The Garment by Catherine Cookson

Product Details:

Title: The Garment

Author: Catherine Cookson

Language: English

Format: Print

ISBN-10: 0-552-13716-2

ISBN-13: 9780552137164

Publisher: Corgi Books

Place of publication: UK

Year Published: 1988

Binding: Pocket

Pages: 287

Dimensions (mm): 80 x 110 x 20

Shipping Weight (g): 200

Synopsis:

A woman faces up to the fact that her marriage is a sham and will never bring her the fulfilment she desperately needs.

Full Description:

Motherhood is every woman's right and the natural outcome of a happy marriage. What then is the answer when a normal and beautiful young woman is forced to recognise, after two years as the wife of a country parson in the north of England, that her own marriage is a sham and will never bring her the fulfilment she desperately needs?
Grace Rouse is faced by this situation and like many other women before her, she seeks to escape a mounting sense of frustration and despair by turning from the husband she has tried in vain to love to the comfort and release offered by another man.
The final outcome however does not conform to pattern, and Grace is forced to wage a war between a man who can give her children and a man who passionately desires children but can only give them his name.
The Garment is an early work by Catherine Cookson, who has never written a novel with a more challenging theme. It is absorbing and very moving and written with compassion and a sense of real concern for the issues it involves.

About the Author:

Catherine Cookson was born in Tyne Dock, the illegitimate daughter of a poverty-stricken woman, Kate, whom she believed to be her older sister. She began work in service but eventually moved south to Hastings, where she met and married Tom Cookson, a local grammar-school master.  Although she was originally acclaimed as a regional writer - her novel The Round Tower won the Winifred Holtby Award for the best regional novel of 1968 - her readership quickly spread throughout the world, and her many best-selling novels established her as one of the most popular of contemporary women novelists.

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie

Title: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

Author: Agatha Christie

Language: English

Publisher: Fontana/Collins

Genre/Subject: short story collection

Place of publication: UK

Year Published: 1980

Edition: Sixth Impression

Binding: Pocket

Number of Pages: 224

Dimensions (mm): 160 x 108 x 14 mm

Shipping Weight (g): 200 g

Description:

When a priceless ruby, belonging to a Far Eastern prince, is stolen from him whilst he is on a visit to England, Poirot is asked to make a quiet investigation. The ruby was destined for the prince’s bride-to-be and a scandal must be avoided.
Poirot does Christmas the English way, pursuing a case at the same time. This story was originally much shorter and appeared under the same title in The Sketch magazine, December 1923. This lengthened version wasn’t to appear in print until 1960, in the collection of the same name. It appeared in 1961 in the US collection Double Sin and Other Stories, under the title The Theft of the Royal Ruby. It was also published in 1997 in While The Light Lasts (UK) and The Harlequin Tea Set and Other Stories (US), titled The Christmas Adventure.
The story was adapted for TV in 1991 and used the US title of the story. It starred David Suchet as Poirot. It appeared as a two-part episode in the Japanese anime series Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple on NHK in 2004. The story was also dramatised for BBC Radio 4, under the original UK title, in 2006, John Moffatt reprising his role as Poirot.

Contents:

Forward by the Author 7

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding  9

The Mystery of the Spanish Chest  14

The Under Dog  96

Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds  158

The Dream   174

Greenshaw's Folly   200

About the Author:

Born in Torquay in 1890, Agatha Christie became, and remains, the best-selling novelist of all time.
She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world’s longest-running play - The Mousetrap. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and a billion in 44 foreign languages.
Agatha Christie created the detective Hercule Poirot in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). She achieved wide popularity with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and produced a total of eighty novels and short-story collections over six decades.

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http://www.agathachristie.com/about-christie/

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They Do it with Mirrors by Agatha Christie

Title: They Do It with Mirrors

Author: Agatha Christie

Language: English

Publisher: Fontana/Collins

Genre/Subject: detective fiction

Place of publication: UK

Year Published: 1980

Edition: Fifteenth Impression

Binding: Paperback

Number of Pages: 188 pages

Dimensions (mm): 180 x 108 x 12 mm

Shipping Weight (g): 100 g

Description:

A man is shot at in a juvenile reform home - but someone else dies
Miss Marple senses danger when she visits a friend living in a Victorian mansion which doubles as a rehabilitation centre for delinquents. Her fears are confirmed when a youth fires a revolver at the administrator, Lewis Serrocold. Neither is injured. But a mysterious visitor, Mr Gilbrandsen, is less fortunate - shot dead simultaneously in another part of the building.
Pure coincidence? Miss Marple thinks not, and vows to discover the real reason for Mr Gilbrandsen’s visit.

About the Author:

Agatha Christie also wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and was occasionally published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan.
Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time. She wrote eighty crime novels and story collections, fourteen plays, and several other books. Her books have sold roughly four billion copies and have been translated into 45 languages. She is the creator of the two most enduring figures in crime literature-Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple-and author of The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of modern theatre.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, England, U.K., as the youngest of three. The Millers had two other children: Margaret Frary Miller (1879-1950), called Madge, who was eleven years Agatha's senior, and Louis Montant Miller (1880-1929), called Monty, ten years older than Agatha.
During the First World War, she worked at a hospital as a nurse; later working at a hospital pharmacy, a job that influenced her work, as many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison.
On Christmas Eve 1914 Agatha married Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind Hicks. They divorced in 1928, two years after Christie discovered her husband was having an affair.
Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, came out in 1920. During this marriage, Agatha published six novels, a collection of short stories, and a number of short stories in magazines.
In late 1926, Agatha's husband, Archie, revealed that he was in love with another woman, Nancy Neele, and wanted a divorce. On 8 December 1926 the couple quarreled, and Archie Christie left their house Styles in Sunningdale, Berkshire, to spend the weekend with his mistress at Godalming, Surrey. That same evening Agatha disappeared from her home, leaving behind a letter for her secretary saying that she was going to Yorkshire. Her disappearance caused an outcry from the public, many of whom were admirers of her novels. Despite a massive manhunt, she was not found for eleven days.
In 1930, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan (Sir Max from 1968) after joining him in an archaeological dig. Their marriage was especially happy in the early years and remained so until Christie's death in 1976. In 1977, Mallowan married his longtime associate, Barbara Parker.
Christie frequently used familiar settings for her stories. Christie's travels with Mallowan contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Other novels (such as And Then There Were None) were set in and around Torquay, where she was born. Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Hotel Pera Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railway. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author. The Greenway Estate in Devon, acquired by the couple as a summer residence in 1938, is now in the care of the National Trust.
Christie often stayed at Abney Hall in Cheshire, which was owned by her brother-in-law, James Watts. She based at least two of her stories on the hall: the short story The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, which is in the story collection of the same name, and the novel After the Funeral. "Abney became Agatha's greatest inspiration for country-house life, with all the servants and grandeur which have been woven into her plots.
During the Second World War, Christie worked in the pharmacy at University College Hospital of University College, London, where she acquired a knowledge of poisons that she put to good use in her post-war crime novels.
To honour her many literary works, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1956 New Year Honours. The next year, she became the President of the Detection Club. In the 1971 New Year Honours she was promoted Dame Commander o

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The Slave by Elechi Amadi

Title: The Slave

Author: Elechi Amadi

ISBN 10: 0435902105

ISBN 13: 978-0435902100

Language: English

Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books

Genre/Subject: Novel / Fiction in English, Nigeria, Igbo (African people)

Place of publication: UK

Year Published: June 1979 (African Writers Series)

Edition: First

Binding: Paperback

Number of Pages: 151 pages

Dimensions (mm): 184 x 122 x 12 cm

Shipping Weight (g): 100 g

Description:

The Slave is set against the background of Nigerian traditional culture which is becoming ever more difficult to reconstruct.

Olumati comes back hesitantly to live in his ancestral village of Aliiji. His struggle against odds for existence and recognition forms the centre of this story, which ends with his return to the shrine whence he came, to become the slave of the god Amadiohu.

About the Author:

Elechi Amadi was born in Aluu (near Port Harcourt), in the Delta region of Eastern Nigeria, into an Ibo family, representing a minority nation (tribe), the Ikwere. He studied at the Government College in Umuahia, and like other major Nigerian writers, he was educated at the University College of Ibadan. Its legendary English department and the student magazine The Horn encouraged a number of aspiring writers, including Wole Soyinka (b. 1934), Christopher Okigbo (1932-67), John Pepper Clark (b. 1935), and Cole Omotso. Amadi, however, studied natural sciences. His native language was Ekwerri but he published his writings in English. In 1957 he married Dorah Ohale; they had eight children.

Amadi received his B. Sc. in physics and mathematic in 1959. He worked in 1959-60 as a landsurveyor in Enugu and then as a science teacher in Protestant mission schools in Oba and Ahoada. In 1963 Amadi joined the Federal army with the rank of captain. He was assigned to teach at the military school in Zaria. After resigning, he worked as a teacher at the Anglican Grammar School in Port Harcourt. During the Nigerian civil war (1966-1970) Amadi was twice arrested and detained by the Biafran government - a former officer of the Nigerian army was politically a doubtful person. He joined the Federal army again and with the war's end Amadi worked for the government of the newly constituted Rivers State, later becoming head of the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Education. From 1984 to 1987 he was writer-in-residence and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at College of Education in Port Harcour. In 1989-90 he served as Commissioner of Lands and Housing. Amadi was awarded in 1973 the International Writers Program grant, and in 1992 he received the Rivers State Silver Jubilee Merit award. In 2007, at the age of 74.

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Paradise News by David Lodge

Title: Paradise News

Author: David Lodge

ISBN 10: 0140162785

ISBN 13: 978-0140167283

Language: English

Publisher: Penguin Books

Genre/Subject: Literature Fiction / Contemporary

Place of publication: UK

Year Published: June 1, 1993

Binding: Pocket

Number of Pages: 369 pages

Dimensions (mm): 181 x 111 x 25 mm

Shipping Weight (g): 220 g

Description:

Paradise, tourist style. It's a very long way from home.
Bernard Walsh is in Hawaii on family business, escorting his querulous father to the bedside of a long-forgotten aunt. His mission transports him from quiet obscurity in Rummridge, England, to a lush tropical playground, from cloistered solitude into the unfamiliar company of package tourists: honeymooners; young women looking for Mr. Nice; families nuclear and fissile. But it is the island itself that holds the most astonishing surprises, as an accidental encounter opens up to Bernard possibilities of life, and love, never dreamed of in his normally overcast habitat. Paradise News is an enchanting--and very funny--portrait of the late flowering of an honest man.
Bernard Walsh is planning a quiet visit to his sick aunt in Hawaii. A cynical ex-priest in search of a well-needed vacation, he is unprepared for this zany package tour from Hell populated with all the "types": dueling newlyweds, boring salesmen, video happy seniors, romance starved spinsters, and a sexy native girl on a collision course with fate (or at least Walsh's father). Lodge combines an interesting mix of viewpoints and writing styles, switching among characters and including such diverse approaches as diaries and postcards. Essential for anyone who loves to travel or wishes they could, this is highly recommended for vacation reading collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/91.
-Suzanne C. Garrison-Terry, Dowling Coll. Lib., Oakdale, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Lodge combines his past fictional interests in Catholicism (The British Museum is Falling Down, etc.) and social satire (Nice Work, etc.) to produce this always engaging and clever tale of innocents abroad. The unlikely naif is Bernard Walsh, a rather dour, middle- aged, part-time instructor in theology from a minor college in Lodge's fictional town of Rummidge. What we don't know at first is that he's also a former priest, the son of Irish-born immigrants to South London who have never become reconciled with their son's descent into apostasy--his now ``wasted life.'' When the family's first black sheep summons Bernard to her deathbed in Hawaii, he agrees to attempt a reunion between her and her brother--Bernard's cantankerous father--whom she hasn't spoken to in 40 years. Getting old Jack Walsh to travel halfway around the world is just the start of Bernard's problems. Once they arrive in ``paradise,'' events conspire to postpone the meeting in which brother and sister will confront some long-suppressed family secrets. Bernard's personal journey--his loss of virginity, and his leap forward in self- confidence--is all the more enjoyable because Lodge sets it against a larger profile of the fellow Brits who come to Hawaii on Bernard's charter. There's Russ Harvey, a yuppie honeymooner, and his Ice Maiden wife, whose vacation is spoiled from the start by a revelation at the wedding reception; there are a couple of elderly second honeymooners who record everything on video; there are the two spinster teachers in search of ``Someone Nice.'' And, of course, no Lodge novel would be complete without a pompous academic--in this case, an anthropology prof who specializes in tourism, which he is ``deconstructing'' on a grant from the British Association of Travel Agents. American litigiousness and health policy come in for some well-deserved mockery along the merry way. Narrative tricks aside, Lodge's Catholicism and his gimlet eye make him the true heir of Evelyn Waugh. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author:

Professor David Lodge is a graduate and Honorary Fellow of University College London. He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught from 1960 until 1987, when he retired to write full-time.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was Chairman of the Judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989, and is the author of numerous works of literary criticism, mainly about the English and American novel, and literary theory. He is also the author ofThe Art of Fiction (1992), a collection of short articles first published in theIndependent on Sunday. David Lodge is a successful playwright and screenwriter, and has adapted both his own work and other writers' novels for television. His novels includeThe Picturegoers(1960),The British Museum is Falling Down(1965),Changing Places(1975),Therapy(1995),Thinks...(2001), and his most recent,Deaf Sentence(2008).

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The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

Title: The Great Gatsby

Author: F Scott Fitzgerald

ISBN 10: 0140620184

ISBN 13: 978-0140620184

Language: English

Publisher: Penguin Popular Classics

Genre/Subject: Contemporary Fiction, Classics

Place of publication: UK

Year Published: 25 Jan 2007

Binding: Paperback

Number of Pages: 192 pages

Dimensions (mm): 111 x 7 x 181 mm

Description:

In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.
It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author:

F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the major American writers of the twentieth century -- a figure whose life and works embodied powerful myths about our national dreams and aspirations. Fitzgerald was talented and perceptive, gifted with a lyrical style and a pitch-perfect ear for language. He lived his life as a romantic, equally capable of great dedication to his craft and reckless squandering of his artistic capital. He left us one sure masterpiece, The Great Gatsby; a near-masterpiece, Tender Is the Night; and a gathering of stories and essays that together capture the essence of the American experience. His writings are insightful and stylistically brilliant; today he is admired both as a social chronicler and a remarkably gifted artist.

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Whirlwind by James Clavell

Title: Whirlwind

Author: James Clavell

ISBN 10: 0-340-40684-4

ISBN 13: 0-340-40684-4

Language: English

Publisher: Coronet Books HODDER STOUGHTON LTD

Genre/Subject: Historical novel

Place of publication: London

Year Published: 1987

Edition: first

Binding: Pocket

Number of Pages: 1343

Dimensions (mm): 180 x 110 x 40 mm (4.4 x 7 x 2.2 inches)

Shipping Weight (g):600 gram (1.2 pounds)

Description:

Presents the story of three weeks in Tehran in February 1979: three weeks of fanaticism, passion, self-sacrifice and heartbreak. Caught between the revolutionaries and the forces of international intrigue is a team of professional pilots. They are ordered to flee to safety with their helicopters.
Andrew Gavallan, based in Scotland, runs a helicopter company operating in Iran during the Shah's reign. When Khomeini comes to power, Gavallan must get his pilots and their families, and his valuable helicopters, out of the riot-torn country. Complicating matters is his power struggle with his company's secret owner, the Noble House of Hong Kong. The pilots' escape efforts form the basic story but as usual in a Clavell novel the action sweeps across many lives: lovers, spies, fanatics, revolutionaries, friends and betrayers. British, Finnish, American, and Iranian, all are caught up in a deadly religious and political upheaval. Clavell effectively portrays the chilling and bewildering encounters when Westernized lifestyle clashes with harsh ancient traditions. This novel, the fifth in what he calls his Asian Series (Noble H o use, King Rat, Tai Pan, Shogun) is certain to be in much demand. A.M.B. Amantia, Population Crisis Committee Lib., Washington D.C.

So abundant in sub-plots, characters, intrigue and atmosphere that its 1,000-plus pages seem barely adequate. Some of the most enjoyable reading around. Daily Mail 'Clavell seems to creep inside the very soul of the land and the people ... A damn good read' Boston Herald WHIRLWIND is strongly structured, skilfully plotted, rich in detail and very entertaining. Clavell brings the grimness and grandeur of an ancient land to life San Francisco Chronicle James Clavell does more than entertain. He transports us into worlds we've not known, stimulating, educating, questioning ... a wonder of detail Washington Post The author handles the plot with all the confident authority of a ring-master, keeping a half-dozen themes and a formidable cast of characters moving along at a cracking pace. By the end I was breathless and lost in admiration at the sheer professionalism of it all Sunday Telegraph

About the Author:

James Clavell (1924-1994) born Charles Edmund Dumaresq Clavell was a British novelist, screenwriter, director and World War II veteran and POW. Clavell is best known for his epic Asian Saga series of novels and their televised adaptations, along with such films as The Great Escape, The Fly and To Sir, with Love.

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