18 books like The Magus
Lord Jim
This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his…
Shares: English Psychological fiction, British, Travel
Anne of Avonlea
The second story in the ever-popular Anne of Green Gables series.Now Anne is half past sixteen and she's ready to begin a new life teaching in her old school. She's as feisty as ever and is fiercely determined to inspire young hearts with her own ambitions. But some of her pupils are as boisterous and high-spirited as Anne, and so life in her Avonlea classroom becomes a lesson in discovery and…
Shares: Islands, Teachers
Robinson Crusoe
During one of his several adventurous voyages in the 1600's, an Englishman becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck and lives for nearly thirty years on a deserted island.
Shares: Islands, British and irish fiction
The Professor
The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Bronte completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846 - Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights - it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Bronte's death. Like Villette (1853), The Professor is based on her experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842.
Told from the point of…
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Villette, a novel
In time for the 200th anniversary of her birth, a Penguin Hardcover Classics edition of the book many believe to be Charlotte Brontë's crowning achievement.
With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially…
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Colonel Sun
The life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency... until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped. The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island, where Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army of China collaborates with an ex-Nazi atrocity expert in a world-menacing conspiracy. Stripped of all professional aids, Bond…
Shares: Greece, British
When the Going Was Good
With the publication of When the Going Was Good Little, Brown takes great pleasure in returning to print a classic of travel journalism. Between 1928 and 1935 Evelyn Waugh wrote four travel books: Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Waugh in Abyssinia, about journeys he made in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. In 1945 he excerpted five long pieces from these books and published…
Shares: British, British and irish fiction, Travel
The man who would be king
It is about two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. The story was inspired by the exploits of James Brooke, an Englishman who became the first White Rajah of Sarawak in Borneo; and by the travels of American adventurer Josiah Harlan, who was granted the title Prince of Ghor in perpetuity for himself and his descendants. It…
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Le Rhin
Dans ces pages de voyage, Victor Hugo fait du Rhin et de ses villes un vaste livre de pierre, où Mayence, Cologne, Francfort, Worms et Rome révèlent les combats du temps, de l'histoire et de la modernité. L'arrivée par le chemin de fer, la douceur des paysages rhénans, les cathédrales, les cloîtres, les tombeaux et les ruines composent une méditation à la fois savante, lyrique et indignée sur la…
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The Painted Veil
A story of the beautiful but love-starve Kitty Fane who is forced to accompany her husband to the heart of a cholera epidemic. She is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.
Shares: British, British and irish fiction
Martin Chuzzlewit
The greed of his family has led wealthy old Martin Chuzzlewit to become suspicious and misanthropic, leaving his grandson and namesake to make his own way in the world. And so young Martin sets out from the Wiltshire home of his supposed champion, the scheming architect Pecksniff, to seek his fortune in America. In depicting Martin's journey – an experience that teaches him to question his…
Shares: British, British and irish fiction, Travel
The History of the Life of Jonathan Wild, the Great
This book is a satire of Walpole that draws a parallel between Walpole and Jonathan Wild, the infamous gang leader and highwayman. He implicitly compares the Whig party in Parliament with a gang of thieves being run by Walpole, whose constant desire to be a "Great Man" (a common epithet for Walpole) should culminate only in the antithesis of greatness: being hanged.
Shares: British and irish fiction, Travel
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II
"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite…
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The heart of the Antarctic
The Heart of the Antarctic, Illustrated by Ernest Shackleton.
THE scientific results of the expedition cannot be stated in detail in this book. The expert members in each branch have contributed to the appendices articles which summarise what has been done in the domains of geology, biology, magnetism, meteorology, physics, &c. I will simply indicate here some of the more important features of…
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The Island of Dr. Moreau
Ranked among the classic novels of the English language and the inspiration for several unforgettable movies, this early work of H. G. Wells was greeted in 1896 by howls of protest from reviewers, who found it horrifying and blasphemous. They wanted to know more about the wondrous possibilities of science shown in his first book, The Time Machine, not its potential for misuse and terror. In The…
Shares: Islands, British and irish fiction
Far Country
When a young Englishwoman named Jennifer Morton leaves London to visit relatives on their sheep ranch in the Australian outback, she falls in love both with the gloriously beautiful country and with Carl, a Czech refugee who was a doctor in his own land and now works as a lumberjack. They are brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, but their relationship hangs in…
Shares: British, Travel
The scapegoat
Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said, 'Je vous demande pardon, ' and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well.I was looking at myself."Two men--one English, the other French--meet by chance in a provincial railway station and are…
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Plain tales from the hills
Originally written for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, the stories were intended for a provincial readership familiar with the pleasures and miseries of colonial life. For the subsequent English edition, Kipling revised the tales so as to recreate as vividly as possible the sights and smells of India for those at home. Yet far from being a celebration of Empire, Kipling's stories tell of…
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