David was hiking across Dartmoor, pleased to have escaped the oppressively juvenile and sometimes perilous behaviour of his fellow undergraduates. As far as he could tell, he was the only human being for miles - at least, that is what he presumed when he found a dead manon top of the tor.

prose; fiction

Book DescriptionIn July 1942, Farley Mowat was an eager young infantryman bound for Europe and impatient for combat. This powerful, true account of the action he saw, fighting desperately to push the Nazis out of Italy, evokes the terrible reality of war with an honesty and clarity fiction can only imitate. In scene after unforgettable scene, he describes the agony and antic humor of the soldier's existence: the tedium of camp life, the savagery of the front, and the camaraderie shared by those who have been bloodied in battle.Kirkus ReviewThere is a deceptive quiet to the beginning of this recollection by Farley Mowat of the hell he and his comrades endured in the bloody Sicilian and Italian campaigns of World War II. And the undersized, baby-faced young man the author was three decades ago, eager to "get a damn good lick in at the Hun," seems, in the first few pages, unendurably callow, striking attitudes as false and dated as his slang. But he grows up fast and the battles he survived as a second lieutenant in the Canadian infantry are clamorously, jarringly real - justifying epigraphs from Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden. In 1940 at age 19 Mowat joined his father's old outfit, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, known as the Hasty Pees and made up of men from southeastern Ontario. A bird-watcher and something of a loner, he ends up in command of a platoon of hard cases and misfits, a iamb among lions. They were thrown into the invasion of Sicily in July of 1943 and Mowat soon loses the illusion that war is little more than an exciting form of battle game. "For the first time," he writes laconically, "I truly understood that the dead were dead." Then, as the Canadians are put through the meat grinder attempting to storm a German mountain-top fortress, he comes to know an unshakable fear; each time he finds it a little harder to blind himself to the death or mutilation he is certain awaits him. Mowat not only gets his emotional responses right, but he also makes the actual battle operations intelligible. A memorable book from a practiced hand.From The Back CoverOn September 2, 1939, Farley Mowat was painting the porch of his family’s home when his ebullient father drove into the driveway and shouted, “Farley, my lad, there’s big bloody news! The war is on!” Eighteen-year-old Farley responded with glee, but four years later, pinned down in the wintry mud of Italy, he saw a soldier “humping jerily away from his own leg, which had been severed at the thigh. In the instant I saw him, he gave one final bubbling shriek, collapsed and mercifully was still.” And No Birds Sang is Mowat’s gripping account of how a young man excited by the prospect of battle, is transformed into a war-weary veteran.

A community devoured by greed, cowardice, and fear. A man persecuted by the ghosts of his painful past. A young woman searching for happiness. In one eventful week, each will face questions of life, death, and power, and each will choose a path. Will they choose good or evil?In the remote village of Viscos — a village too small to be on any map, a place where time seems to stand still — a stranger arrives, carrying with him a backpack containing a notebook and eleven gold bars. He comes searching for the answer to a question that torments him: Are human beings, in essence, good or evil? In welcoming the mysterious foreigner, the whole village becomes an accomplice to his sophisticated plot, which will forever mark their lives.Paulo Coelho's stunning novel explores the timeless struggle between good and evil, and brings to our everyday dilemmas fresh perspective: incentive to master the fear that prevents us from following our dreams, from being different, from truly living.

Sylvia Plath is one of the defining voices in twentieth-century poetry. This classic selection of her work, made by her former husband Ted Hughes, provides the perfect introduction to this most influential of poets. The poems are taken from Sylvia Plath's four collections Ariel, The Colossus, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, and includes many of her most-celebrated works, such as 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Wuthering Heights'.

A True Life Novel Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle was "nothing short of spectacular" (Entertainment Weekly). Now she brings us the story of her grandmother – told in a voice so authentic and compelling that the book is destined to become an instant classic. "Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did." So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls's magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hard working, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town – riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car ("I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place") and fly a plane, and, with her husband, ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette's memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle. Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds – against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn't fit the mold. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa or Beryl Markham's West with the Night. It will transfix readers everywhere.

These poetic, inspiring essays offer insights into the world of a gifted woman who was deaf and blind. Helen Keller relates her impressions of life's beauty and promise, perceived through the sensations of touch, smell, and vibration, together with the workings of a powerful imagination.The World I Live In comprises fifteen essays and a poem, "A Chant of Darkness," all of which originally appeared in The Century Magazine. These brief articles include "The Seeing Hand," "The Hands of Others," "The Power of Touch," "The Finer Vibrations," "Smell, the Fallen Angel" "Inward Visions," and other essays. "Optimism," written while Keller was a college student, offers eloquent observations on acquiring and maintaining a sense of happiness. These essays reflect the author's remarkable achievements, as expressed in her honorary degree from Harvard, the first ever granted to a woman: "From a still, dark world she has brought us light and sound; our lives are richer for...