From an award-winning author, Fingersmith is an extraordinary, ingenious tale of fraud, insanity and secrets

Oostende, oktober 1914. De stad wordt ingenomen door het Duitse leger en zal vanwege de strategische ligging jarenlang bezet gebied blijven.

De bewoners kreunen onder bombardementen, voedseltekorten en een strenge Duitse bezettingsmacht. Om tijdens die harde oorlogsjaren te overleven in Oostende, wordt Julie een alsjebliefmeisje: gedwongen om in de prostitutie te werken om zo voor haar broers en zussen te kunnen zorgen. Als ze jaren later goed gesetteld is in Duitsland, denkt ze dat ze het ve...

The Black Cat, short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in August 1843 and included in the collection Tales by Edgar Allen Poe (1845). The story’s narrator is an animal lover who, as he descends into alcoholism and perverse violence, begins mistreating his wife and his black cat Pluto.

When Pluto attacks him in self-defense one night, he seizes the cat in a fury, cuts out one of its eyes, and hangs it. That night a fire destroys his house, leaving him in ...

They say life is all about choices; that our choices, whether easy or difficult, shape the journey ahead. But what if for every path we choose, another possibility unfolds in a parallel universe?

Roya is a work of historical fiction, telling the story of a young Iranian woman living in a parallel universe, one in which the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did not happen and the Islamic Republic was not established. In this alternate reality, the ayatollahs never rose to power and Iran follows a dif...

Willa Cather’s best-loved novel, and the final book in the Great Plains trilogy, is a beautiful portrayal of friendship, longing and growing up in frontier Nebraska. When young orphan Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, he finds himself growing up alongside Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. Their childhoods are full of shared adventures but as they grow their paths diverge, spurred on by the dire poverty of the Shimerda family.

Yet Jim will never forget Ántoni...

Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's thirteenth novel. It is his second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. Great Expectations is abildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel, and it is a classic work of Victorian literature. It depicts the growth and personal development of an orphan named Pip. The novel was first published in serial form in Dickens' weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Ha...

Ein ehrgeiziger Kaufmannssohn, eine verbotene Liebe und der erbitterte Kampf zweier rivalisierender Handelsmächte

1593. Die Hanse kämpft um ihr Überleben, misstrauisch beäugen die Kaufleute Lübecks den Aufstieg des rivalisierenden Amsterdam. Der junge Arjen, unehelich in eine Lübecker Kaufmannsfamilie geboren und voller Neugier auf die weite Welt, macht sich auf, um in der niederländischen Metropole das Glück zu finden. Dank seinem Geschäftssinn erarbeitet er sich schnell Reichtum un...