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Oxford University Press
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How fair is fair trade? When the American models leave the Malaysian island after their fashion shoot, they take away more than just photographs, and leave behind a family that will never be the same again. Bookworms World Stories collect stories written in English from around the world. These stories from China, India, Malaysia, and Singapore, are by writers Lui Hong, Attia Hosain, Preeta Samarasan, Hwee Hwee Tan, Ridjal Noor, Shashi Deshpande, Ovidia Yu, Nora Adam, Nirupama Subramanian, and Catherine Lim. |
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Jane Eyre is alone in the world. Disliked by her aunt's family, she is sent away to school. Here she learns that a young girl, with neither money nor family to support her, can expect little from the world. She survives, but she wants more from life than simply to survive: she wants respect, and love. When she goes to work for Mr Rochester, she hopes she has found both at once. But the sound of strange laughter, late at night, behind a locked door, warns her that her troubles are only beginning. |
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London in the 1830s was no place to be if you were a hungry ten-year-old boy, an orphan without friends or family, with no home to go to, and only a penny in your pocket to buy a piece of bread. But Oliver Twist finds some friends — Fagin, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates. They give him food and shelter, and play games with him, but it is not until some days later that Oliver finds out what kind of friends they are and what kind of 'games' they play ... |
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The wind is strong on the Yorkshire moors. There are few trees, and fewer houses, to block its path. There is one house, however, that does not hide from the wind. It stands out from the hill and challenges the wind to do its worst. The house is called Wuthering Heights. When Mr Earnshaw brings a strange, small, dark child back home to Wuthering Heights, it seems he has opened his doors to trouble. He has invited in something that, like the wind, is safer kept out of the house. |
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'Curtis Colt didn't kill that liquor store woman, and that's a fact. It's not right that he should have to ride the lightning — that's what prisoners call dying in the electric chair. Curtis doesn't belong in it, and I can prove it.' But can Curtis's girlfriend prove it? Murder has undoubtedly been done, and if Curtis doesn't ride the lightning for it, then who will? These seven short stories, by well-known writers such as Dashiel Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, and Nancy Pickard, will keep you on the edge of your seat. |
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Dublin, Ireland, in the early years of the twentieth century. It is a poor city, and there is hard drinking, dishonesty, and violence just beneath the surface everywhere you look. Glance inside a few people's lives, and you soon find loneliness and disappointment, self-hate, and despair. The people in these stories are paralysed: locked into the circles of their everyday lives, where they are caught waiting between life and death. For some, there is a way out — but will circumstances, or their own fear, stop them from taking it? |
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'Calling all cars, calling all cars. Here's the story on the Smoke Rise kidnapping. The missing boy is eight years old, fair hair, wearing a red sweater. His name is Jeffry Reynolds, son of Charles Reynolds, chauffeur to Douglas King.' The police at the 87th Precinct hate kidnappers. And these kidnappers are stupid, too. They took the wrong boy — the chauffeur's son instead of the son of the rich tycoon, Douglas King. And they want a ransom of $500,000. A lot of money. But it's not too much to pay for a little boy's life ...is it? |
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Arthur Clennam is back in England after many years abroad. He finds his mother as cold and hard as ever, but his father's recent death has thrown up a mystery, and he is determined to get to the bottom of it. Could it have anything to do with Little Dorrit, the quiet, kind girl who sews for his mother and goes back at night to her home in the Marshalsea Prison? As Arthur gets to know the Dorrit family, he is too busy looking for the truth about his mother's secret to notice that he has perhaps found the answer to his own happiness ... |
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Sometimes the Dashwood girls do not seem like sisters. Elinor is all calmness and reason, and can be relied upon for practical, common sense opinions. Marianne, on the other hand, is all sensibility, full of passionate and romantic feeling. She has no time for dull common sense — or for middle-aged men of thirty-five, long past the age of marriage. True love can only be felt by the young, of course. And if your heart is broken at the age of seventeen, how can you ever expect to recover from the passionate misery that fills your life, waking and sleeping? |
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Mrs Proudie, the warlike wife of the new Bishop of Barchester, brings the Reverend Slope into the Bishop's Palace to help dominate her husband and rule the local clergy. But Slope is a snake in the grass, determined to find a rich wife, to win advancement for himself, even to fight Mrs Proudie if necessary. Their battle becomes a furious dance, involving rich, pretty Widow Bold, angry Archdeacon Grantly, man-eating Signora Neroni, gentle Mr Harding, confused Parson Quiverful and his fourteen noisy children. This classic comic story is Trollope's most famous novel. |
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In a gloomy, neglected house Miss Havisham sits, as she has sat year after year, in a wedding dress and veil that were once white, and are now faded and yellow with age. Her face is like a death's head; her dark eyes burn with bitterness and hate. By her side sits a proud and beautiful girl, and in front of her, trembling with fear in his thick country boots, stands young Pip. Miss Havisham stares at Pip coldly, and murmurs to the girl at her side: 'Break his heart, Estella. Break his heart!' |
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Gatsby's mansion on Long Island blazes with light, and the beautiful, the wealthy, and the famous drive out from New York to drink Gatsby's champagne and to party all night long. But Jay Gatsby, the owner of all this wealth, wants only one thing — to find again the woman of his dreams, the woman he has held in his heart and his memory for five long years. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. It captures perfectly the Jazz Age of the 1920s, and goes deep into the hollow heart of the American Dream. |
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When a handsome young man begins to court Catherine Sloper, she feels she is very lucky. She is a quiet, gentle girl, but neither beautiful nor clever; no one had ever admired her before, or come to the front parlour of her home in Washington Square to whisper soft words of love to her. But in New York in the 1840s young ladies are not free to marry where they please. Catherine must have her father's permission, and Dr Sloper is a rich man. One day Catherine will have a fortune of 30,000 dollars a year ... |
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Into the narrow social world of New York in the 1870s comes Countess Ellen Olenska, surrounded by shocked whispers about her failed marriage to a rich Polish Count. A woman who leaves her husband can never be accepted in polite society. Newland Archer is engaged to young May Welland, but the beautiful and mysterious Countess needs his help. He becomes her friend and defender, but friendship with an unhappy, lonely woman is a dangerous path for a young man to follow — especially a young man who is soon to be married. |
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'Please, Mr Murdstone! Don't beat me! I've tried to learn my lessons, really I have, sir!' sobs David. Although he is only eight years old, Mr Murdstone does beat him, and David is so frightened that he bites his cruel stepfather's hand. For that, he is kept locked in his room for five days and nights, and nobody is allowed to speak to him. As David grows up, he learns that life is full of trouble and misery and cruelty. But he also finds laughter and kindness, trust and friendship ...and love. |
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Oh, how delightful it is to fall in love for the first time! How exciting to go to your first dance when you are a girl of eighteen! But life can also be hard and cruel, if you are young and inexperienced and travelling alone across Europe ...or if you are a child from the wrong social class ...or a singer without work and the rent to be paid. Set in Europe and New Zealand, these nine stories by Katherine Mansfield dig deep beneath the appearances of life to show us the causes of human happiness and despair. |
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'I turned on the light, but there was nobody there. Then I saw something in the corner that made my blood turn cold. Scudder was lying on his back. There was a long knife through his heart, pinning him to the floor.' Soon Richard Hannay is running for his life across the hills of Scotland. The police are chasing him for a murder he did not do, and another, more dangerous enemy is chasing him as well — the mysterious 'Black Stone'. Who are these people? And why do they want Hannay dead? |
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'I like work. I find it interesting — I can sit and look at it for hours.' With ideas like this, perhaps it is not a good idea to spend a holiday taking a boat trip up the River Thames. But this is what the three friends — and Montmorency the dog — decide to do. |
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When Christmas comes for the four March girls, there is no money for expensive presents and they give away their Christmas breakfast to a poor family. But there are no happier girls in America than Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. They miss their father, of course, who is away at the Civil War, but they try hard to be good so that he will be proud of his 'little women' when he comes home. This heart-warming story of family life has been popular for more than a hundred years. |
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In a hole under the floorboards Silas Marner the linen-weaver keeps his gold. Every day he works hard at his weaving, and every night he takes the gold out and holds the bright coins lovingly, feeling them and counting them again and again. The villagers are afraid of him and he has no family, no friends. Only the gold is his friend, his delight, his reason for living. But what if a thief should come in the night and take his gold away? What will Silas do then? What could possibly comfort him for the loss of his only friend? |
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