Tess Durbeyfield is the oldest child of John and Joan, uneducated peasants living in an impoverished rural village in Wessex, during the Long Depression of the 1870s. One day, her father is given the hint that they may have noble blood and that they are successors of a noble Norman family D'Urberville. Tess's fortune is changed after one accident and she decides to visit Mrs. D'Urberville, a rich widow who lives in the nearby town, and «claim kin». Though now considered a major...
The Caleb Sweetwater Mysteries is a collection of three novels featuring Caleb Sweetwater, a policeman in New York City. The author, Anna Katharine Green is credited with shaping detective fiction into its classic form, and developing the series detective She was one of the first writers of detective fiction in America and distinguished herself by writing well plotted, legally accurate stories. Green has been called «the mother of the detective novel». As journalist Kathy Hickman writes, Green...
The Making of Americans is a modernist novel that traces the genealogy, history, and psychological development of members of the fictional Hersland and Dehning families. Being ostensibly a history of three generations of and everyone they knew or knew them, the novel is a philosophical and poetic meditation on identity, on what it means to be human living an everyday, mundane life. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector, best known for Three...
Lady Anne is herself at the receiving end of a puzzling murder mystery when the killer strikes her for hiring a private detective. Would Inspector Furnival be able to solve the mystery of the double murders and find the criminal before it's too late? Annie Haynes (1865-1929) was a renowned golden age mystery writer and a contemporary of Agatha Christie, another famous crime writer, which often led to her comparison with the latter, and unfavourably so. Haynes's fictions are now lauded...