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Contents: The goophered grapevine.--Po' Sandy.--Mars Jeem's nightmare.--The conjurer's revenge.--Sis' Becky's pickaninny.--The gray wolf's ha'nt.--Hot-Foot Hannibal. Note these stories were written in the dialect of the American south of the 19th century. It employes terms and descriptions common to that era which modern readers may find offensive.

Most of Hawthorne's early writings were magazine stories subsequently collected in books. His second story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, includes many of his best-known short stories. Among the 22 stories in this edition are "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappucini's Daughter," "The Birthmark," "Egotism, or the Bosom Serpent," "Roger Malvin's Burial," and "The Artist of the Beautiful."

Pictures from Italy is a travelogue by Charles Dickens, written in 1846. The book reveals the concerns of its author as he presents, according to Kate Flint, the country "like a chaotic magic-lantern show, fascinated both by the spectacle it offers, and by himself as spectator"

This collection of Thomas Hardy's stories include storie stories of witchcraft, smuggling, mystery, humour and heartache.

Lonely Viviette Constanine awaits the return of her husband from a hunting expedition to Africa. She becomes involved with a young astronomer, Swithin St.Cleeve, who observes the night sky from a disused tower on her estate. Despite their differing ages and social backgrounds they soon find their destinies are linked - but with fateful consequences.

In 1820 Salem Street is sparkling and new: eight small terraced houses built by a Lancashire mill owner for his best workers. Annie Gibson's family is one of them, but when Annie's mother dies her world changes and not all for the good.

Two young men come to the forbidding desert at the foot of Black Mesa. Paul Manning, a would-be writer from Kansas City, is running from memories that haunt him. Wess Kintell, a tall, grey-eyed Texan, is hiding from his shady past. Together, they decide to start a cattle ranch at Black Mesa.

Want to escape to a place where the sun always shines? Where passionate music, magic potions and the drama of Africa are cooled by the genius of Arabic culture? Miranda Innes and her partner Dan Pearce were lured into buying a beautiful long-neglected riad in the heart of the magical pink-walled city of Marrakech. Only after they'd begun their restoration work did they find that nothing in this place of smoke and mirrors was quite what it seemed.

Lally Fraser, widowed at twenty, seeks comfort with dashing young millowner Roly Sinclair. But when she finds she is expecting his baby, she turns to his dour brother Harry. Secretly in love with her, Harry offers her marriage. Roly, though, is anything but pleased. Threatening scandal or worse, he sets out to destroy them both. And when Harry is injured in a vicious attack, Lally must take charge of the mills to protect her children and the man she is growing to love from his worst enemy - his own brother.

Carrie Preston is used to hard work - oldest of ten, with an imcompetent mother and a drunken father, she struggles to find food for the younger children. But nothing could have prepared her for the day fate deals her family the cruellest of hands, rendering the Prestons more helpless and desperate than ever.