The Haunted Hotel

Wilkie Collins

"An eminent doctor is visited by a desperate woman with a question- am I evil, or insane? When the letters from Italian servant to his wife in London suddenly cease, she is convinced he has been murdered. In the darkened bedroom of a mouldering palazzo by the Grand Canal, an English lord sickens and sud...

Mapp and Lucia

E. F. Benson

Miss Elizabeth Mapp reigns supreme over the village of Tilling... until the advent of Mrs Emmeline Lucas, or 'Lucia' to her friends. No one could compete, surely, with Lucia's formidable armoury: her duchesses, her Italian, her financial speculations, her celebrated recipe for Lobster a la Riseholme....

The Gifts of Reading

Robert Macfarlane

From the acclaimed author of The Old Ways and Landmarks -- an essay on the beauty and joy of reading, for anyone who has ever loved a book Every book is a kind of gift to its reader, and the act of giving books is charged with a special emotional resonance. It is a meeting of three minds (the giver, the...