The English Opium-Eater

The Romantic Movement is frequently personified by the image of a young poet suffering for his art. However, the Romantics` sense of Liberty also hailed the emergence of an influential generation of women writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Mary Lamb, Catherine Macaulay, Sarah Hazlitt, Joanna Baillie and Hannah More. Whilst some of the pieces by Women Romantics evolve around themes central to the Movement, such as the reaction to the Industrial Revolution and Revolution in France, much of their prose writing reflects upon women`s rights and suffrage, education, social and domestic life, slavery and race, radical dissent and religion. The reading of Romantic prose writing by women adds an exhilarating new dimension to Romantic studies in particular and to women`s studies in general.

Randall Wilkes, his big-city journalism career in ruins, has returned after twenty years to Pilgrim's Rest, the Tennessee hill town where he grew up. He has taken on a lucrative but low-prestige writing job for Sonny McMahan, a former governor and Randall's boyhood friend. Faye McMahan, Sonny's mother, is addled with age, imagining that her dead husband is alive and worrying that her son might be in danger. Amid a violent autumn storm, Randall finds Faye hideously murdered, hanged by the neck from a bridge over the town landmark called Damnation Falls. Within days, another person connected to the McMahan clan is murdered in an even more grisly fashion. And the bones of a third, long-buried murder victim - a young woman - have emerged from the earth.Randall's ties to the victims force him to acknowledge debts that go back decades. Drawing on his investigative skills and his roots in the region, he sets out to discover who is behind the killings. His search takes him the length of the state - a land once split by civil war, where history lies close to the surface and tales of murder and betrayal weigh heavily on the town of Pilgrim's Rest. Before all the answers are in, more people will die, an old score will be settled, and the dead will finally tell their stories.

THE ODYSSEY, which tells of the detours Odyssesus made on his way home from the battle of Troy, is one of the defining masterpieces of Western literature. Populated by the Cyclops, the Sirens, cannibals and the holy cows of the Sun God, it is an extraordinary work of the imagination; the original epic voyage into the unknown that has inspired other works for millennia - from ancient poems to modern fiction and films. With its consummately modern hero, full of guile and wit, always prepared to reinvent himself, THE ODYSSEY is perfectly suited to our times. Thanks to the scholarship and poetic power of the highly acclaimed Stephen Mitchell, this new translation recreates the energy and simplicity, the speed, the grace, and continual thrust and pull of the original, while THE ODYSSEY's ancient story bursts vividly into life.

Maeve Connolly is tired of being labelled as irresponsible. Yes, she may spend unhealthy amounts of time on Facebook and watch marathon sessions of America's Next Top Model, but Maeve isn't a typical post-college slacker. Determined to change her life and make her own luck, Maeve impulsively decides on a grand adventure - driving cross country to LA. But en route, Maeve's car breaks down and she is stranded in Unknown, Arizona.It is here, alone and in the middle of nowhere, that Maeve finally faces up to the reality of her past. What Maeve has denied acknowledging, even to herself, is that she isn't running from bad luck, but from something much more complicated - something that made her feel as though the world would never turn again, and her heart would always remain closed. What begins as a hilarious and quirky coming-of-age tale soon deepens into a complex portrayal of survivorship and one woman's journey to a new beginning. Funny, irreverent, and moving in equal measure, The Good Luck Girl will leave you smiling through tears.

It is 1835, and with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, railway fever sweeps the country. Pyke is uneasy with the luxury his aristocratic marriage has brought him, and when he is unofficially asked to investigate a decapitation, he can not resist the chance to resuscitate the old skills he learned on the streets.But with the industrial world comes a new and faceless enemy: men who have money and power, and who will stop at nothing in their pursuit of both. For Pyke, with his young wife and child and an elevated place in society to protect, the stakes have suddenly become alarmingly high.From the sweat shops of the east end to the palace of the Queen-in-waiting; from the elegant drawing rooms of the newly rich, to the blood-spattered backrooms of London's taverns, Pyke's investigation stirs up a hornets' nest of trouble. As the death toll rises, an alluring woman from his past returns, and Pyke must draw on all of his resources if he is to protect his family, and survive.

London: 1840. The economy is sliding into recession; gangs of unemployed workers roam the streets; and a murderer prowls the capital's poor neighbourhoods. Pyke, still grieving over the death of his wife and struggling to shoulder his responsibilities as a father, is in debtors' prison, having lost his home and reached the edge of bankruptcy. Fitzroy Tilling, now head of the new Metropolitan Police Force gives Pyke his freedom, but in return he must agree to investigate the brutal death of a young mulatto woman, who was apparently working as a prostitute.It is not long before another woman turns up dead, and Pyke begins to suspect that he has stumbled on something more sinister, and more far-reaching than the murder of a couple of prostitutes...Pyke's investigation takes him from the London docks to the sugar plantations of Jamaica, from a fading colonial mansion to the back-streets of the East End in a struggle against ambitious and ruthless enemies, as well as demons of his own.