The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

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Jane Austen

Fanny Price is born to a poor family, but is sent to her mother's rich relations to be brought up with her cousins. There she is treated as an inferior by all except her cousin Edmund, whose kindness towards her earns him her steadfast love. Fanny is quiet and obedient and does not come into her own until her elder cousins leave the estate following a scandalous play put on in their father's absence. Fanny's loyalty and love is tested by the beautiful Crawford siblings. But their essentially weak natures and morals show them for what they really are, and allow Fanny to gain the one thing she truly desires.

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Kate Eberlen

"Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Tess can't get the motto from her mother's kitchen knick-knack out of her head, even though she's in Florence on an idyllic vacation before starting university in London. Gus is also visiting Florence, on a holiday with his parents seven months after tragedy shattered their lives. Headed to medical school in London, he's trying to be a dutiful son, but longs to escape and discover who he really is. A chance meeting brings these eighteen-year-olds together for a brief moment--the first of many times their paths will crisscross as time passes and their lives diverge from those they'd envisioned. Over the course of the next sixteen years, Tess and Gus will face very different challenges and choices. Separated by distance and circumstance, the possibility of these two connecting once more seems slight. But while fate can separate two people, it can also bring them back together again.

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Grant Allen

This book is an interesting exploration of free birth, in that a woman believes to be truely free of the yoke of a man he must take her on her own terms. This means without marriage (considered by her a form of slavery) and with a commitment to love each other without the trappings of a union. Hermaini finds in Alan such a mate and they devote each to the other to live free, together. Together they conceive a child and just before it is born Alan dies of typhoid, putting all their dreams of a free life in jeopardy. Hermaini now devotes her life to bringing her daughter up with similar beliefs. It is unfortunate that the world and ultimately her daughter believes the bond of marriage to be the true union between a man and woman, and as she will not repent her "wicked ways" tragedy ensues. An interesting book that sets out the reasons for living free, although it is the world itself that holds her back which she realises late in the day, although she stays true to her beliefs til the very end.

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Nadine Dorries

In the Four Streets in Liverpool, a dreadful murder has been committed, and 14-year-old Kitty Doherty is pregnant with the dead man's child. This secret is so dangerous that her mother, Maura, and the redoubtable Kathleen, her best friend Nellie's grandmother, decide the girls must be spirited away quietly to Ireland to await the birth of the baby. But back in Liverpool, the police are not giving up their search for the truth. Somewhere, in this tight-knit Irish Catholic community, someone must know something. Someone surely will talk one day. The streets are alive with gossip and rumour and it isn't easy to keep a secret that big.