Nadia May

This single volume, blank verse translation of The Divine Comedy includes an introduction, maps of Dante's Italy, Hell, Purgatory, Geocentric Universe, and political panorama of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, diagrams and notes providing the reader with invaluable guidance.

The 14th century gives us back two contradictory images: a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry, and a dark time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world plunged into a chaos of war, fear and the Plague. Barbara Tuchman anatomizes the century, revealing both the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived.

The Longest Journey (1907) is a novel by English author E.M. Forster. Despite its critical success, the novel was a commercial failure for Forster, but has since grown in reputation and readership to help cement his reception as one of twentieth century England's most talented writers. Rickie Elliot enters Cambridge as a young man, exploring his interests in poetry and art and joining a circle of intellectuals centered around, a philosopher named...

A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August
 
*Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal
 
The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades,...

"The Return of the Soldier" is British author Rebecca West's remarkable 1918 novel of the struggle of a World War I veteran and the three women who love him as he returns home and tries make sense of the life that he had before he went to war. Told from the perspective of his cousin Jenny, who lives with him and his wife Kitty, it is the story of British soldier Chris Baldry, who has just returned home from fighting in France. Chris has amnesia and...

Hinds Feet on High Places by Hannah Hurnard, is a dramatic allegory telling the journey we each must take before having the ability to live on high places. Throughout the story, the emotions and struggles of our nature are personified. It is a story of endurance, persistence, and reliance on God, which has inspired millions of people to become sure-footed in their faith even when facing the rockiest of life's terrain. Much-Afraid had been in the service...

"In South Africa, where Blacks and whites are caught in the winds of change, a young woman tries to uphold the radical heritage she received from her martyred parents while carving out a sense of self." --

College Sunrise is a vaguely disreputable finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina, run the school as a way to support themselves while he works, somewhat falteringly, on his novel. Into his creative writing class comes seventeen-year-old Chris Wiley, a literary prodigy whose historical novel-in-progress, on Mary Queen of Scots and the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, has already excited the interest of publishers.

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A mystery with "atmosphere, humor . . .and a group of characters, English, Maori, and New Zealander, who are fascinating and completely credible." —The New York Times
During World War II, Colonel Claire—a tremendously nice fellow and a disastrously bad businessman—runs a mud-baths resort in rural New Zealand. But the place is on the brink of being taken over by a local blowhard who may be a Nazi spy. Inspector Alleyn has...

Trilby (1894) is a novel by George du Maurier. Originally serialized in Harper's Monthly the novel went on to become an international bestseller, attracting controversy and interest for its depiction of bohemian life in 19th-century Paris. Although Trilby has been criticized by such readers as George Orwell for its anti-Semitic depiction of Svengali, the novel has been adapted countless times for theater and film, including a 1931 motion picture starring...