , and Billy becomes convinced of the veracity of their theories . As Billy travels , or believes he travels , forward and backward in time , he relives occasions of his life , both real and fantasy . He spends time on Tralfamadore , in Dresden during the war , walking in deep snow before his German capture , in his mundane post war married life in the United States during the 1950s and early 1960s , and in the moment of his murder by a petty thief named Paul Lazzaro . Billy s death is the consequence of a string of events . Before the Germans capture Billy , he meets Roland Weary , a jingoist character and bully , just out of childhood like Billy , who constantly chastises him for his lack of enthusiasm for war . When captured , the Germans confiscate everything Weary has , including his boots , giving him hinged , wooden clogs to wear Weary eventually dies of gangrene caused by the clogs . While dying in a railcar full of POWs , Weary manages to convince another soldier , Paul Lazzaro , that Billy is to blame . Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary s death by killing Billy , because revenge is the sweetest thing in life . Lazzaro later shoots and kills Billy with a laser gun after his speech on flying saucers and the true nature of time before a large audience in Chicago , in a balkanized United States on February 13 , 1976 the future at the time of the book s writing .

<|fantasy|>Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his novice Adso of Melk travel to a Benedictine monastery in Northern Italy to attend a theological disputation . As they arrive , the monastery is disturbed by a suicide . As the story unfolds , several other monks die under mysterious circumstances . William is tasked by the Abbot of the monastery to investigate the deaths as fresh clues with each murder victim lead William to dead ends and new clues . The protagonists explore a labyrinthine medieval library , discuss the subversive power of laughter , and come face to face with the Inquisition . William s innate curiosity and highly developed powers of logic and deduction provide the keys to unravelling the mysteries of the abbey .

<|childrens|>The novel takes place over a few days in late August . It tells the story of 12 year old tomboy Frankie Addams , who feels disconnected from the world in her words , an unjoined person . Frankie s mother died when she was born , and her father is a distant , uncomprehending figure . Her closest companions are the family s African American maid , Berenice Sadie Brown , and her six year old cousin , John Henry West . She has no friends in her small Southern town , and dreams of going away with her brother and his bride to be on their honeymoon in the Alaskan wilderness . The novel explores the psychology of the three main characters , and is more concerned with evocative settings than with incident . Frankie does , however , have a brief and troubling encounter with a soldier . Her hopes of going away disappointed her fantasy destroyed a short coda reveals how her personality has changed . It also recounts the fate of John Henry West , and Berenice Sadie Brown s future plans .

<|romance|>Robert Merrick is resuscitated by a rescue crew after a boating accident . The crew is unable to save the life of Dr . Phillips , a doctor renowned for his ability to help people , who was having a heart attack at the same time on the other side of the lake . Merrick then decides to devote his life to making up for the doctor s , and becomes a physician himself . The book s plot portrays Mrs . Hudson , the widow , moving to Europe after her daughter , Joyce , is married . Merrick progresses in his career , and in the story s climax , gets involved in a railway accident in which Mrs . Hudson suffers serious injury . Merrick is instrumental in her recovery . The movie differs from the book in that before deciding to become a surgeon , Merrick not only alienates the doctor s widow , with whom he has fallen in love , but also causes another tragedy . This makes him totally re evaluate his life , and at that point , he decides to become a doctor .

<|novel|>In the 1820s , Eugene Onegin is a bored St . Petersburg dandy , whose life consists of balls , concerts , parties and nothing more . One day he inherits a landed estate from his uncle . When he moves to the country , he strikes up a friendship with his neighbor , a starry eyed young poet named Vladimir Lensky . One day , Lensky takes Onegin to dine with the family of his fiancée , the sociable but rather thoughtless Olga Larina . At this meeting he also catches a glimpse of Olga s sister Tatyana . A quiet , precocious romantic and the exact opposite of Olga , Tatyana becomes intensely drawn to Onegin . Soon after , she bares her soul to Onegin in a letter professing her love . Contrary to her expectations , Onegin does not write back . When they meet in person , he rejects her advances politely but dismissively and condescendingly . This famous speech is often referred to as Onegin s Sermon . Later , Lensky mischievously invites Onegin to Tatyana s name day celebration promising a small gathering with just Tatyana , her sister , and her parents . When Onegin arrives , he finds instead a boisterous country ball , a rural parody of and contrast to the society balls of St . Petersburg he has grown tired of . Onegin is irritated with the guests who gossip about him and Tatyana , and with Lensky for persuading him to come . He decides to avenge himself by dancing and flirting with Olga . Olga is insensitive to her fiancé and apparently attracted to Onegin . Earnest and inexperienced , Lensky is wounded to the core and challenges Onegin to fight a duel Onegin reluctantly accepts , feeling compelled by social convention . During the duel , Onegin unwillingly kills Lensky . Afterwards , he quits his country estate , traveling abroad to deaden his feelings of remorse . Tatyana visits Onegin s mansion , where she looks through his books and his notes in the margins , and begins to question whether Onegin s character is merely a collage of different literary heroes , and if there is , in fact , no real Onegin . Several years pass , and the scene shifts to Moscow . Onegin has come to attend the most prominent balls and interact with the leaders of old Russian society . He sees a most beautiful woman , who captures the attention of all and is central to society s whirl , and he realizes that it is the same Tatyana whose love he had once turned away . Now she is married to an aged prince . Upon seeing Tatyana again , he becomes obsessed with winning her affection , despite the fact that she is married . However , his attempts are rebuffed . He writes her several letters , but receives no reply . Eventually Onegin manages to see Tatyana and presents to her the opportunity to renew their past love . Tatyana admits that she still loves him , but declares her determination to remain faithful to her husband .

<|fantasy|>It presents an Earth where the oceans have gone dry and humans are hunter gatherer bands . Haiti is the mountain range Hait , and New York City becomes the ruins of Niourk . The black child goes to Niourk where he wanders through the ruins and the still functioning automatic devices . He finds a pair of shipwrecked humans from a space bound branch of mankind . Their technological civilization has suppressed sexual reproduction and sexual organs . The child eats the radioactive brains of giant vertebrated mutant earth octopuses and becomes more intelligent . He teaches himself reading and the rest of the ruined technology and evolves into a superior species of Homo .

<|fantasy|>This is a classic communist utopia set in a distant future . Throughout the novel , the author s attention is focused on the social and cultural aspects of the society there are several principal heroes a historian , an archeologist , a starship captain involved in several plot lines . Though the world shown in the novel is intended as ideal , there s an attempt to show a conflict and its resolution with a voluntary self punishment of a scientist whose reckless experiment caused damage . There s also a fair amount of action in the episodes where the crew of a starship fight alien predators . Several civilizations of our Galaxy , including Earth , are united in the Great Circle whose members exchange and relay scientific and cultural information . Notably , there s was no faster than light travel or communication in this world before events , described in novel . Moreover , interstellar missions sent by Earth are few because of very costly fuel used by interstellar but not planetary spaceships , and the Great Circle civilizations almost never meet in person . The Great Circle radio transmissions are pictured as taking the energy of the whole Earth and therefore infrequent one such transmission is a lecture on the history of the Earth civilization which gives the author an opportunity to put his world into a historic context .

<|horror|>Eight year old Rhoda is the only child of Kenneth and Christine Penmark . Kenneth Penmark goes away on business , leaving Christine and Rhoda at home . Christine begins to notice that Rhoda is acting strangely after one of her classmates mysteriously drowns , and eventually makes a horrible discovery Rhoda killed the boy , and will almost certainly kill again .

<|novel|>Dred is the story of Nina Gordon , an impetuous young heiress to a large southern plantation , whose land is rapidly becoming worthless . It is run competently by one of Nina s slaves , Harry , who endures a murderous rivalry with Nina s brother Tom Gordon , a drunken , cruel slaveowner . Nina is a flighty young girl , and maintains several suitors , before finally settling down with a man named Clayton . Clayton is socially and religiously liberal , and very idealistic , and has a down to earth perpetual virgin sister , Anne . In addition to Harry who , as well as being the administrator of Nina s estate , is secretly also her and Tom s half brother , the slave characters include the devoutly Christian Milly actually the property of Nina s Aunt Nesbit , and Tomtit , a joker type character . There is also a family of poor whites , who have but a single , devoted slave , Old Tiff . Dred , the titular character , is one of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons , escaped slaves living in the Great Dismal Swamp , preaching angry and violent retribution for the evils of slavery and rescuing escapees from the dog of the slavecatchers .

<|fantasy|>The book focuses on a twelve year old boy named Jonas residing in an immaculately organized , tightly run , but strict utopian society known as the community of Sameness , where eccentricities in behavior , appearance , or personality are strongly outlawed and opposed . Nearing an age where he will be selected for the position that he will hold in the Community throughout adulthood , Jonas is selected for the role as the Receiver of Memory , the keeper of all ancient memories in the Community before the start of the strict system through which the world is now run . Under the guidance of the older Receiver of Memory , the Giver , Jonas is transferred memories that had taken place years prior to the events of the story , involving color , emotion , freedom , and pain , which have since been drained entirely from the Community . Through the Giver , Jonas receives stunning wisdom of the true secret runnings of the Community , including secrets remaining heavily guarded from its inhabitants , and the boy starts to yearn for the happier world which had been available during the past . He is exposed to shocking footage of his father , a Nurturer , injecting a baby twin with poison as a means of living up to the Community s mandatory standards of population control and is shocked by the true intentions and behaviors of the residents in the Community , how their utter inability to accept pain forced their hunger for a Receiver of Memory . The Giver informs Jonas that it is up to him to help restore freedom to the world , and therefore he must flee the town late at night with the other closest option for a Receiver a baby boy named Gabriel , who Jonas s family had been sheltering for the past few months , so the Giver may convince everyone that they have died so they may once again accept the burden of the pains of their own memories and everything can be restored to how it had formerly been . Jonas must escape to Elsewhere , an unknown land located beyond the boundaries of the Community , and the pair must endure through the freezing cold together , just as Jonas thinks he hears singing a reference to a past memory he d received .

<|novel|>The heroine , Sybylla Melvyn , is an imaginative , headstrong girl growing up in rural Australia in the 1890s . Drought and a series of poor business decisions reduce her family to subsistence level , her father begins to drink excessively , and Sybylla struggles to deal with the monotony of her life . To her relief , she is sent to live on her grandmother s property , where life is more comfortable . There she meets wealthy young Harry Beecham , who loves her and proposes marriage convinced of her ugliness and aware of her tomboyish ways , Sybylla is unable to believe that he could really love her . By this time , her father s drinking has got the family into debt , and she is sent to work as governess housekeeper for the family of an almost illiterate neighbour to whom her father owes money . She finds life there unbearable and eventually suffers a physical breakdown which leads to her return to the family home . When Harry Beecham returns to ask Sybylla to marry him , she concludes that she would only make him unhappy and sends him away , determined never to marry . The novel ends with no suggestion that she will ever have the brilliant career as a writer that she desires .

<|fantasy|>The Rebel Angels follows several faculty and staff of the fictional College of St . John and Holy Ghost . It did not quite attain the popularity of the Deptford Trilogy , but it is generally considered to be among his best books . The story , like many of Davies , is notable for very strongly drawn and memorable characters mdash in this case the defrocked monk Parlabane , a brilliant and sinister sodomite with a thundering voice , voracious appetite Anglican priest and professor of New Testament Greek Simon Darcourt Maria Theotoky , a graduate student researching Rabelais Clement Hollier , a frazzled and absentminded professor and Urquhart McVarish , a greedy and manipulative counterpoint to Hollier . The novel s narration alternates between Theotoky s and Darcourt s points of view . Darcourt is attempting to write a history of the university based on Aubrey s Brief Lives . Much of the story is set in motion by the death of eccentric art patron and collector Francis Cornish . Hollier , McVarish , and Darcourt are the executors of Cornish s complicated will , which includes material that Hollier wants for his studies . The deceased s nephew Arthur Cornish , who stands to inherit the fortune , is also a character . Many of the characters including Parlabane and McVarish were based on college acquaintances of Davies their stories are recounted in Judith Skelton Grant s biography Robertson Davies Man of Myth 1994 and Brian Busby s Character Parts Who s Really Who in CanLit 2003 . As well , many believe that Davies based the College of St . John and the Holy Ghost or Spook as it is affectionately called in the novel on Toronto s Trinity College . Evidence for this connection includes numerous similarities between the fictional and the real life college including architectural style , layout of rooms , age , and religious affiliation the fact that Davies taught at Trinity College for 20 years and lived across the street from Trinity while master of Massey College and perhaps most convincingly that a picture of Trinity s central tower is prominently featured on the cover of the novel s first edition . Equally plausible is the belief that Ploughwright College in the book is patterned after Davies s own Massey College . This connection is supported by the fact that much of the fortune donated by the Massey family to the University of Toronto for the founding of Massey College was originally made in the manufacture of farm equipment . Like the real life Massey College , Ploughwright is a graduate college where scholars are invited to partake in interdisciplinary discussions and High Table dinners .

<|fantasy|>Part One The story tells the Ancient Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche , from the perspective of Orual , Psyche s older sister . It begins as the complaint of an old woman who is bitter at the injustice of the gods . Although disfigured herself , and covering her facial deformity with a mask throughout the book , Orual loves her beautiful half sister Psyche and when Psyche is sent as a human sacrifice , at the command of Ungit Aphrodite , to her son , the unseen God of the Mountain Cupid , Orual feels wounded and betrayed . Orual tries to rescue Psyche , who says she doesn t need to be rescued , and that she lives in a beautiful castle , which Orual can t see . She almost sees something , but then it vanishes , like a mist . Orual urges Psyche to do the one thing the God has commanded her not to to sneak a peek when he comes to their marriage bed . Orual argues that the God must be a monster , or he would not hide his face . She brings Psyche the means to see him , and threatens , cajoles , and coerces her , until Psyche agrees reluctantly , out of pity and love for her sister . When Psyche obeys Orual , the God has no choice but to banish Psyche . Orual suffers with the knowledge that she destroyed her sister s happiness and marriage , through misapplied love and jealousy . The Four Loves have all gone horribly wrong . Eventually , Orual becomes Queen , warrior , diplomat , architect , reformer , politician , legislator , and judge , but remains all alone . She drives herself , through work , to forget her grief and the love she has lost . Psyche is gone her other sister has married and moved away her father and her beloved tutor , the Fox , have died even her old infatuations are castrated , bloated , ridiculous and the gods remain , as ever , silent and unseen . When she is invited to witness a new cult ritual as Queen , Orual hears a version of Psyche s myth , which shows her as deliberately ruining her sister s life out of envy . In response , she writes out her own story which becomes this book , to set the record straight in hopes that it will be brought to Greece , where she has heard that men are willing to question even the gods . Part Two Orual begins the second part of the book stating that her previous argument was wrong , but she doesn t have time to revise it before she dies . After finishing her book , she thought the gods would end her lonely , exhausted life . Instead , she writes , that through dreams and visions , she sees herself in the midst of the tasks given to her sister Psyche , in the myths , as a penitence . Orual dreams of even presenting her complaint to the gods herself . Among them , her sister Psyche comes to meet her . Orual weeps , Long did I hate you . Long did I fear you . I might . Finally , Psyche helps her sister to see , what was hidden from her though she caught glimpses of it along the way , on the long , hard road to meet her again .

<|childrens|>Adelheid familiarly known as Heidi is a girl who has been raised by her aunt Dete in Maienfeld , Switzerland after the early deaths of her parents , Tobias and Adelheid . Dete brings 5 year old Heidi to her grandfather , who has been at odds with the villagers for years and lives in seclusion on the alm . This has earned him the nickname Alp Öhi Alm Uncle in the Graubünden dialect . He at first resents Heidi s arrival , but the girl manages to penetrate his harsh exterior and Heidi subsequently has a delightful stay with him and her best friend , young Peter the goat herd . Dete returns three years later to bring Heidi to Frankfurt as a companion of a 12 year old girl named Clara Sesemann , who is regarded as an invalid . Heidi spends a year with Clara , conflicting with the Sesemanns strict housekeeper Fraulein Rottenmeier and becoming more and more homesick . Her one diversion is learning to read and write , motivated by her desire to go home and read to Peter s blind grandmother . Heidi s increasingly failing health , and several instances of sleepwalking cause hysteria in the household that there is a haunting , prompt Clara s doctor to send Heidi home to her grandfather . Her return prompts the grandfather to descend to the village for the first time in years , marking an end to his seclusion . Heidi and Clara continue to contact each other . A visit by the doctor to Heidi and her grandfather convinces him to recommend Clara to visit Heidi . Meanwhile , Heidi teaches Peter to read and write . Clara makes the journey the next season and spends a wonderful summer with Heidi . Clara becomes stronger on goat s milk and fresh mountain air , but Peter , feeling deprived of Heidi s attention , pushes Clara s wheelchair down the mountain to its destruction . Without her wheelchair , Clara attempts to walk and is gradually successful . Clara s grandmother and father are amazed and overcome with joy to see Clara walking . Clara s wealthy family promises to provide a shelter for Heidi , in case her grandfather will no longer be able to do so .

<|fantasy|>Horselover Fat believes his visions expose hidden facts about the reality of life on Earth , and a group of others join him in researching these matters . One of their theories is that there is some kind of alien space probe in orbit around Earth , and that it is aiding them in their quest . It also aided the United States in disclosing the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 . There is a filmed account of an alternate universe Nixon , Ferris Freemont and his fall , engineered by a fictionalised Valis , which leads them to an estate owned by the Lamptons , popular musicians . Valis the fictional film contains obvious references to identical revelations to those that Horselover Fat has experienced . They decide the goal that they have been led toward is Sophia , who is two years old and the Messiah or incarnation of Holy Wisdom anticipated by some variants of Gnostic Christianity . She tells them that their conclusions are correct , but dies after a laser accident . Undeterred , Fat goes on a global search for the next incarnation of Sophia . Dick also offers a rationalist explanation of his apparent theophany , acknowledging that it might have been visual and auditory hallucinations from either schizophrenia or drug addiction sequelae .

<|fantasy|>5000 AD . Humanity staggers to save itself amid the world s littered , stagnant wreckage after what has become known as the great Age of Waste . 10 , 000 AD . The world is dominated by the Brain the immovable in purpose super computer that knows all , sees all , and feels nothing . Thanks to its cradle to grave supervision , human life is easy and comfortable , but what will happen when The Brain realizes people are superfluous ? 15 , 000 AD . People can now program their choice of dreams and sleep their lives away . Winters awakes to find the sleeping outnumber the living . He cannot stop the implosion of civilization by himself . 20 , 000 AD . After an abused Age of Freedom came an Age of License . Genetic experiment heralded the terrifying Age of Anarchy . Each Individual had his own mobile City that provided for all his needs , resulting in a society where people had no need for each other and were incapable of cooperating , resulting in nearly all interpersonal encounters being small wars . 25 , 000 AD . Scientists discover the secret sought through the centuries immortality . But is Mankind ready for it ? Immortality is frightfully boring without a purpose . Humanity scatters to the far corners of the cosmos seeking knowledge and experience , leading to a quest toward the meaning of it all . The novel might be easily dismissed as standard pulp fare if it had not presaged concepts popularized decades later the sexual revolution , green consumerism , strong AI , full immersion virtual reality as a surgical procedure like The Matrix , desktop molecular manufacturing , global warming , and stem cell therapies . Many of these have only appeared in most peoples worldview in the 21st century . This book was recently re released .

<|fantasy|>The Genesis Quest gets around the problems involved with intergalactic travel , namely the distance , by avoiding the traditional staple of science fiction , faster than light travel . Instead Moffitt opts for a different tactic , that of having an alien race The Nar assemble humans from a stream of genetic information transmitted by radio from the Milky Way Galaxy . The resulting colony of humans spend some time integrated into the Nar society before growing randy , discovering the secret of human longevity , and embarking on the seemingly impossible millennia long mission of a physical journey back to earth . This epic journey is made in a gigantic space grown semi sentient Dyson tree known as Yggdrasil .

<|fantasy|>A boy receives a Velveteen Rabbit for Christmas . The Velveteen Rabbit is snubbed by other more expensive or mechanical toys , the latter of which fancy themselves real . One day while talking with the Skin Horse , the Rabbit learns that a toy becomes real if its owner really and truly loves it . The Skin Horse makes the Velveteen Rabbit aware that . . . once you are Real you can t become unreal again . It lasts for always . When the boy s china dog is misplaced , the Velveteen Rabbit is given to the boy as a quick replacement by the Nana . The Velveteen Rabbit soon takes his place as the boy s constant companion . The Rabbit becomes shabbier , but the boy loves him no matter what . In the woods near the boy s home , the Velveteen Rabbit meets actual rabbits , and learns about the differences between himself and the real rabbits when the real rabbits prove he is not real by his inability to hop and jump . The Velveteen Rabbit s companionship with the boy lasts until the boy falls ill with scarlet fever . The boy becomes too ill to play for a very long time upon his recovery , he is sent to the seaside on doctor s orders . The doctor orders all the toys the boy has played with , including the Rabbit , be burned in order to disinfect the nursery . The boy is given a new plush rabbit and is so excited about the trip to the seaside that he forgets his old Velveteen Rabbit . While awaiting the bonfire , in which the Velveteen Rabbit will be burned , the Rabbit cries a real tear . This tear brings forth the Nursery Magic Fairy . She tells the Rabbit that he was only real to the boy , and then brings him to the woods and kisses him , making him real to everybody . He soon discovers that he is a real rabbit at last and runs to join the other rabbits in the wild . The following spring , the boy sees the Rabbit hopping in the wild and thinks he looks like his old Velveteen Rabbit , but he never knows that it actually was .

<|action|>Following the conclusion of Debt of Honor , Jack Ryan is sworn in as president of the United States minutes after becoming Vice President . With virtually nearly every executive , legislative , and judicial figure deceased , Ryan is left to represent the United States by himself . Ryan deals with various hardships and crises , from reconstituting the House and the Senate to a challenge on his legitimacy by former vice president Ed Kealty to a brewing war in the Middle East . When the president of Iraq is assassinated by an Iranian agent , the Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei takes advantage of the power vacuum by launching an unopposed invasion of Iraq . The ayatollah unites the two countries into the United Islamic Republic UIR . With Indian and Chinese assistance , the UIR makes a bid for superpower status by attacking Saudi Arabia . Following a series of Iranian backed terrorist attacks mdash including the release of a genetically enhanced Ebola strain mdash the UIR declares war on both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait . Meanwhile , China accidentally shoots down a Taiwanese airliner . As a result of the Ebola attack , Ryan declares martial law and enforces travel restrictions in an effort to contain the virus . However , the attack becomes only a limited success for the UIR , since the virus is so deadly that it cannot spread effectively . The tide soon turns against the UIR , with its forces being defeated against the combined firepower of the U . S . , Saudi Arabia , and Kuwait . President Ryan sends Ding Chavez and John Clark into the UIR to assassinate Daryaei . After showing the destruction of Daryaei s residence during a televised press conference , Ryan threatens to launch a tactical nuclear strike on Tehran unless those responsible for the attacks are extradited to the U . S . to face charges . Kealty s challenge to President Ryan s legitimacy fails in court . In the aftermath of the crisis , appreciation of the unelected president grows . Then in answering a question from a reporter in the White House press room , Ryan says he will seek election to the office of President of the United States .

<|romance|>Herminia Barton , the Cambridge educated daughter of a clergyman , frees herself from her parents influence , moves to London and starts living alone . As she is not a woman of independent means , she starts working as a teacher . When she meets and falls in love with Alan Merrick , a lawyer , she suggests they live together without getting married . Reluctantly , he agrees , and the couple move to Italy . There , in Florence , Merrick dies of typhoid before their daughter Dolores is born . Legal technicalities and the fact that the couple were not married prevent Herminia from inheriting any of Merrick s money . Dreaming of being a role model for Dolores and her friends , Herminia returns to England and raises her daughter as a single mother . She wants to show the younger generation that even as a woman there is something one can do about the unfair position of women in society a small step maybe , but with more and larger steps to follow soon . However , Dolores turns out to be ashamed of her mother s unmarried state and gradually turns against her . Eventually , Herminia chooses to make a huge sacrifice for her daughter s benefit and commits suicide .

<|novel|>The events of Au Bonheur des Dames cover approximately 1864 1869 . The novel tells the story of Denise Baudu , a 20 year old woman from Valognes who comes to Paris with her brothers and begins working at the department store Au Bonheur des Dames as a saleswoman . Zola describes the inner workings of the store from the employees perspective , including the 13 hour workdays , the substandard food and the bare lodgings for the female staff . Many of the conflicts in the novel spring from the struggles for advancement and the malicious infighting and gossip among the staff . Denise s story is played against the career of Octave Mouret , the owner of Au Bonheur des Dames , whose retail innovations and store expansions threaten the existence of all the neighborhood shops . Under one roof , Octave has gathered textiles silks , woolens as well as all manner of ready made garments dresses , coats , lingerie , gloves , accessories necessary for making clothes and ancillary items like carpeting and furniture . His aim is to overwhelm the senses of his female customers , forcing them to spend by bombarding them with an array of buying choices and by juxtaposing goods in enticing and intoxicating ways . Massive advertising , huge sales , home delivery , a system of refunds and novelties such as a reading room and a snack bar , further induce his female clientele to patronize his store in growing numbers . In the process , he drives smaller , speciality shops out of business . In Pot Bouille , Octave is depicted as a sometimes inept ladies man who seduces or attempts to seduce women who can give him some type of material social or financial advantage . This characteristic is carried over in Au Bonheur des Dames . Here , he uses a young widow to influence a political figure modeled after Baron Haussmann in order to have frontage access to a huge thoroughfare the present day rue de Quatre Septembre for the store . Despite his contempt for women , Octave finds himself slowly falling in love with Denise , whose inability to be seduced by his charms further inflames him . The book ends with Denise admitting her love for Octave . Her marriage with Octave is seen as a victory of women over a man who refuses to be conquered and whose aim is to subjugate and exploit women using their own senses .

<|crime|>Jarvis Stringer is a student of the London Tube and its history and of underground trains worldwide . In order to finance his hobby and be able to travel to distant lands to inspect the underground systems in other parts of the world , he lets rooms in an old disused school building he has inherited which is close to the tube tracks in West Hampstead see Jubilee Line . There , a group of misfits and weirdos , including a squatter , gather whose dreams of the good life have time and again been shattered as they are constantly victimized by society . There is 24 year old Alice , an aspiring musician who leaves her husband and new born baby only to end up busking in various stations in central London . There is Tom , who , after an accident , drops out of music school and is reduced to busking as well but who dreams of one day starting his own business . There is unemployed Tina , whose promiscuity landed her with two children whom she does not take care of in the way her mother thinks she ought to . There is Jed , who volunteers as a vigilante and who , disappointed by humans , lavishes all his love on the hawk he has acquired and which he keeps in the house . And there is Axel , an enigmatic man who regularly travels on the tube in the company of a man disguised as a bear and who is planning something illegal . Cecilia and Daphne , two old ladies living in the neighbourhood , serve as a foil to this ill assorted group . It is Cecilia in particular who does not understand how young people such as her daughter Tina can be utterly devoid of morals . She is shocked to learn that her 10 year old grandson enjoys riding on the roof of cars as they go through deep level tunnels . While travelling on the tube herself , her handbag containing her credit cards is stolen , and she suffers a stroke in one of the packed cars . The novel is interspersed with extracts from Jarvis Stringer s fictional book on the London Underground .

<|fantasy|>In this story , Goodman the Cat joins Uncle s supporters . He is rescued from down trodden and hungry service at Wizard Blenkinsop s and throws himself wholeheartedly into battle against Uncle s enemies , though never quite ridding himself of a propensity to steal fish and postage stamps . His fish stealing gets him into trouble at Professor Gandleweaver s Fish Frying Academy , and Uncle is forced to make a dignified exit as the crowd gathered to watch Gandleweaver s frying exhibition turns ugly The crowd began to hiss , and , as Uncle didn t want a row , he decided to withdraw and take action later . The moment he and his party got out of the crowd , they were forgotten . The Professor had started frying a conger eel in an enormous pan , and this is one of star turns and nobody thinks about anything else when he does it . The incident is seized on by the Badfort Crowd and written up in the usual lying and distorted way in The Badfort News , one of the many provocations offered by the newspaper that eventually lead Uncle to take action against it . Visiting its offices , he finds a young badger literally chained to the printing press , whom he rescues before visiting well deserved punishment on Beaver Hateman by kicking him far and high into Gaby s Marsh , where the crabs are and the barking conger eels . As before , Uncle Cleans Up ends in Uncle s capture by the Badfort Crowd before he escapes , this time with the help of his loyal friend the Old Monkey , and a great battle is fought in which the Badfort Crowd are completely defeated until next time . The last that is seen of Beaver Hateman is this Even for Uncle it was a great kick up . Beaver Hateman was holding a huge lighted cigar in his hand , and the wind made it glow so that everyone could see in the sky what looked like a slowly soaring red light . He comes down in Gaby s Marsh again , and vows in an insolent letter delivered to Uncle as the book closes that he will take a revenge so fearful that anyone who speaks of it will develop lockjaw .

<|romance|>The Small House at Allington concerns the Dale family , who live in the Small House , a dower house intended for the widowed mother Dowager of the owner of the estate . The landowner , in this instance , is the bachelor Squire of Allington , Christopher Dale . Dale s mother having died , he has allocated the Small House , rent free , to his widowed sister in law and her daughters Isabella Bell and Lilian Lily . Lily has for a long time been secretly loved by John Eames , a junior clerk at the Income Tax Office , while Bell is in love with the local doctor , James Crofts . The handsome and personable , somewhat mercenary Adolphus Crosbie is introduced into the circle by the squire s nephew , Bernard Dale . Adolphus rashly proposes marriage to portionless Lily , who accepts him , to the dismay of John Eames . Crosbie soon jilts her in favour of Lady Alexandrina de Courcy , whose family is in a position to further his career . Lily meets her misfortune with patience , and remains single , continuing to reject Eames , though retaining his faithful friendship . Bell marries Dr Crofts , after refusing an offer of marriage from her cousin Bernard . As with all of Trollope s novels , this one contains many sub plots and numerous minor characters . Plantagenet Palliser of the Pallisers series makes his first appearance , as he contemplates a dalliance with Griselda Grantly , the now married Lady Dumbello , daughter of the Archdeacon introduced earlier in the Chronicles of Barsetshire .

<|romance|>The hero of Framley Parsonage , Mark Robarts , is a young vicar , newly arrived in the village of Framley in Barsetshire . The living has come into his hands through Lady Lufton , the mother of his childhood friend Ludovic , Lord Lufton . Mark has ambitions to further his career and begins to seek connections in the county s high society . He is soon preyed upon by local Member of Parliament Mr Sowerby to guarantee a substantial loan , which Mark in a moment of weakness agrees to , even though he does not have the means and knows Sowerby to be a notorious debtor . The consequences of this blunder play a major role in the plot , with Mark eventually being publicly humiliated when bailiffs begin to confiscate the Robarts furniture . At the last moment , Lord Lufton forces a loan on the reluctant Mark . Another plot line deals with the romance between Mark s sister Lucy and Lord Lufton . The couple are deeply in love and the young man proposes , but Lady Lufton is against the marriage . She would prefer that her son instead choose the coldly beautiful Griselda Grantly , daughter of Archdeacon Grantly , and fears that Lucy is too insignificant for such a high honour . Lucy herself recognizes the great gulf between their social positions and declines . When Lord Lufton persists , she agrees only on condition that Lady Lufton ask her to accept her son . Lucy s conduct and charity especially towards the family of poor curate Josiah Crawley weaken her ladyship s resolve . In addition , Griselda becomes engaged to Lord Dumbello . But it is the determination of Lord Lufton that in the end vanquishes the doting mother . The book ends with Lucy and Ludovic s marriage as well as three other marriages of minor characters . Two of these involve the daughters of Bishop Proudie and Archdeacon Grantly . The rivalry between Mrs Proudie and Mrs Grantly over their matrimonial ambitions forms a significant comic subplot , with the latter triumphant . The other marriage is that of the outspoken heiress , Martha Dunstable , to Doctor Thorne , the eponymous hero of the preceding novel in the series .

<|fantasy|>A very powerful and armed interstellar space ship called Invincible lands on the planet Regis III which seems uninhabited and bleak , to investigate the loss of its sister ship , Condor . During the investigation , the crew finds evidence of a form of quasi life , born through evolution of autonomous , self replicating machines , apparently left behind by an alien civilization that visited the planet a very long time ago . The evolution was controlled by robot wars , and the only form that survived were swarms of minuscule , insect like micromachines . Individually , or in small groups , they are quite harmless to humans and capable of only very simple behavior . However , when bothered , they can assemble into huge swarms displaying complex behavior arising from self organization , and are able to defeat an intruder by a powerful surge of EMI . The members of the Condor s crew suffered a complete memory erasure as a consequence . Big clouds of insects are also able to travel at a high speed and even to climb to the top of troposphere . The angered crew attempts to fight the perceived enemy , but eventually recognizes the futility of their efforts in the most direct sense of the word . The robotic fauna has become part of the planet s ecology , and would require a disruption on planetary scale such as a nuclear winter to be destroyed . The novel turns into an analysis of the relationship between different life domains , and their place in the universe . In particular , it is an imaginary experiment to demonstrate that evolution may not necessarily lead to dominance by intellectually superior life forms . The plot also involves a philosophical dilemma , juxtaposing the values of humanity and the efficiency of mechanical insects . In the face of defeat and imminent withdrawal of the Invincible , Rohan , the spaceship s navigator , undertakes a trip into the enemy area in search of 4 crew members who went missing in action an attempt which he and captain Horpach see as certainly futile , but necessary for moral reasons . Rohan betakes himself into canyons covered by metallic shrubs and insects and finds the crewmen dead . He gathers some evidence and returns to the ship unharmed thanks to a simple anti detection device and his calm and peaceful behaviour .

<|novel|>Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning , getting ready to host a party that evening . The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about her choice of husband she married the reliable Richard Dalloway instead of the enigmatic and demanding Peter Walsh and she had not the option to be with Sally Seton . Peter reintroduces these conflicts by paying a visit that morning . Septimus Warren Smith , a veteran of World War I suffering from deferred traumatic stress , spends his day in the park with his Italian born wife Lucrezia , where they are observed by Peter Walsh . Septimus is visited by frequent and indecipherable hallucinations , mostly concerning his dear friend Evans who died in the war . Later that day , after he is prescribed involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital , he commits suicide by jumping out of a window . Clarissa s party in the evening is a slow success . It is attended by most of the characters she has met in the book , including people from her past . She hears about Septimus suicide at the party and gradually comes to admire the act of this stranger , which she considers an effort to preserve the purity of his happiness .

<|crime|>Three generations of the Leonides family live together under wealthy patriarch Aristide . His first wife died her sister Edith has cared for the household since then . Second wife indolent Brenda , decades his junior , exchanges love letters with grandchildren s tutor . After Aristide is poisoned by his own eye medicine eserine , his granddaughter Sophia tells narrator and fiancé Charles Hayward that they cannot marry until the killer is apprehended . Charles father The Old Man is the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard , so Charles investigates from the inside along with assigned detective , Chief Inspector Taverner . When sly Josephine suffers attack and Nanny is poisoned by hot chocolate after Brenda and the tutor are arrested , the danger escalates to a surprise finish .

<|fantasy|>The novel begins when Henry Pulling , a conventional and uncharming bank manager who has taken early retirement , meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over fifty years at his mother s funeral . Despite having little in common , they form a bond . Henry finds himself drawn into Aunt Augusta s world of travel , adventure , romance and absence of bigotry . He travels first with her to Brighton , where he meets one of his aunt s old acquaintances , and gains an insight into one of her many past lives . Here a psychic foreshadows that he will have many travels in the near future . This prediction inevitably becomes true as Henry is pulled further and further into his aunt s lifestyle , and delves deeper into her past . Their voyages take them from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express , and as the journey unfolds , so do the stories of Aunt Augusta , painting the picture of a woman for whom love has been the defining feature of her life . Henry returns to his quiet retirement , but tending his garden no longer holds the same allure . When he receives a letter from his aunt , he finally gives up his old life to join her and the love of her life in South America , and to marry a girl decades younger than himself . As his travels progress it becomes clear to Henry that the woman he had been raised to believe was his mother was in fact his aunt . His real mother is Augusta , and her reconnection with him at her sister s funeral marked the beginning of her reclamation of her child .

<|fantasy|>Mr . Stanley forbids his adult daughter , a biology student at Tredgold Women s College and the youngest of his five children , to attend a fancy dress ball in London , causing a crisis . Ann Veronica is planning to attend the dance with friends of a down at the heels artistic family living nearby and has been chafing at other restrictions imposed for no apparent reason on her . After her father resorts to force to stop her from attending the ball , she leaves her home in the fictional south London suburb of Morningside Park in order to live independently in an apartment in a street near the Hampstead Road in North London . Unable to find appropriate employment , she borrows forty pounds from Mr . Ramage , an older man , without realizing she is compromising herself . With this money , Ann Veronica is able to devote herself to study in the biological laboratory of the Central Imperial College a constituent college of London University where she meets and falls in love with Capes , the laboratory s demonstrator . But Mr . Ramage loses little time in trying to take advantage of the situation , precipitating a crisis . Distraught after Ramage tries to force himself on her , Ann Veronica temporarily abandons her studies and devotes herself to the cause of women s suffrage she is arrested storming Parliament and spends a month in prison . Sobered by the experience , Ann Veronica convinces herself of the necessity of compromise . She returns to her father s home and engages herself to marry an admirer she does not love , Hubert Manning . But she soon changes her mind , renounces the engagement , and boldly tells Capes she loves him . Though he returns Ann Veronica s love , at first the thirty year old Capes insists on the impossibility of the situation he is a married albeit separated man with a sullied reputation because of an affair that became public . They can only be friends , he declares . But Ann Veronica is undeterred by his confession and his prudence , and finally Capes s resistance buckles She stood up and held her arms toward him . I want you to kiss me , she said . . nbsp . nbsp . I want you . I want you to be my lover . I want to give myself to you . I want to be whatever I can to you . She paused for a moment . Is that plain ? she asked . Capes decides to throw over his employment at the college in order to live with Ann Veronica , and they enjoy a glorious honeymoon in the Alps . A final chapter shows the happy couple four years and four months later living in London . Capes has become a successful playwright , and Ann Veronica is pregnant and has reconciled with her family .

<|childrens|>In a shabby New York side street in the mid 1880s , young American Cedric Errol lives with his mother never named , known only as Mrs . Errol or Dearest in genteel poverty after his father , Captain Errol whose first name was also Cedric , dies . They receive a visit from Havisham , an English lawyer with a message from young Cedric s grandfather , the Earl of Dorincourt . With the deaths of his father s elder brothers , Cedric is now Lord Fauntleroy and heir to the Earldom and a vast estate . The Earl wants Cedric to live with him and learn to be an English aristocrat . The Earl despises America and was deeply disappointed with Captain Errol , his favorite son , for marrying an American . So he offers Mrs . Errol a house and income , yet refuses to meet or have anything to do with her , even after she declines the offer of the money . However , the crusty Earl is impressed by the appearance and intelligence of his young American grandson , and charmed by his innocent nature . Cedric , a trusting child , believes his noble grandfather to be a great benefactor , and the Earl cannot bear to disappoint his loving grandson . Thus , the Earl acts as a benefactor to his tenants as the local populace notices to their delight . A pretender to Cedric s inheritance appears , his mother claiming that he is the son of the Earl s eldest son , but the claim is investigated and disproved with the assistance of Cedric s loyal friends in New York , one of whom mdash a bootblack called Dick mdash recognizes the mother as the missing wife of his brother Ben , and her son the alleged heir as his own nephew . The Earl is reconciled to his son s American widow after meeting with the other boy s mother , recognizing that , despite his preconceptions and prejudices , Dearest is a far superior woman to the alternative . The Earl had intended to teach his grandson how to be an aristocrat however , Cedric inadvertently teaches his grandfather that an aristocrat should practice compassion towards persons who are dependent on him . The Earl becomes the kind and good man Cedric always innocently believed him to be . Cedric s mother is invited by the Earl to live in the ancestral castle , and Cedric s old friend Mr . Hobbs , the New York City grocer , who came to England to help investigate the false claim , decides to stay to help look after Cedric

<|novel|>The titular character , Humphry Clinker , is an ostler , a stableman at an inn , who does not make his first appearance until about a quarter of the way through the story . He is taken on by Matthew Bramble and his family while they are travelling through England . Various adventures befall them , especially after their meeting with Lieutenant Lismahago , a Scotsman , who joins their party . After various romantic interludes , Humphry suffers false imprisonment but is rescued and returned to his sweetheart , the maid Winifred Jenkins . It is then discovered that Humphry is Mr . Bramble s illegitimate son from a relationship with a barmaid during his wilder university days .

<|novel|>Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam , The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl from a financially strapped French family and an older , wealthy Chinese man . In 1929 , a 15 year old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta , returning from a holiday at her family home in the town of Sa Đéc , to her boarding school in Saigon . She attracts the attention of a 37 year old son of a Chinese business magnate , a young man of wealth and heir to a fortune . He strikes up a conversation with the girl she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine . Compelled by the circumstances of her upbringing , this girl , the daughter of a bankrupt , manic depressive widow , is newly awakened to the impending and all too real task of making her way alone in the world . Thus , she becomes his lover , until he bows to the disapproval of his father and breaks off the affair . For her lover , there is no question of the depth and sincerity of his love , but it isn t until much later that the girl acknowledges to herself her true feelings .

<|romance|>His beloved wife having died in childbirth , Phineas Finn finds Irish society and his job as a Poorhouse Inspector dull and unsatisfying after the excitement of his former career as a Member of Parliament . Back in England , the Whigs are determined to overturn the Tory majority in the Parliament of the United Kingdom . As Finn had been considered the most promising of the younger set , he is encouraged to stand for office again . Returning to London , he renews his acquaintance with the wealthy widow , Madame Max Goesler . In the past , she had offered to marry him and had been gently turned down after an awkward first encounter , they renew their friendship . In the political arena , Finn loses the election by a narrow margin , but his luck does not desert him . On appeal , it is found that his opponent had bribed some of the voters , enough to give Finn the victory . He does however make one enemy within his own party . Mr . Bonteen makes disparaging remarks about his political trustworthiness referring to an incident described in Phineas Finn . The conflict spirals out of control when neither man will back down , and they become bitter foes . When Bonteen is murdered , suspicion falls on two men . One is the Reverend Mr Emilius , husband of Lady Eustace the main character of The Eustace Diamonds . At her urging , Bonteen had discovered that Emilius had been married when he wed Lady Eustace , thus annulling the marriage and safeguarding her wealth . The other suspect is Phineas Finn . He and Bonteen had been seen to quarrel violently the night of the murder and all the circumstantial evidence points to him , while Emilius did not even have a key to exit his lodgings that night . Finn therefore is brought to trial . Not unexpectedly , the murder of one Member of Parliament allegedly by another quickly becomes the sensation of all England . While the trial goes on , Madame Max travels to the Continent looking for evidence , and she succeeds . She finds a locksmith who had made a duplicate key for Emilius . This , along with other developments , convinces everyone that Finn is innocent and Emilius guilty . Unfortunately , it is not enough to convict the latter . Afterwards , Finn , worn out by the ordeal and disillusioned with politics , retires and marries Madame Max .

<|fantasy|>The central theme of the novel is time travel using a highway that links all times and all possible histories . Exits from the highway lead to different times and places . Changing events in the past cause some exits further up the road , in the future , to become overgrown and inaccessible and new exits to appear , leading to different alternative futures . The narrator and protagonist , Red Dorakeen , has vague memories of a place or time that is no longer accessible from the Road . He runs guns to the Greeks at Marathon , trying to recreate history as he remembers it in an attempt to open a new exit from the Road to his half remembered place . The phrase Last Exit to Babylon was the manuscript title of the book and appears on the cover art it was later used as a title for Volume Four in the Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny collection . All One chapters feature Red Dorakeen , and all Two chapters feature secondary characters . These are Red s natural son Randy , newly introduced to the Road and tired of his old life in Ohio a bevy of would be assassins attempting to kill Red , some of whom are comic references to pulp characters , or real people it is implied that Ambrose Bierce is writing a novel somewhere on the metaphysical highway and Leila , a woman whose fate is bound to Red s in mysterious and unexplained ways . The One storyline is fairly linear , but the Two storyline jumps around in time and sequence , first bringing in Randy and Leila without introduction , then later showing Randy s introduction to the Road and meeting with Leila , who will has just abandoned Red following an incident in the One timeline . Everything comes clear in the final chapter , however . There are a number of interesting humorous touches and allusions in the story . These include an ancient dragon who falls in love with a tyrannosaurus , a futuristic warrior robot left behind by aliens because it is malfunctioning and has now taken up pottery , a lost crusader who now works in a gas station located somewhere on the timeless road , occasionally asking his customers about the current status of the Holy Land , an ancient Sumerian who buries artifacts later to be found by himself as archaeologist , along with the brief appearances of pulp heroes such as Doc Savage and John Sunlight as well as real historical figures , including Jack the Ripper , Marquis de Sade and an angry Adolf Hitler who is furiously searching for the place where he won .

<|fantasy|>It is about the 253 people on a London Underground train travelling between Embankment station and Elephant Castle on January 11 , 1995 . The basic structure of the novel is explained in this quote from the foreword There are seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train , each with 36 seats . A train in which every passenger has a seat will carry 252 people . With the driver , that makes 253 . Each character is introduced in a separate section containing 253 words . The sections give general details and describe the thoughts going through the characters 39 heads . In the online version , hypertext links lead to other characters who are nearby or who have some connection to the current character in the print version , the links are partly replaced by a traditional index . The reader can proceed from one character to another using these devices or can read the novel in positional order , e . g . from one train car to the next , but there is no overall chronological order except in the final section .

<|romance|>The plot centres on Anna Tellwright , daughter of a wealthy but miserly and dictatorial father , living in the Potteries area of Staffordshire , England . Her activities are strictly controlled by the Methodist church . The novel tells of Anna s struggle for freedom and independence against her father s restraints , and her inward battle between wanting to please her father and wanting to help Willie Price whose father , Titus Price , commits suicide after falling into bankruptcy and debt . During the novel , Anna is courted by the town s most eligible bachelor Henry Mynors , and agrees to be his wife , much to her young sister Agnes pleasure . She discovers and the end , however , that she loves Willie Price , but does not follow her heart , as he is leaving for Australia , and she is already promised to Mynors . Willie then also commits suicide .

<|romance|>The story begins with a historical event the 1672 lynching of the Dutch Grand Pensionary roughly equivalent to a modern Prime Minister Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis , by a wild mob of their own countrymen considered by many as one of the most painful episodes in Dutch history , described by Dumas with a dramatic intensity . The main plot line , involving fictional characters , takes place in the following eighteen months only gradually does the reader understand its connection with the killing of the de Witt brothers . The city of Haarlem , Netherlands has set a prize of 100 , 000 guilders to the person who can grow a black tulip , sparking competition between the country s best gardeners to win the money , honour and fame . The young and bourgeois Cornelius van Baerle has almost succeeded , but is suddenly thrown into the Loevestein prison . There he meets the prison guard s beautiful daughter Rosa , who will be his comfort and help , and at last his rescuer . The novel was originally published in three volumes in 1850 as La Tulipe Noire by Baudry Paris .

<|novel|>The story of Kip Caley , an ex criminal , intent on becoming a useful and honourable human being . His struggle with himself and with a society which will not let him regain his human dignity .

<|fantasy|>Cousin Octavia of Faction Paradox has come to Peking during the Boxer Rebellion in search of an artifact she believes can bestow immortality . For Liu Hui Ying , the artifact is a symbol that will rally the Han . But in this dangerous time , more than each other stands in the way of either obtaining the jade casket .

<|fantasy|>A scientist by the name of Dennis Nuel is working at , and attending , an institute of scientific research and pioneering work into the fictional scientific field of Zievatronics , the manipulation of Time and Space . After the death of his mentor , however , he is taken off the project and another professor takes over . After a time , the device that has been created to move through space and time , known as the Zievatron encounters operational problems and is fixed to the co ordinates of a world that appears to be very similar to our Earth in most respects , and Dennis is re recruited to help fix it . He volunteers to be sent to the other world in order to fix the other part of the Zievatron . On arriving to this planet , he finds the Zievatron dismantled and critical parts of it missing . Of the three surveillance robots sent through to this planet , he finds two have also been broken apart . After a while , he finds the last robot , intact and still functioning , and uses it to view any recorded images that might help him identify what it was that happened to the Zievatron . In this world , instead of objects wearing out as you use them , they improve . This is referred to as the Practice effect . For example , swords get sharper with use , baskets get stronger the more things they carry , mirrors , furniture and decorations look more attractive the more they are looked at . The downside to this being that an object s condition deteriorates over time if not put to use . Under this system , members of society s higher strata employ servants to Practice their own possessions to perfection . It is eventually discovered that the Practice Effect is the result of an elusive , biologically engineered creature known as a Krenegee Beast that causes a change in a law of thermodynamics . This creature emits a field under which the Practice Effect works . The closer one is to the Krenegee Beasts , the more efficient the Practice that is done . The Practice Effect can take many months before an object reaches its maximum point of practice , however if one is under a Felthesh Trance the process is sped up if a Krenegee Beast is present the process is sped up more so than if one were under a Felthesh Trance .

<|novel|>Set in Swinging London , the novel describes one day in the life of Adam Appleby , who lives in constant fear that his wife might be pregnant again with a fourth child . As Catholics , they are denied any form of contraception and have to play Vatican roulette instead . Adam and Barbara have three children Clare , Dominic , and Edward their friends ask if they intend working through the whole alphabet . In the course of only one busy day , several chances to make some money present themselves to Adam . For example , he is offered the opportunity to edit a deceased scholar s unpublished manuscripts however , when he eventually has a look at them , he feels uncomfortable realizing that the man s writings are worthless drivel . Also , at the house in Bayswater where he is supposed to get the papers , Adam has to cope with an assortment of weird characters ranging from butchers to a young virgin intent on seducing him . Lodge s novel makes extensive use of pastiche , incorporating passages where both the motifs and the styles of writing used by various authors are imitated . For instance , there is a Kafkaesque scene where Adam has to renew his reading room ticket . The final chapter of the novel is a monologue by Adam s wife in the style of Molly Bloom s soliloquy in Ulysses . This use of different styles mirrors James Joyce s Ulysses , a work also about a single day . When Lodge s novel first came out , quite a number of reviewers and critics , not appreciating the literary allusions , found fault with Lodge for his inhomogeneous writing .

<|horror|>An unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript written by a former governess whom the friend claims to have known and who is now dead . The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has become responsible for his young nephew and niece after the death of their parents . He lives mainly in London and is not interested in raising the children himself . The boy , Miles , is attending a boarding school , while his younger sister , Flora , is living at a country estate in Essex . She is currently being cared for by the housekeeper , Mrs . Grose . The governess s new employer , the uncle of Miles and Flora , gives her full charge of the children and explicitly states that she is not to bother him with communications of any sort . The governess travels to her new employer s country house and begins her duties . Miles soon returns from school for the summer just after a letter arrives from the headmaster stating that he has been expelled . Miles never speaks of the matter , and the governess is hesitant to raise the issue . She fears that there is some horrid secret behind the expulsion , but is too charmed by the adorable young boy to want to press the issue . Soon thereafter , the governess begins to see around the grounds of the estate the figures of a man and woman whom she does not recognize . These figures come and go at will without ever being seen or challenged by other members of the household , and they seem to the governess to be supernatural . She learns from Mrs . Grose that her predecessor , Miss Jessel , and another employee , Peter Quint , had a sexual relationship with each other and have both died . It is also implied that Quint sexually molested Miles and the other members of the household . Prior to their deaths , they spent much of their time with Flora and Miles , and this fact has grim significance for the governess when she becomes convinced that the two children are secretly aware of the presence of the ghosts . Later , Flora leaves the house while Miles plays music for the governess . They notice Flora s absence and go to look for her . The governess and Mrs . Grose find her in a clearing in the wood , and the governess is convinced that she has been talking to Miss Jessel . When she finally confronts Flora , Flora denies seeing Miss Jessel , and demands never to see the governess again . Mrs . Grose takes Flora away to her uncle , leaving the governess with Miles . That night , they are finally talking of Miles expulsion when the ghost of Quint appears to the governess at the window . The governess shields Miles , who attempts to see the ghost . The governess tells him that he is no longer controlled by the ghost , and then finds that Miles has died in her arms .

<|crime|>When a serial killer nicknamed ABC taunts Poirot in veiled letters and kills people in alphabetical order , Poirot employs an unconventional method to track down ABC . In a seemingly unconnected story , a travelling salesman named Alexander Bonaparte Cust has travelled to all of the murder locations on the day the crimes occurred . Cust had suffered a blow on the head during military service . As a result , he is prone to blackouts , headaches and epileptic attacks . Could this seemingly innocent stranger be the eponymous killer ?

<|novel|>It tells the story of Oscar Hopkins , the Cornish son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest , and Lucinda Leplastrier , a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory . They meet on the boat over to Australia , and discover that they are both gamblers , one obsessive the other compulsive . Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church from Sydney to a remote settlement at Bellingen , some 400 nbsp km up the New South Wales coast . This bet changes both their lives forever .

<|fantasy|>It s been some time since the end of the American Civil War . The Gun Club , a society based in Baltimore and dedicated to the design of weapons of all kinds especially cannons , meets when Impey Barbicane , its president , calls them to support his idea according to his calculations , a cannon can shoot a projectile so that it reaches the moon . After receiving the whole support of his companions , a few of them meet to decide the place from where the projectile will be shot , the dimensions and makings of both the cannon and the projectile , and which kind of powder are they to use . An old enemy of Barbicane , a Captain Nicholl of Philadelphia , designer of plate armor , declares that the enterprise is absurd and makes a series of bets with Barbicane , each of them of increasing amount over the impossibility of such feat . The first obstacle , the money , and over which Nicholl has bet 1000 dollars , is raised from most countries in America and Europe , in which the mission reaches variable success while the USA gives 4 million dollars , England doesn t give a farthing , being envious of the United States in matters of science , but in the end nearly five and a half million dollars are raised , which ensures the financial feasibility of the project . After deciding the place for the launch Stone s Hill in Tampa Town , Florida predating Kennedy Space Center s placement in Florida by almost 100 years Verne gives the exact position as 27 7 northern latitude and 5 7 western longitude , of course relative to the meridian of Washington that is , the Gun Club travels there and starts the construction of the Columbiad cannon , which requires the excavation of a and circular hole , which is made in the nick of time , but a surprise awaits Barbicane Michel Ardan , a French adventurer , plans to travel aboard the projectile . During a meeting between Ardan , the Gun Club , and the inhabitants of Florida , Nicholl appears and challenges Barbicane to a duel . The duel is stopped when Ardan having been warned by J . T . Maston , secretary of the Gun Club meets the rivals in the forest where they have agreed to duel . Meanwhile , Barbicane finds the solution to the problem of surviving the incredible acceleration that the explosion would cause . Ardan suggests that Barbicane and Nicholl travel with him in the projectile , and the offer is accepted . In the end , the projectile is successfully launched , but the destinies of the three astronauts are left inconclusive . The sequel , Around the Moon , deals with what happens to the three men in their travel from the Earth to the Moon .

<|novel|>The novel opens on October 3 , 1951 , when a boy named Cotter Martin sneaks in to watch the New York Giants play the Brooklyn Dodgers at the Giants home field Polo Grounds . The prologue , Pafko at the Wall , was written on its own before the novel . In the ninth inning , Ralph Branca pitches to Bobby Thomson , who hits the ball into the stands for a three run homer , beating the Dodgers 5 4 and capturing the National League pennant . Known to baseball fans as The Shot Heard Round the World , the fate of that ball is unknown , but in DeLillo s novel , Cotter Martin wrests this valuable ball away from another fan who has just befriended him and runs home . Cotter s father , Manx , steals the ball and later sells it for thirty two dollars and forty five cents . Branca and Thomson are never given much screen time , and Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra only put in cameos , but other historical figures become important parts of the story . J . Edgar Hoover muses on death , loyalty and leather masks while comedian Lenny Bruce faces the Cuban Missile Crisis by impersonating a hysterical housewife shrieking , We re all gonna die ! Early in the novel it is revealed that Nick Shay was in a juvenile detention center for murdering a man , but it is not until near the end of the book that we learn the details of his crime . After being released from the detention center , he is sent to a Jesuit reform school in northern Minnesota . In the epilogue , we learn that Nick and Marian remain married despite infidelity on both sides . In fact , Nick indicates their relationship is much improved as he has opened up to her about his past a subject that had always much interested her and that he had been unwilling to discuss .

<|fantasy|>The action of the story follows Sybil Gerard , a political courtesan and daughter of an executed Luddite leader she is borrowed from Disraeli s novel Sybil Edward Leviathan Mallory , a paleontologist and explorer and Laurence Oliphant , a historical figure with a real career , as portrayed in the book , as a travel writer whose work was a cover for espionage activities undertaken in the service of Her Majesty . Linking all their stories is the trail of a mysterious set of reportedly very powerful computer punch cards and the individuals fighting to obtain them as is the case with special objects in several novels by Gibson , the punch cards are to some extent a MacGuffin . During the story , many characters come to believe that the punch cards are a gambling modus , a programme that would allow the user to place consistently winning bets . This is in line with Ada Lovelace s historically documented penchant for gambling . Only in the last chapter is it revealed that the punched cards represent a program which proves two theorems which in reality would not be discovered until 1931 by Kurt Gödel . Lovelace delivers a lecture on the subject in France . Defending the cards , Mallory gathers his brothers and Ebenezer Fraser a secret police officer to fight the revolutionary Captain Swing who leads a London riot during the Stink , a major episode of pollution in which London swelters under an inversion layer comparable to the London Smog of December 1952 . After the abortive uprising , Oliphant and Sybil Gerard meet at a cafe in Paris . Oliphant informs her that he is aware of her true identity , but will not pursue it , although he does want information that would compromise her seducer , Charles Egremont MP , now regarded as an obstacle to the strategies and political ambitions of Lords Brunel and Babbage . Sybil has longed for an opportunity for vengeance against Egremont , and the resultant political scandal destroys his parliamentary career and aspirations for a merit lordship . Oliphant also encounters a Manhattan based group of feminist pantomime artists . After several vignettes that elaborate on the alternate historical origins of the world of The Difference Engine , Ada Lovelace delivers her lecture on Gödel s Theorem , as its counterpart is known in our world . She is chaperoned by Fraser , and castigated by Sybil Gerard , who is still unable to forgive Ada s father , the late Lord Byron , for his role in her own father s death . At the very end of the novel , there is a dystopian depiction of an alternate 1991 from the vantage point of Ada Lovelace . Throughout the novel s latter sections , there are references to an Eye . At the end of the novel , human beings appear to have become digitized , ephemeral ciphers at the mercy of an all powerful artificial intelligence .

<|mystery|>The Continental Op is called to Personville known as Poisonville to the locals by Donald Willsson , who is murdered before the Op has a chance to meet with him . The Op begins work on the murder and meets with Willsson s father , Elihu , a local industrialist who has found his control of the city threatened by several competing gangs he himself had originally invited into his city to resolve a labor dispute . The Op extracts a promise and a signed letter from Elihu that pays the Continental Detective Agency , the Op s employer , 10 , 000 in exchange for cleaning up the city . When the Op solves Donald s murder , Elihu tries to renege on the deal , but the Op won t allow him to do so . In the meantime , the Op finds himself spending time with Dinah Brand , a possible love interest of Donald Willsson s as well as a moll for the local gangster Max Whisper Thaler . Between Brand and the crooked chief of police , Noonan , the Op manages to extract and spread most of the information he needs to set off a gang war among the four major local factions . He wakes up the next morning to find Brand stabbed to death with the icepick the Op had used the previous evening , with no visible signs of forced entry . The Op ends up a suspect sought by the police for this murder , and one of his fellow operatives ends up leaving Personville because he is uncertain of the Op s innocence . The story ends as the Op finds Reno Starkey , the only one of the four main gangsters still alive , bleeding from a gunshot wound . Reno reveals that it was he who stabbed Brand , and that when she fell she collided with the semi conscious Op , coincidentally landing in a position which made the Op look like the culprit . Reno has also just killed Whisper , and after he dies himself , Elihu can restore his control over the town .

<|crime|>Marina Gregg is a famous , temperamental , much loved movie star who has come to settle down in the village of St . Mary Mead after the death of Colonel Bantry , who used to live at Gossington Hall where Marina has taken up residence with her husband Jason Rudd . Heather Badcock , an ordinary albeit annoying woman , dies after drinking a cocktail at a party hosted by Marina . Shortly before her death , Heather was in conversation with Marina , giving her a long boring account of how she had met Marina many years ago getting out of bed despite her illness and putting on lots of makeup , in order to seek Marina s autograph . Marina is seem with a frozen look on her face for a moment while Heather talks to her a look likened to the Lady of Shalott , as though doom has come upon her . It then comes to light that Marina had handed her own drink to Heather after Heather s drink was spilled . Therefore it is surmised that Marina must be the intended victim . As a famous star who has married five times , she is a far more likely murder target . Suspicion is cast on many people including Marina s seemingly devoted husband , a big shot American TV producer who is a former admirer , and an American actress who was previously Marina s rival in love . Both Americans turn up unexpectedly at the party . It also comes to light that an arty photographer at the party is actually one of three children that Marina had adopted in the past for a while and then got tired of Marina does not recognize her as such at the party . It is known that 11 12 years before the events in the book , Marina desperately wanted children of her own but had difficulties conceiving . After adopting three children , she became pregnant but her baby was born mentally handicapped and abandoned to a lifetime of institutions , leaving Marina emotionally scarred . This misfortune was due to Marina contracting German measles in the early stages of her pregnancy . While police search for clues , two other murders take place one of Marina s social secretary and the other of Marina s butler both of whom were serving drinks at the party . Finally , Miss Marple deduces what Marina had instantly realised at the party , that Heather is the woman who was responsible for infecting Marina with German measles all those years previously when she put on make up to cover the rash and went to meet Marina for her autograph . Overcome by rage and grief at seeing her unwitting tormentor looking so happy and proud of her act , Marina impulsively poisons her own glass and hands it to Heather after making Heather spill her own drink . At the end of the book , Marina is found dead from a drug overdose .

<|fantasy|>Following the death of her parents , the book s heroine , Flora Poste , finds she is possessed of every art and grace save that of earning her own living . She decides to take advantage of the fact that no limits are set , either by society or one s own conscience , to the amount one may impose on one s relatives , and settles on visiting her distant relatives at the isolated Cold Comfort Farm in the fictional village of Howling in Sussex . The inhabitants of the farm Aunt Ada Doom , the Starkadders , and their extended family and workers feel obligated to take her in to atone for an unspecified wrong once done to her father . As is typical in a certain genre of romantic 19th century and early 20th century literature , each of the farm s inhabitants has some long festering emotional problem caused by ignorance , hatred , or fear , and the farm is badly run . Flora , being a level headed , urban woman , determines that she must apply modern common sense to their problems and help them adapt to the 20th century .

<|fantasy|>Academy plebe Justin Bell is excited about his new career in space . Unfortunately several colonies are agitating for independence . On top of this very dangerous political situation , contact has just been made with non human life .

<|crime|>Harriet has evacuated her family to the Wimseys country house , Talboys in Hertfordshire , taking her two children , along with the three children of her sister in law , Lady Mary , and Peter s venerable old housekeeper , Mrs . Trapp . Peter and Bunter are away on an undercover assignment . During a practice air raid , a young woman is murdered in the village , and Superintendent Kirk recruits Harriet to help solve the murder , partly because the police are too busy organizing all the changes necessitated by the war and partly because as the wife of a detective , and as a crime novelist , she is the best qualified person to find the murderer . The murdered girl had come from the city as a Land Girl , to do agricultural work and help the war effort . She was killed in the village street during an air raid drill , while most people were underground , and much of the investigation turns on the issue of who had been , or could have been , outside the shelter when the murder was committed . Many of the witnesses and some of the possible suspects are RAF pilots stationed at a nearby air base , who need to be questioned in between going out on missions . Gerald , Lord Peter s favourite nephew , who was first seen a decade earlier as a precocious boy playing a major role in solving The Learned Adventure of the Dragon s Head and appeared as an Oxford undergraduate in Gaudy Night is now an RAF combat pilot . At least one character introduces the possibility that the murder is directly linked to German espionage . While conducting the investigation and riding herd on the five children under her charge , Harriet worried about her husband , whose life is in danger . She regrets the lost years when she had put him off before finally agreeing to marry him . Wimsey , realizing that the Germans had broken the code which he had been using , devises a new one which is unbreakable because of being based on things only he and Harriet knew . His Secret Service colleague brings her Peter s message and she shows considerable skill in decoding it . Eventually , Bunter comes back from the continent uncharacteristically dirty , scruffy and so exhausted that he lets Lady Peter wait upon him and put him to bed and is followed some days later by Peter , who arrived by a different route . It is never revealed where exactly they had been . Lord Peter is retired from active service and , while still involved in intelligence issues , would not be sent again behind enemy lines . Being presented with Harriet s record of her investigations which , as he notes , already solved most of the mystery he is able to add the last missing pieces . Finding the solution for the mystery does not mean , however , just handing the perpetrator to the police rather , solving the mystery arouses a complicated new problem involving legal , military , ethical and moral issues which Lord Peter manages to neatly tie up .

<|comedy|>The book chronicles the rise to fame of one Montgomery Marvin , a professor of economics who , as an academic teacher , keeps a low profile but who nevertheless is given tenure quite early in his career . While outwardly concerning himself with unspectacular research focusing on Mathematical Paradigms in an Approach to Refrigerator Pricing which is also the title of his Ph . D . thesis , Marvin s extracurricular activities centre on becoming very rich in a very short time . For that purpose , Marvin has devised a new formula a stock forecasting model by means of which he and his wife can cash in on people s euphoria , greed and , as they call it , dementia . Eventually , while everyone loses money in the wake of the Black Monday stock market crash of October 19 , 1987 , the Marvins gain an awful lot . See also Michael Milken and leveraged buyout . They decide to spend their money wisely , according to their liberal agenda . Intent on strictly observing the code of business ethics , they start to make use of the positive power of wealth and embark on a life of philanthropy . They fund a number of chairs in peace studies to be established at , of all places , military academies . They also secure legislation by which companies are required to label their products according to the percentage of female executives employed by them . After they have launched several of their projects , their operations are increasingly considered un American and officially put under surveillance . But whatever will happen Marvin knows that he will be able to nourish his family , as he has been accorded tenure . A Tenured Professor was republished as paperback by Houghton Mifflin in 2001 ISBN 0 618 15455 8 .