A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded readers. Retold for Learners of English by Clare West. On a stormy winter night, a stranger knocks at the door of a shepherd’s cottage. He is cold and hungry, and wants to get out of the rain. He is welcomed inside, but he does not give his name or his business. Who is he, and where has he come from? And he is only the first visitor to call at the cottage that night… In these three short stories, Thomas Hardy gives us pictures of the lives of...
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Grace Melbury, the only daughter of a timber-merchant, arrives home in Little Hintock after an expensive education and her father looks to find a husband for her. There are two rivals for her hand: Giles Winterborne, a good-hearted yeoman and her childhood sweetheart, and Edred Fitzpiers, an ambitious young doctor of good family. Fitzpiers wins her, but the mismatch brings unhappiness not just to the young...
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), dreamed since his childhood of becoming a poet. Then he produced several popular works that cemented his reputation as a great novelist of the Victorian period, and earned him the admiration of later writers like D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Hardy's stories are noted for their nuances of Romantic and Enlightenment thinking, particularly elements of the supernatural. In «Two on a Tower», a love story set against the background of the stellar universe, Hardy...