David Case
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The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, an astonishingly...
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"A famous London financier vanishes from his bedroom, leaving no trace. Across town, a corpse is found in an architect's bathtub, wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez. The body is not that of the missing financier, so--whose body is it? When Lord Peter Wimsey is asked by his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, to help clear her architect of suspicion, he eagerly obliges. With the assistance of his valet, Bunter, a skilled amateur photographer,...
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Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s. The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. Cry, the Beloved Country...
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Featuring ten works of comedic short fiction, P.G Wodehouse's The Clicking of Cuthbert is comprised of stories about golfers that teach a lesson is an odd and amusing way. In A Woman is Only a Woman, the friendship between two men is threatened when they both fall in love with the same woman. Since she claims to like them equally, the two men decide to challenge each other to a game of golf, agreeing that the best golfer gets the woman's hand in marriage....
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Sally Nicholas is a pretty and popular American woman working as dance partner for hire. Orphaned, she and her brother, Fillmore, has been on their own for years. However, on Sally's twenty-first birthday, her life is changed when she learns that she and her brother have inherited a fortune, which they now have access to. Fillmore, who is overly ambitious, and impulsive intends on investing his money in schemes that promise fast wealth, in hopes to...
6) Adam Bede
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English
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Arthur's seduction of an innocent, young country girl results in remorse, suffering, and regret.
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English
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A decade after their wild boat ride adventure on the Thames river, J, Harris, and George reunite for another vacation. Older, richer, and fatter, but not wiser, the three men stumble through mishaps and surprises as they journey to Germany. First saying their goodbyes, J and Harris seek the approval of their wives, worried about leaving their kids. Their wives are supportive, secretly considering their husbands' trip from home as a vacation for themselves...
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A comic crime caper from the popular and prolific twentieth-century author of the Jeeves novels featuring Bertie Wooster.
When Ogden Ford, the chubby son of a divorced American millionaire, arrives at a posh English prep school, he sets in motion a dastardly plot. There's a new classics teacher at the school who's not who he purports to be ...
The schoolmaster in training, Peter Burns, is really working for Ogden's mother, who wants her son back...
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Overview: Anne, like her sisters Emily and Charlotte, published under a male pseudonym, Acton Bell, yet still this novel was scorned by many for its exposure of the abusive male chauvinism concealed, like all things sexual, during the Victorian Era. Just as she had to use a male pseudonym in order to be free to publish, as women authors were not yet deemed acceptable or bankable, Helen Graham, the novel's protagonist and a battered wife, assumes an...
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After nearly two decades in Britain, Bill Bryson took the decision to move back to the States for a few years, to let his kids experience life in another country, to give his wife the chance to shop until 10 p.m. seven nights a week, and, most of all, because he had read that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, and it was thus clear to him that his people needed him. But before leaving his much-loved...
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Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's brutally honest account of his experience as a militiaman during the Spanish Civil War.
In the last days of 1936, Spain was five months into a bitter civil war, in which volunteers from many countries were helping the elected government of the Spanish Republic battle a military coup led by General Francisco Franco and backed by Hitler and Mussolini. Some foreigners flocking to Spain had come for another reason:...
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"Little progress had been made by the Thames Valley Police since the discovery of a corpse in a North Oxford flat. The victim had been killed by a single stab wound to the stomach. The police had no weapon, no suspect, no motive, but within days of taking over the investigation, Chief Inspector Morse and Detective Sergeant Lewis uncover startling new information about the life and death of the victim, Dr. Felix McClure, late of Wolsey College, Oxford....
14) Lord Jim
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English
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The eponymous Jim is a young, good-looking, genial, and naive water-clerk on the Patna, a cargo ship plying Asian waters. He is, we are told, "the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of the deck." He also harbors romantic fantasies of adventure and heroism--which are promptly scuttled one night when the ship collides with an obstacle and begins to sink. Acting on impulse, Jim jumps overboard and lands in a lifeboat,...
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Classics - St. Charles Public Library
HPL Irish American Heritage Month 2025
HPL Irish Authors 2024
OBD Adult New Classics
HPL Irish American Heritage Month 2025
HPL Irish Authors 2024
OBD Adult New Classics
Description
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce and is a key work of twentieth century literature that remains as fresh, challenging and relevant as the day it was first published. It is a autobiographical novel and describes the early life and development of its central character, Stephen Dedalus (representing Joyce). Stephan, an intelligent but frail child, struggles toward maturity in Ireland at the turn of...
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A new edition of Heart of Darkness, the 1899 masterpiece by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad about a voyage up the Congo River into the Heart of Africa. The story is narrated by Charles Marlow, recalling his obsessive quest to locate the ivory trader Kurtz, who has become ensconced deep in the jungle managing a remote outpost. As he ventures further and further down the Congo, Marlow finds himself and his surroundings become increasingly untethered....
17) I, Claudius
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“One of the really remarkable books of our day”—the story of the Roman emperor on which the award-winning BBC TV series was based (The New York Times).
Once a rather bookish young man with a limp and a stammer, a man who spent most of his time trying to stay away from the danger and risk of the line of ascension, Claudius seemed an unlikely candidate for emperor. Yet, on the death of Caligula, Claudius...
Once a rather bookish young man with a limp and a stammer, a man who spent most of his time trying to stay away from the danger and risk of the line of ascension, Claudius seemed an unlikely candidate for emperor. Yet, on the death of Caligula, Claudius...
18) Smiley's people
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George Smiley novels volume 7
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English
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Description
In London at dead of night, George Smiley, sometime acting Chief of the Circus (aka the British Secret Service), is summoned from his lonely bed by news of the murder of an ex-agent. Lured back to active service, Smiley skillfully maneuvers his people -- "the no-men of no-man's land"--Into crisscrossing Paris, London, Germany, and Switzerland as he prepares for his own final, inevitable duel on the Berlin border with his Soviet counterpart and archenemy,...
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Overview: Alexandre Dumas's novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery - one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written - appears here in a newly revised translation. "This novel tells the story of Edmond Dantes, wrongfully imprisoned for life in the supposedly impregnable sea fortress the Chateau d'If. After a daring escape, and after unearthing a hidden treasure revealed to him by a fellow prisoner, he devotes the rest...
20) The commodore
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English
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The 18th Century heroes, Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin of the Royal Navy, are sent to the fever-ridden Gulf of Guinea to disrupt the slave trade. But their ultimate destination is Ireland where the French are mounting an invasion, a mission that will test Aubrey's seamanship and Maturin's talents as a secret agent. By the author of The Wine-Dark Sea.