Ireland is neither cursed with snakes, nor blessed with nightingales, and the characters in Maeve Binchy's fiction occupy the same middle ground. These five stories feature modern Irishwomen emerging from a culture where they knew their place into a more hazardous, but more rewarding light.

Never before published in a single volume, Tolkien's four novellas (Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wootton Major, and Roverandom) and one book of poems (The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) are gathered together for the first time, in a fully illustrated volume. This new, definitive collection of works -- which had appeared separately, in various formats, between 1949 and 1998 -- comes with a brand-new foreword and endmatter, and with a...