Originally published in serial form in 1884 to 1885, "Germinal" is Émile Zola's realistic depiction of the coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s. In this faithful translation from the original French by Havelock Ellis, the story centers on Étienne Lantier, a young migrant worker who arrives at the coalmining town of Montsou in search of work. Set against a backdrop of extreme poverty and oppression, "Germinal" is the story of the idealistic...

First published in 1689, "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" is British philosopher John Locke's important and influential exposition on the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. Arranged into four books, the first book begins by rejecting the notion of innate ideas proposed by Descartes and proposes instead that humans are born as blank slates. Book two argues that all knowledge is derived from experience and reflection. Locke also...

When twelve-year-old Ash McCarthy wakes up after his father's funeral, he finds that he has been kidnapped to an island off the coast of Costa Rica, caught in the middle of a secret and deadly project named Kronos in which his mother is somehow involved, and he must find a way to save them both--and the only person he is sure he can trust is a Spanish girl his own age named Isabel

The fourteenth novel in a twenty book series collectively entitled, "Les Rougon-Macquart, L'Œuvre" was first translated into English in 1886, the title having since been rendered "The Masterpiece". Set in France's Second Empire, the story of naturalist painter Claude Lantier is believed to be a highly fictionalized account of Zola's friendship with the painter Paul Cézanne. The fictional artist of Zola's Bohemian world, Lantier, strives to complete...

An incredible tale of one man's adversity and defiance, for readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Horace Greasley escaped over 200 times from a notorious German prison camp to see the girl he loved. This is his incredible true story.
A Sunday Times Bestseller - over 60,000 copies sold.
Even in the most horrifying places on earth, hope still lingers in the darkness, waiting for the opportunity...

First published anonymously in December 1689, John Locke's "Two Treatises of Government" are considered to be some of the most important works of political philosophy ever written. In the first treatise, Locke disputes the divine right of monarchial rule principle that is put forth in the book "Patriarcha" by Sir Robert Filmer. The first treatise is in fact a sentence by sentence refutation of "Patriarcha." Filmer asserts the idea that absolute authority...

The Sorrows of Young Werther is an autobiographical novel which is loosely based on the life of its author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This publication is a classic originally published in the late 18th century that made Goethe one of the first major literary celebrities and was a key novel from the German literature movement known as Sturm and Drang. Largely a collection of letters written by Werther and sent to a close friend, it is an intimate...

Literally meaning "The tailor re-tailored," "Sartor Resartus" is Thomas Carlyle's 1836 novel which was first serialized in "Fraser's Magazine" in 1833-1834. The novel poses as a review for the work "Clothes, Their Origin and Influence" by the fictional philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, Professor of "Things in General" at Weissnichtwo University. Intended by Carlyle as a new kind of book, "Sartor Resartus" is at once a work of fiction and social...

"Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond. Sinclair McKay's Berlin begins by taking readers back to 1919 when the city emerged from the shadows of the Great War to become an extraordinary by-word for modernity-in art, cinema, architecture, industry, science, and politics. He traces the city's history through the rise of...

Winner of the 2016 EDGAR, AGATHA, MACAVITY and H.R.F.KEATING crime writing awards, this real-life detective story investigates how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction. Detective stories of the Twenties and Thirties have long been stereotyped as cosily conventional. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Golden Age of Murder tells for the first time the extraordinary story of British detective...