Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury.

It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the sinister 'Indian runner', they find help in the person of Hawkeye, the white woodsman, and his companions, the Mohican Chingachgook and Uncas, his son, the last of his tribe.

Cooper's novel is full of vivid incident- pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes, treachery and brutality- but reflects also on the interaction between the colonists and the native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, Cooper raises lasting questions about the practises of the American frontier and the eclipse of the indigenous cultures.

In The Voyage Out, one of Woolf's wittiest, socially satirical novels, Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship, and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage. Lorna Sage's Introduction and Explanatory Notes offer guidance to thereader new to Woolf, and illuminate Woolf's presence, not identifiable in the heroine, but in the social satire, lyricism and patterning of consciousness in one woman's rite of passage.

Radin's timeless critique of anthropological theory and methods from a humanistic perspective provides an overall assessment of the field of ethnology, its shortcomings, errors, and misdirections.

Freedom and Death is Kazantzakis's modern Iliad. The context is Crete in the late nineteenth century, the epic struggle between Greeks and Turks, between Christianity and Islam. A new uprising takes place to rival those of 1854, 1866 and 1878, and the island is thrown into confusion yet again. In the village of Megalokastro a Cretan resistance fighter, Captain Michales, is matched by the Turkish bey, his blood-brother. The life of the local community continues shakily, but is disrupted by explosions of violence.

'No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.' Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people's everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont's lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This is a masterly narrative history of the Seven Years War, in which the British decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean, and yet also managed to ignite the slow-burning fuse of the American Revolution.Fred Anderson observes how the war displaced native peoples from their previously central role in an American diplomatic system; how it gave American colonists their first encounters with real live Englishmen; and how Americans were consequently emboldened to rally against the men who were once their masters. Anderson offers a wholly engrossing account of the conflict, interweaving the stories of kings and officers with those of traders, Native Americans, and colonial peoples.

A young woman, assisted by a once famous classical composer, investigates the identity of a fantastically popular but mysteriously incognito rock-and-roll star.

Whilst Sara pores over ancient texts in the Vatican reading room, a brutal murder is taking place in a nearby church. Then suddenly a crazed man enters the Vatican carrying a bloodied bag. He walks up to Sara's desk. He has something he would like her to see. Soon Sara is linked to a series of murders.

A compulsive novel about a young woman hijacked by her own ambition and the blind love of two obsessive men.

A female patient has escaped from a Massachusetts federal mental institition. Before she fled she left some encoded clues about mind control, eugenics and CIA drug trials. The investigating officers fear that they have stumbled into something far more dangerous than the usual missing person scenario.

A writer's circle in Chichester is delighted when a publisher agrees to address one of their meetings, but when that same publisher turns up dead they find themselves and their unpublished ambitions under close police scrutiny.

It is winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander's team at the Ystad police station face a new challenge: two corpses, frozen together in a gruesome embrace, have been washed ashore on the remote Swedish coastline. The dead men were Eastern European criminals, but what looks like a gangland hit takes on a much more sinister aspect when Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea to Latvia, a nation in the throws of the massive upheaval that will lead to its independence from the Soviet Union. Wallander is thrown into an icy, alien world of police surveillance, veiled threats and lies, coming to understand what it is to live in a nation in which democracy is still a dream. Only his dogged, almost subconscious desire to see justice done will lead him to the shadowy figures he pursues.

One frozen January morning at 5 a.m., Inspector Wallander responds to what he expects is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside hs shattered body, victims of violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander with his only clue: the perpetrators may have been foreign. When this is leaked to the press, racial hatred is unleashed.Kurt Wallander is a senior police officer at Ystad, a small town in the wind-lashed Swedish province of Skane. His life is a shambles. His wife has left him, his daughter refuses to speak to him, even his ageing father barely tolerates him. He works tirelessly, eats badly and drinks the nights away in a lonely, neglected flat. But now winter closes its grip on Ystad, and Wallandar, his tenacious efforts closely monitored by the tough minded (and disarmingly attractive) district attorney Anette Brolin, must forget his trouble, and throw himself into a battle against time and xenophobia.

The execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife looks like a simple case even though there is no obvious suspect. But then Wallander learns of a determined stalker, and soon enough, the cops catch up with him. But when his alibi turns out to be airtight, they realize that what seemed a simple crime of passion is actually far more complex—and dangerous. The search for the truth behind the killing eventually uncovers an assassination plot, and Wallander soon finds himself in a tangle with both the secret police and a ruthless foreign agent. 

In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea lived a Stone Age tribe which survived into the 20th century - the Kurelu. Matthiessen joined the Harvard-Peabody Expedition of 1961 which set out to study the tribe as unobtrusively as possible, living among the Kurelu for two seasons. The result was this account, not of the expedition but of a lost culture: the Kurelu's timeless rhythms of work and play, or warriorship, feasting and funerals.

Everyone is always telling Stone Barrington that he's too smart to be a cop, but it's pure luck that places him on the streets in the dead of night, just in time to witness the horrifying incident that turns his life inside out. Suddenly he is on the front page of every New York newspaper, and his life is hopelessly entwined in the increasingly shocking life (and perhaps death) of Sasha Nijinsky, the country's hottest and most beautiful television anchorwoman. No matter where he turns, the case is waiting for him, haunting his nights and turning his days into a living hell. Stone finds himself caught in a perilous web of unspeakable crimes, dangerous friends, and sexual depravity that has throughout it one common thread: Sasha.

Meet Charlie. An everyday bloke. Good news is, he has a job. Bad news is, it's in a photo kiosk. He whiles away the hours with his rather eccentric colleague George. But appearances can be deceptive. You see, there is one line of work where taking the world at face value can be very foolish indeed. Where trusting someone -- anyone -- is the most dangerous thing you can do. The truth is, Charlie and George have not been very honest with each other. The truth is, this isn't their number one career choice. Their real jobs are a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's time to come clean. But the truth could very well kill them...

Rose`s early life was full of tragedy. Her father disappeared one night, presumed drowned and her twin brother died when he was only ten, on a bike that had been his cherished birthday present. No wonder that she depends on her husband, Michael. He is the only certainty in her life, and provides the love and stability that her own family background lacked. All Rose asks of Michael is complete fidelity, and when she has cause to doubt him she devises a terrible revenge. Michael has planned an anniversary trip to Venice for the two of them. But as they ride in gondolas, dine on delicious seafood and wander the sights of this most romantic of cities, Rose, racked with secret jealousy, is making plans. By the time they return, Michael will have become seriously ill - although not so ill that he cannot recognize the fact that something truly dreadful has happened to him. In this chilling novel Gillian White explores the most destructive of human weaknesses - jealousy.

Richard Gardner lives in the commuter village of Haverscot, with his troublesome wife and stepsons. He strikes up a friendship with the new occupant of The Willows , and is drawn into crime and violence - caused by someone with a deadly intention.

During a burglary, a young woman is raped. The fact that her father made no attempt to protect her shatters the family more than the actual violation. When the rapist is freed, one of the family decides to apply their own justice.

Is there an ethics of reading, and is this something that the interpretive humanities can and should contribute to other professional fields, including law, and to public life?

This book tests the proposition that the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading. And that this commitment, and the training and discipline of close reading that underlie it, represent something that the humanities need to bring to other fields: to professional training and to public life.

What leverage does reading, of the attentive sort practiced in the interpretive humanities, give you on life? Does such reading represent or produce an ethics? The question was posed for many in the humanities by the "Torture Memos" released by the Justice Department a few years ago, presenting arguments that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government with the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: This is not possible.

Teaching the humanities appears to many to be an increasingly disempowered profession--and status--within American culture. Yet training in the ability to read critically the messages with which society, politics, and culture bombard us may be more necessary than ever in a world in which the manipulation of minds and hearts
is more and more what running the world is all about.

This volume brings together a group of distinguished scholars and intellectuals to debate the public role and importance of the humanities. Their exchange suggests that Shelley was not wrong to insist that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind: Cultural change carries everything in its wake. The attentive interpretive reading practiced in the humanities ought to be an export commodity to other fields and to take its place in the public sphere.in the public sphere.

WINNER OF A BETTY TRASK AWARD 2016SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS' CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2016FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2016An International Bestseller / A Guardian Summer Read / An Amazon Best Book of the Month / A Goodreads Best Book of the Month / A Buzzfeed Summer Read / A Foyles Book of the Month / A Huffington Post Summer Read / A Yorkshire Post Book of the WeekIn 1883, Thaniel Steepleton returns to his tiny flat to find a gold pocketwatch on his pillow. When the watch saves Thaniel's life in a blast that destroys Scotland Yard, he goes in search of its maker, Keita Mori - a kind, lonely Japanese immigrant. Meanwhile, Grace Carrow is sneaking into an Oxford library, desperate to prove the existence of the luminiferous ether before her mother can force her to marry.As the lives of these three characters become entwined, events spiral out of control until Thaniel is torn between loyalties, futures and opposing geniuses.