Showing results by narrator "Wanda McCaddon" in All Categories

Johnson’s monumental history of the United States, from the first settlers to the Clinton administration, covers every aspect of American culture: politics, business, art, literature, science, society and customs, complex traditions, and religious beliefs. The story is told in terms of the men...

In this elegant set of stories, three modern women are touched in different ways by the paintings of Henri Matisse. In “Medusa’s Ankles,” a distinguished translator visits a hair salon hoping to regain a hint of her youthful looks. Hung on the wall before her is one of Matisse’s iconic...

In two breathtakingly accomplished novellas, A. S. Byatt explores the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion. In "Morpho Eugenia", a shipwrecked naturalist is rescued by a wealthy family...

This landmark biography penetrates the barriers of legend to bring to full and intimate life a man whose burning passions—for painting, women, and ideas—were matched by a compulsion to invent reality in his life no less than in his art. Here is the tragic story of a man who, from his teenage...

Young Ricky Alleyn has come to the picturesque fishing village of Deep Cove to write. Though the sleepy little town offers few diversions, Ricky manages to find the most distracting one of all: murder. For in a muddy ditch, he sees a dead equestrienne whose last leap was anything but an accident...

When the president of Ng'ombwana proposes to dispense with the usual security arrangements on an official visit to London, his old school mate, Chief Superintendent Alleyn, is called in to try to persuade him otherwise. Alleyn performs his mission so successfully that on the night of the...

A ritual dance becomes a murderous mambo… The village of South Mardian always observes the winter solstice with an ancient, mystical sword dance, complete with costumed performers. But for one of them, the excitement proves too heady, and his decapitation turns the fertility rite into a...

Lord Pastern fired his revolver. The figure in the spotlight fell and the coup-de-theatre had become murder. Could Inspector Alleyn believe Pastern had let hatred of his future son-in-law go too far? When Lord Pastern Bagott takes up with the hot music of Breezy Bellair and His Boys, his...

Hong Kong is the world's most exciting city, at once fascinating and exasperating, a tangle of contradictions. It is a dazzling amalgam of conspicuous consumption and primitive poverty, the most architecturally incongruous yet undeniably beautiful urban panorama of all. Through firsthand...

This is a provocative and panoramic survey of 2,000 years of English history. Johnson tells the story of how a small nation, living in a geographical backwater, developed unique economic and political institutions, expanded its territory, and saddled upon it the frame of a modern industrial...

Murder gets into the act in Ngaio Marsh's wittiest and most readable novel—and aShakespearean actor takes his final bow. Beautiful Troy Alleyn, artist wife of Inspector Alleyn, had been warned about the famed old Shakespearean actor Sir Henry and his eccentric household. But she was not...

The aim of this work is not a history of events but an account of the achievement and spirit of Greece. “What the Greeks discovered, how they brought a new world to birth out of the dark confusions of an old world that had crumbled away, is full of meaning for us today who have seen an old...

This is an extraordinary chronicle of the fifteen years, 1815–1830, that laid the foundations of modern society. It is a history of people, ideas, politics, manners, morals, economics, art, science and technology, diplomacy, business and commerce, literature, and revolution. From Wellington at...

The Mill on the Floss, first published in 1860, tells the story of Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom as they grow from children to young adults in the small rural town of St. Ogg's, England. Intelligent and passionate, Maggie yearns to develop her mind and break free of the constraints of her provincial village. Though she loves her brother above anyone else, Tom's rigid, pragmatic personality often conflicts with Maggie's headstrong nature, with increasingly tragic consequences.

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, distinguished historian, and bestselling author Barbara W. Tuchman finally turns her sights homeward. Here she analyzes the American Revolution in a brilliantly original way, placing the war in the historical context of the centuries-long conflicts between...

Beautiful, spirited Isabel Archer, an American heiress newly arrived in Europe, is widely expected to quickly marry. But Isabel does not look to a man to furnish her with destiny; instead she desires, with grace and courage, to find it herself. Two eligible suitors are refused in favor of her...

Jane Eyre, the plain yet spirited governess, introduced a new kind of heroine to literature: one whose virtuous integrity, sharp intellect, and tireless perseverance broke through class barriers to win equal stature with the man she loved. Orphaned and subject to a cruel regime at Lowood charity...

A man dies with his hand on a radio dial. A disguised aristocrat finds murder at the opening night of a play. A cryptogram produces death in an English churchyard. These are just a few of the situations that confront Scotland Yard's Inspector Roderick Alleyn who, with his lovely wife Agatha Troy...

“If a woman really believes herself to be a lower kind of being, she should place herself in subjection….If not, let her show her power of choosing something better.” This is the challenge thrown down to George Eliot’s heroine, Esther Lyon, who dreams of marrying into a life of...

Rachel Vinrace, Virginia Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at 24, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who wishes to teach Rachel "how to live." Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates.