Frank Carlson Library

Embittered by a false accusation and disappointed in friendship and love, the weaver Silas Marner retreats into a life alone with his loom and his gold. Fate steals his gold and replaces it with a golden-haired foundling child.

The final novel by Charles Dickens, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", was unfinished at the time of his death in 1870. The novel revolves around John Jasper, choirmaster and opium addict, who is the guardian of his orphaned nephew Edwin Drood. Before the death of his parents, Edwin was promised to marry Rosa Bud, another orphan, but their affections have cooled upon reaching adulthood. Rosa has also attracted the affections of Jasper, her teacher, as...

The History of Mr. Polly is a 1910 comic novel by H. G. Wells. The protagonist of The History of Mr. Polly is an antihero inspired by H. G. Wells's early experiences in the drapery trade: Alfred Polly, born circa 1870, a timid and directionless young man living in Edwardian England, who despite his own bumbling achieves contented serenity with little help from those around him. Mr. Polly's most striking characteristic is his "innate sense of epithet",...

First published in 1854, Hard Times is a profoundly moving, articulate and searing indictment of the life-reducing effects of the industrial revolution, and certain aspects of enlightenment thinking. Set in the fictional midlands mill-town of Coketown, the narrative centers on the industrialist, Mr Thomas Gradgrind, whose belief in scientific utilitarianism skews his world view and is a motive force, carrying the narrative towards farce

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"Plain Tales From the Hills" is a classic collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. Contained here in this volume are the following tales: Lispeth, Three and-an Extra, Thrown Away, Miss Youghal's Sais, 'Yoked with an Unbeliever', False Dawn, The Rescue of Pluffles, Cupid's Arrows, The Three Musketeers, His Chance in Life, Watches of the Night, The Other Man, Consequences, The Conversion of Aurelian McGoggin, The Taking of Lungtungpen, A Germ-Destroyer,...

Dubliners is a collection of short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. It's a snapshot of Dublin society in the early 20th century, capturing the lives of ordinary people in various stages of their existence. The stories are interconnected thematically, offering a vivid portrayal of the city and its inhabitants. The collection consists of 15 stories, each exploring different facets of human experience, often with a focus on the mundane...

Lyra and Will find themselves at the center of a battle between the forces of the Authority and those gathered by Lyra's father, Lord Asriel.

"Just two years after completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate...

American novelist Winston Churchill (who bore no known relation to the British statesman of the same name) was regarded as a master of realist literature, and his novels paint a remarkably vivid picture of the daily lives of both the haves and the have-nots in the early-twentieth-century United States. The Dwelling-Place of Light focuses on a bitter struggle between mill workers and factory owners in a Massachusetts town—and the unforeseeable

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A boy, a patchwork girl, and a glass cat go on a mission to find the ingredients for a charm which will transform some people turned to marble.