Having got rid of their human master, the animals in this political fable look forward to a life of freedom and plenty. But as a clever, ruthless elite takes control, the other animals find themselves hopelessly ensnared in the same old way.
Everybody who is anybody is seen at Gatsby's glittering parties. None of the socialites understand Gatsby. He seems to always be watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. But as the tragic story unfolds, Gatsby's destructive dreams and passions are revealed.
In "Dubliners", completed when Joyce was only 25, the author produced a definitive group portrait. The book is rooted in an accurate apprehension of the detail of Dublin life. The author also wrote "Ulysses" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".
Streetwise George and his childlike friend Lennie are drifters, searching for work in the fields and valleys of California. They have nothing except the clothes on their back, and a hope that one day they'll find a place of their own and live the American dream. But do dreams come at a price!
This play tells the story of Willy Loman, an ageing salesman, who is a failure in both his business and private life. Fired by his firm, ignored by his children, his humiliation ends in suicide.
Set in the American South, this is the story of a group of people who appear to have little in common except they are all hopelessly lonely. A young girl, a drunken socialist and a black doctor are drawn to a gentle, sympathetic deaf mute, John Singer, whose presence changes their lives.
Features the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.
The story of Dick and Nicole Divers, rich Americans holding court in their villa on the French Riviera during the 1920s. Into their circle comes Rosemary Hoyt, a film star, who is instantly attracted to them, but understands little of the dark secrets and hidden corruption that bind them.
Set against the background of Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, this novel tells of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel West in search of the promised land.
Reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. The author's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved.
Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel deals with the events of one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, now known as "Bloomsday". The principal characters are Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly.
The landmark work on race in America from James Baldwin, whose life and words are immortalized in the Oscar-nominated film I Am Not Your Negro 'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation' James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice. 'Sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle ... all presented in searing, brilliant prose' The New York Times Book Review 'Baldwin writes with great passion ... it reeks of truth, as the ghettoes of New York and London, Chicago and Manchester reek of our hypocrisy' Sunday Times 'The great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement ... his seminal work' Guardian
Holly Golightly is generally up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She hasn't got a past. She doesn't want to belong to anything or anyone, not even to her one-eyed rag-bag pirate of a cat. One day Holly might find somewhere she belongs.
In 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson was suffering from poor health, struggling to survive on the income derived from his writings, and tormented by his infatuation with Fanny Osbourne, a married American woman. His response was to embark on journeys through Cevennes and America where he wrote 'Travels With a Donkey' and 'The Amateur Emigrant'.
Set in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692, a community stands accused of witchcraft, and in the mood of fear and recriminations that develops, men denounce their neighbours and truth is perverted by superstition.
The story of the guilt, bitterness and spiritual strivings of the Grimes family which is told as the son, John, faces the issue of religious conversion in the Temple of the Fire Baptised.
After Rufus Scott, an embittered and unemployed black jazz-musician commits suicide, his sister Ida and old friend Vivaldo become lovers. Yet their feelings for each other are complicated by Rufus's friends, especially the homosexual actor Eric Jones who has been Vivaldo's lover.
"An inspector calls", the title play in this collection, was written inside a week in 1944. Inspector Goole, investigating a girl's death, calls on the Birlings, an outwardly virtuous household.
This is the story of the Ramsays, based on Virginia Woolf's own family. Written in the stream-of-consciousness style, the book examines family relationships, the traditional roles of the sexes, the tensions and love between husband and wife and the resentment children can feel for their parents.
A memoir of the author's time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris. It documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses, working as a dishwasher in the vile 'Hotel X', living alongside tramps, surviving on scraps and cigarette butts.
A masterpiece . . . as mature and finished as Henry James''s The Turn of the Screw'' Timebr>br>Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, Reflections in a Golden Eye tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton''s tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora. Upon the novel''s publication in 1941, reviewers were unsure of what to make of its relatively scandalous subject matter. But a critic for Time magazine wrote, "In almost any hands, such material would yield a rank fruitcake of mere arty melodrama. But Carson McCullers tells her tale with simplicity, insight, and a rare gift of phrase." Written during a time when McCullers''s own marriage to Reeves was on the brink of collapse>
