The Outcry is a novel by Henry James published in 1911. It was originally conceived as a play. James cast the material in a three-act drama in 1909, but like many of his plays, it failed to be produced. (There were two posthumous performances in 1917.) In 1911 James converted the play into a novel, which was successful with the public. The Outcry was the last novel he was able to complete before his death in 1916. The storyline concerns the buying up of Britain's art treasures by wealthy Americans. To cover the gambling debts of his daughter Kitty Imber, the widowed Lord Theign is planning to...

The Lost Girl is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1920. It was awarded the 1920 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the fiction category. Lawrence started it shortly after writing Women in Love, and worked on it only sporadically until he completed it in 1920. Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a widowed Midlands draper, comes of age just as her father's business is failing. In a desperate attempt to regain his fortune and secure his daughter's proper upbringing, James Houghton buys a theater. Among the traveling performers he employs is Ciccio, a sensual Italian who immediately...

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light and thus becomes invisible. He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. While its predecessors, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, were written using...

In 1895, "Flor de Mayo" was published, the second novel by the Valencian writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez, originally written as a leaflet for the republican newspaper El Pueblo, founded by Blasco himself. Considered as one of the best novels written on men of the sea, is part of the cycle of Valencian costumbristas novels made by Blasco between 1894 and 1902, along with "Arroz y tartana," "Canas y barro" and "La barraca." In "Flor de Mayo," Blasco takes us to his hometown, El Cabanyal, a small fisherman's neighborhood that supplies fish to the whole city of Valencia, at many times the life of...

J. Storer Clouston achieved great success with the "Lunatic" series of comic novels, of which this, "The Lunatic at Large, " is the first. His first published book was 'Vandred the Viking; or The Feud and the Spell' (1898) and the following year he published what was to be his most celebrated work, 'The Lunatic at Large', to which there were a number of sequels.

Women in Love is a novel by British author D. H. Lawrence, published in 1920. It is a sequel to his earlier novel The Rainbow (1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula Brangwen and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The emotional relationships thus established are given further depth and tension by an intense...

However, the story soon focuses on Bert who is an unimpressive, not particularly gifted, unsuccessful young man with few ideas about larger things - but far from unintelligent. He has a strong attachment to a young woman named Edna, and works as a helper and later a partner in a bicycle shop. When bankruptcy threatens one summer, he and his partner abandon the shop, devise a singing act ("the Desert Dervishes"), and resolve to try their fortunes in English sea resorts. As chance would have, their initial performance is interrupted by a balloon which lands on the beach before them, and which...

H G Wells, Herbert George Wells, an English writer, he was renowned for his works of science fiction especially 'The Time Machine'. He is also referred as 'The Father of Science Fiction' "Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences," H.G. Wells wrote in 1916. "For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind. ... The scientific training develops the idea that...

The World Set Free is a novel written in 1913 and published in 1914 by H. G. Wells. The book is based on a prediction of nuclear weapons of a more destructive and uncontrollable sort than the world has yet seen. It had appeared first in serialised form with a different ending as A Prophetic Trilogy, consisting of three books: A Trap to Catch the Sun, The Last War in the World and The World Set Free. A frequent theme of Wells's work, as in his 1901 nonfiction book Anticipations, was the history of humans' mastery of power and energy through technological advance, seen as a determinant of human...

Tono-Bungay is narrated by George Ponderevo, who is persuaded to help develop the business of selling Tono-Bungay, a patent medicine created by his ambitious uncle Edward. George devotes seven years to organising the production and manufacture of a product which he believes to be "a damned swindle." He then quits day-to-day involvement with the enterprise in favour of aeronautics. But he remains associated with his uncle Edward, who becomes a financier of the first order and is on the verge of achieving social as well as economic dominance when his business empire collapses. George tries to...