Recommended English-language Books lists

Senora Amelia loves animals. In this lively and cheery story from Venezuela, you will see to what lengths she will go in order to grant her handsome hen Rosaura a birthday wish. The delicate colored pencil drawings lend warmth and charm to this tale. Their color and light precisely portray the sense of place--a small town in Venezuela.

An allegorical novella descibing the rehabilitation of bitter, miserly businessman Ebenezer Scrooge. The reader is witness to his transformation as Scrooge is shown the error of his ways by the ghost of former partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas past, present and future.

 

 

First performed in 1945 in the Soviet Union and 1946 in the UK ,and conveying a strong -if not manicheist- political message, the play is a three-act drama, which takes place on a single night in 1912, and focuses on the prosperous middle-class Birling family, who live in a comfortable home in Brumley, "an industrial city in the north Midlands". The family is visited by a man calling himself Inspector Goole, who questions the family about the suicide of a young working-class woman, Eva Smith (also known as Daisy Renton). The family are interrogated and revealed to have been responsible for the young woman's exploitation, abandonment and social ruin, effectively leading to her death. Long considered part of the repertory of classic "drawing room” theatre, the play has also been hailed as a scathing critique of the hypocrisies of Victorian/Edwardian English society and as an expression of Priestley’s Socialist political principles.

The plot is based on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives and follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony from the time of the Parthian War to Cleopatra's suicide. The major antagonist is Octavius Caesar, one of Antony's fellow triumviri and the future first emperor of Rome.

 

 

 

Ten-year-old India Opal Buloni describes her first summer in the town of Naomi, Florida, and all the good things that happen to her because of her big ugly dog Winn-Dixie.

It's bedtime, and Little Bear can't get to sleep. He's frightened of the dark, the dark all around, which not even Big Bear's largest lantern can light up. Big Bear finds a way to show Little Bear that there is no need to be afraid. The Smarties Price

Albert, Carrie and young Nick are war-time evacuees whose lives get so tangled up with the people they've come to live among that the war and their real families seem to belong to another world.
Carrie and Nick are billeted in Wales with old Mr Evans, who is so mean and cold, and his timid mouse of a sister, Lou, who suddenly starts having secrets. Their friend Albert is luckier, living in Druid's Bottom with warm-hearted Hepzibah Green and the strange Mister Johnny, who can talk to animals but not to human beings. Carrie and Nick visit him there whenever they can for Hepzibah makes life exciting and enticing with her stories and delicious cooking. Gradually they begin to feel more at ease in their war-time home, but then, in trying to heal the rift between Mr Evans and his estranged sister, and save Druid's Bottom, Carrie does a terrible thing which is to haunt her for years to come. Carrie revisits Wales as an adult and tells the story to her own children.

Harry found a box of dinosaurs in the attic. He cleaned them and repaired them. He was moved to research the names of each dinosaur. He took very good care of them and they went everywhere with him. One day on an exciting trip with his grandma on a train he forgot them and they were left behind on the train. His gran bought him a video to take their place. But that couldn't replace them. He is inconsolable. Finally Gran takes him to the train station to check the lost and found. Harry has to prove they are his by naming them, which he does. His dinosaurs are happy to see him and they whisper to him "You are definitely our Harry, definitely!" .

As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.

When Michael's parents lose their jobs, they buy a boat and decide to sail around the world with their son and their beloved dog. It's an ideal trip - until Michael is swept overboard. He's washed up on an island, where he struggles to survive. Then he discovers that he's not alone. His fellow-castaway, Kensuke, keeps his distance at first. But when Michael's life is threatened, he slowly lets the boy into his world. The two teach and learn from each other until, inevitably, they must part ways.

"containing his treacherous plots against his brother Clarence, the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes, his tyrannicall usurpation, with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death"

(Subtitle of the 1597 edition.)

Free online scanned Francis Hart & Co 1878 edition at archive.org::

Free online scanned Blackie & Sons, The Warwick Sharespeare, 1896 edition at archive.org::