September 1st, 2010
Author: Mrs Aeneas Gunn
This fine Australian drama is based on the memoirs of Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, the first white woman ever to journey into the Australian Outback.
Emotional and inspirational this is an intimate portrait of a pioneering woman who overcame adverse conditions to be with her man of the land. The cinematography of the Australian outback is breathtaking and the script paints a believable examination of what it must have been like to be a female living in a tough and unforgiving land.
June 20th, 2010
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
THE SCARLET LETTER exposes the moral rigidity of a 17th-Century Puritan New England community when faced with the illegitimate child of a young mother. Regarded as the first real heroine of American fiction, it is Hester Prynne′s strength of character that resonates with the reader when her harsh sentence is cast. It is in her refusal to reveal the identity of the father in the face of her accusers that Hawthorne champions his heroine and berates the weakness of Society for attacking the innocent.
April 20th, 2010
Author: Stieg Larsson
This is a violent and bloody thriller, a sinister family saga, a mystery of massive financial fraud and an ambiguous and haunting love story. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a genuinely complex and unique contribution to crime fiction.
March 20th, 2010
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina seems to have everything – beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky.
February 20th, 2010
Author: Emily Bronte
Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him. As Heathcliff’s bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.
December 10th, 2009
Author: Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Bronte’s first published novel, Jane Eyre was immediately recognised as a work of genius when it appeared in 1847. Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. How she takes up the post of governess at Thornfield Hall, meets and loves Mr Rochester and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage are elements in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman’s passionate search for a wider and richer life than that traditionally accorded to her sex in Victorian society.
October 28th, 2009
Author: Jackie French
This is the story of a Scottish wolfhound called Snarf and his owner, Hekja, whose simple but happy lives change unrecognisably when their village is raided by Vikings.As a puppy, Snarf is fortuitously rescued by a young girl called Hekja when he is badly injured. Both are then captured by raiding Vikings and transported to ‘Vinland’ with Freydis Ericsdottir, half-sister of Leif Ericson (who is usually credited with ‘discovering’ America. Both Freydis and Leif are the children of Eric the Red, who founded the Greenland colony.)This page-turning story is set against an historical backdrop and the book is both fascinating and historically informative
September 16th, 2009
Author: LLoyd Jones
In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives. On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosi …
August 5th, 2009
Author: Anthony Bourke and John Rendall
In 2008, YouTube.com featured an extraordinary film clip that soon became an internet phenomenon. It showed the emotional reunion of two young men and their pet lion, Christian, after they had left him in Africa with Born Free’s George Adamson, who would introduce him into his rightful home in the wild.
