Showing results by narrator "Wanda McCaddon" in All Categories

In this searching tragicomedy of manners, personalities, and world views, E.M. Forster explores the "idea of England" he would later develop in Howards End. Bookish, sensitive, and given to wild enthusiasms, Rickie Elliot is virtually made for a life at Cambridge, where he can subsist on a regimen of biscuits and philosophical debate.

In March 1279, Edward I takes a break from hammering the Welsh and bearing down on England's Jews to vacation in Gloucestershire. The royal party breaks the journey at Woodstock Manor. There, one life begins as the queen gives birth to a daughter, and one draws to an end as apoplexy fells Baron Adam Wynethorpe. Hastening to the baron's deathbed is his eldest son, Hugh, a veteran of Edward's Crusades who can't shake off the battle horrors he has witnessed.

There was only one mystery Agatha Christie could not solve: her own. Why did she disappear in 1926? In this psychological mystery, Dr. Carole Owens, a practicing psychotherapist, takes on Agatha Christie as a patient to diagnose her problem and at long last solve the mystery of The Last Days of Agatha Christie.

In The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence challenged the customary limitations of language and convention to carry into the structures of his prose the fascination with boundaries and space that characterize the entire novel. A visionary novel, considered to be one of Lawrence's finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world.

In the spring of 1277, Prioress Eleanor goes on a pilgrimage to a famous East Anglian shrine. There are rumors that King Edward may also visit the shrine soon to seek God's blessing for his invasion of Wales. Lurking in this sacred place, however, is an assassin hoping to murder a king. Soon after Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas arrive, a nun falls to her death from the priory bell tower. Brother Thomas finds the body, and the pair quickly grasp that this nun's death was not an accident.

The summer of 1276 at Tyndal Priory is peaceful - until Kenelm’s corpse is found floating in the millpond. When Brother Thomas concludes that the murder occurred on priory grounds, Prioress Eleanor and Crowner Ralf swiftly agree to help each other solve the crime. The murder victim, a newcomer, was disliked in Tyndal village, and no one there wants one of their own hanged for the deed. Fingers quickly point to a Jewish family, refugees under the relocation provisions of King Edward’s Statute of Jewry. As riots loom and threats mount against the family, Eleanor and Ralf have little time before popular opinion rules the murder solved.

Originally published in 1748, this is possibly the most masterful and influential book ever written on the subject of liberty and justice. Accordingly, it is a work that profoundly influenced America’s Founding Fathers. Its success was due partly to the fact that it was the first systematic treatise on politics, partly to Montesquieu’s championship of the nobility and the Parlements, but above all, to the brilliant style of his prose.

Daughter of the Duke of Milan and wife of the conniving Count Girolamo Riario, Caterina Sforza was the bravest warrior Renaissance Italy ever knew. She ruled her own lands, fought her own battles, and openly took lovers whenever she pleased. Her remarkable tale is told by her lady-in-waiting, Dea, a woman knowledgeable in reading the "triumph cards", the predecessor of modern-day Tarot.

It is May 1272, and Prioress Eleanor of Tyndal, recovering from a near-fatal winter fever, journeys to Amesbury Priory to visit her aunt in time for the Feast of Saint Melor. Although Eleanor hopes to regain her strength in the midst of pleasant childhood memories, death reveals a most troublesome fondness for her company. A ghost now haunts Amesbury. Is it perhaps the spirit of a pregnant woman who drowned herself in the River Avon? But soon the specter turns murderous.

Shy, fragile Fanny Price is the consummate "poor relation". Sent to live with her wealthy uncle Thomas, she clashes with his spoiled, selfish daughters and falls in love with his son. Their lives are further complicated by the arrival of a pair of witty, sophisticated Londoners, whose flair for flirtation collides with the quiet, conservative country ways of Mansfield Park.

Ireland is inarguably a beautiful, enchanted place. But its history is more turbulent, fascinating, and terrible than any other. From the first English presence in Ireland in the 12th century, through siege, rebellion, and civil war, to Irish ascendancy, home rule, and the present-day troubles, best-selling author Paul Johnson tells, with remarkable clarity and concision, the compelling story of this most remarkable island.

Harry Blamires, a noted British Christian thinker who started writing through the encouragement of C. S. Lewis, his tutor at Oxford, makes a perceptive diagnosis of some of the weaknesses besetting the church today. He argues that the distinctively Christian intellect is being swept away by secular modes of thought and secular assumptions about reality. Blamires calls for the recovery of the Christian mind and challenges “not only secularism’s assault upon personal morality and the life of the soul, but also secularism’s truncated and perverted view of the meaning of life...."

Rachel Vinrace, Virginia Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at 24, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who wishes to teach Rachel "how to live." Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates.

Jane Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, is a wonderfully entertaining tale of flirtation and folly that revolves around two starkly different sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. While Elinor is thoughtful, considerate, and calm, her younger sister is emotional and wildly romantic.

Written when she was 26, Agnes Grey is Anne Bronte's first novel. It tells the story of a rector's daughter who has to earn her living as a governess. Drawing directly from her own experiences, Anne Bronte set out to describe the immense pressures that the governess' life involved: the frustration, the isolation, and the insensitive and cruel treatment on the part of employers and their families.

On Midsummer’s Eve, Dan and Una enact A Midsummer Night’s Dream three times over - right under Pook’s Hill. That is how they meet Puck, “the oldest Old Thing in England” and the last of the People of the Hills. Through Puck, they are introduced to the nearly forgotten pages of old England’s history and to characters that can illuminate their own historical predicaments. Originally published in 1906, these 10 stories and accompanying poems were intended for both adults and children.

Maggie Tulliver, whose father owns a mill perched on the banks of the River Floss, is intelligent and imaginative beyond the understanding of her community, her relatives, and particularly her brother Tom. Despite their opposite temperaments, Maggie and Tom are united by a strong bond. But this bond suffers when Tom's sense of family honor leads him to forbid her to associate with the one friend who appreciates her intelligence and imagination.

Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell's best-known work, is a humorous account of a nineteenth-century English village dominated by a group of genteel but modestly circumstanced women. This is a community that runs on cooperation and gossip, at the very heart of which are the daughters of the former rector: Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister, Miss Matty.

Aglirta is known as the Kingless Land. Once prosperous and peaceful, it has now fallen into lawlessness, studded with feuding baronies engaged in a constant state of war. The only hope for peace lies in the legend of the Sleeping King, destined to rise and restore peace when the Dwaerindim stones are recovered.

In My Greek Drama, Gianna Angelopoulos - known in her home country simply as "Gianna" - has written a memoir that is as much about Greece's journey as her own. From her childhood in Crete, to law school in Thessaloniki, to Athens, where she overcame male-dominated legal and political cultures to help redefine public service in Greece, Gianna worked her way into becoming one of the most respected women in Greek public life.