Twentieth Century Classics

A story from India in which a little girl plants a cherry seed and cares for the cherry tree through its difficult life. About life and growing older.

From amazon dot com: "This slim book starts with the meeting of an English traveler and an enigmatic elderly Frenchwoman on an Aegean island. He is captivated by her painting of a busy Caribbean port in the shadow of a volcano, which leads her to tell him the story of her childhood in that town back at the beginning of the twentieth century. The tale she unfolds, set in the tropical luxury of the island of Saint-Jacques, is one of romantic intrigue and decadence involving the descendants of slaves and a fading French aristocracy. Then, on the night of the annual Mardi Gras ball, a whole world comes to a catastrophic and haunting end." From Google Books: "Originally published in 1953, this novel was immediately hailed as a rare sweep of color across the drab post-war years. Fermor's writing about this tropical island is as beautiful and haunting as the sound of the violins rising from the water, which is all that remains of the island and its inhabitants."

A classic 20th-century novel. Sammy Rice, a weapons scientist and one of the "backroom boys" of World War Two, suffers from a crippling disability that has left him cynical, disillusioned, and riddled with self-doubt. But, when the enemy begins dropping a new form of booby bomb, causing terrible casualties, Sammy alone has the know-how to defuse it. Face to face with real danger, he must confront his inadequacies - if he is to succeed.

Langston Hughes's spare yet eloquent tribute to his people has been cherished for generations. Now, acclaimed photographer Charles R. Smith Jr. interprets this beloved poem in vivid sepia photographs that capture the glory, the beauty, and the soul of being a black American today.

"Sir Osbert's novel Before the Bombardment is one of the finest pieces of sustained satire in English; it can take its place beside The Way of All Flesh without apology." - Robertson Davies

The amorous and pastoral problems of a very liberal minister. Satirical, light comedy.

"Kat Howard--intelligent, beautiful, naively outspoken, and passionately idealistic--catches the eye of Henry VIII and improbably becomes his fifth wife. A teenager who has grown up far from court, she is wholly unused to the corruption and intrigue that now surround her. It is a time of great upheaval, as unscrupulous courtiers maneuver for power while religious fanatics--both Protestant and Catholic--fight bitterly for their competing beliefs. Soon Katharine is drawn into a perilous showdown with Thomas Cromwell, the much-feared Lord Privy Seal, as her growing influence over the King begins to threaten too many powerful interests."--P. of cover.

Riceyman Steps, first published in 1923, is set in “dingy and sordid” Clerkenwell, in central London, where “existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter.” It’s there that Henry Earlforward runs a gloomy, dusty store full of secondhand books. He eats less and less with every day, keeps his young servant Elsie working long hours for minimal pay, and never lights a candle when darkness will do. One day he takes notice of Violet, a middle-aged widow who owns a confectionary shop nearby, and they become husband and wife soon after. It quickly becomes clear that his miserliness, his “grand passion and vice,” has rubbed off on Violet, threatening her chances at happiness just as much as his. His obsession also imperils Elsie’s ability to help her lover Joe, who returned from World War I with shell shock, and who desperately needs her. The year it was published Riceyman Steps won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. Its tragic tone represents a departure from many of the novels and stories Arnold Bennett set in the “Five Towns,” the fictional location inspired by his Staffordshire childhood. Instead, it reflects the pain and disappointment of the years immediately following the Great War. As Earlforward tells a customer early on, “We’re not quite straight here yet. The truth is, we haven’t been straight since 1914.”