Item category 1: Classics

John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders sees our eponymous hero tackle his first ever case. It is just after the war and two RAF heroes are found shot dead. Simon Jerold, the son of one of the victims, is the only suspect and young Rumpole is given the hopeless task of defending him.

This story is the confessional of a famous glamour girl of the affluent 1920s and an aspiring ballerina, which captures the spirit of an era. Written in six weeks while recovering from a period of schizophrenia, this tale parallels the narrative of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night".

The extraordinary story takes hold of the reader and never lets go; the setting in a French chateau in these times is wholly real; the prose is simple and assured; and finally, the characters speak, act, and react precisely as they would have done in that family network of hatred, deceit, and jea...

"Set in a strict Puritan community in 17th-century Boston, this novel tells the moving tale of an adulterous love affair and the retribution that follows."--P. [4] of cover.

Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter, Pearl, is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl's father. Hester's refusal to name him ...

The first and most successful in the Baroness's series of books that feature Percy Blakeney, who leads a double life as an English fop and a swashbuckling rescuer of aristocrats, "The Scarlet Pimpernel" was the blueprint for what became known as the masked-avenger genre. As Anne Perry writes in h...

Review: "'Many men write well and tell a story well, but few possess the art of giving individuality to their characters so happily and easily as you...'" "Thus wrote the publisher John Blackwood in February 1857 to a shy and ambitious new author, whom he had not yet met, George Eliot. Shielded b...