Narrator

Stuart Langton

Stuart Langton
  • When young Harry Sandwith, a Westminster boy, becomes a resident at the chateau of a French marquis, he begins a series of adventures with the family. One day, an ill-advised trip takes them to Paris at the height of the French Revolution. Suddenly Harry and his party are beset with perils at every turn. As they struggle to escape, imprisonment and death reduce their number. Finally, Harry finds himself in charge of the three young daughters of the house. Only he can save them from the reign of terror—and certain death.

  • When sixteen-year-old Angus Campbell finds himself orphaned and his life at risk, he leaves Tabriz and makes his way to Teheran to seek employment with the British ambassador there. His knowledge of Persian, Arabic, Armenian, Kurdish, and Pushtoo secures him a post as a secretary for Mr. M'Neill. Resourceful and intrepid, he soon finds himself involved in a number of dangerous and daring undercover missions during what has come to be called the First Afghan War. On one of these missions he rescues from certain death a young Afghan chief, and the friendship that develops between them has surprising consequences.

    This book demonstrates just how much a young man is capable of, even in the face of terrible enemies.

  • For hundreds of years, the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table has been one of the world's most precious literary possessions.

    In 1902, the distinguished American artist Howard Pyle undertook to retell this classic. His four-volume work on King Arthur has long been considered one of the outstanding interpretations of the Arthur cycle.

    This first volume, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights conveys the true spirit of the England of that time, when Arthur Pendragon was overlord of Britain and Merlin was a powerful enchanter, when the sword Excalibur was forged and won, and when the Round Table came into being.

  • The Titan is the second volume in what the author called his “trilogy of desire,” featuring the character of Frank Cowperwood—a powerful, irresistibly compelling man driven by his own need for power, beautiful women, and social prestige.

    Having married his former mistress, Aileen Butler, and moved to Chicago, Cowperwood almost succeeds in his dream of establishing a monopoly of all public utilities. Dissatisfaction with Aileen leads him, however, to a series of affairs with other women. When the Chicago citizenry frustrates his financial schemes, he departs for Europe with Berenice Fleming, the lovely daughter of the madam of a Louisville brothel. At last, Cowperwood experiences “the pathos of the discovery that even giants are but pygmies, and that an ultimate balance must be struck.”

  • In this mischievous yarn by Mark Twain, a Yankee mechanic named Hank Morgan is knocked unconscious in a fight and awakens to find himself at Camelot in AD 528. Brought before the knights of the Round Table, he is condemned to death but saves himself by using his nineteenth-century scientific knowledge to pose as a powerful magician. After correctly predicting an eclipse, Hank is made minister to King Arthur, and goes on to counsel him on such matters as gunpowder, electricity, and industrial methods. But when he attempts to better the condition of the peasantry, he meets opposition from the church, knights, and sorcerers, and finds his efforts at enlightenment turned against him.

    A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is both a rollicking romantic fantasy and a canny social satire that only one of America's greatest writers could pen.

  • Written by one of Russia’s literary masters, Smoke is both a poignant love story and a brilliant socio-political study. Marked with a barbed wit and a visionary modernism, it became the center of a famous philosophical breach between Turgenev and Dostoevsky.

    On the brink of marriage, Grigorii Litvinov visits the fashionable European spa of Baden-Baden, a scene dominated by the Russian upper classes. Among them is the beautiful Irina Osinin, Litvinov’s first love, to whom he was engaged ten years earlier. Litvinov’s struggle with a nostalgic passion is set against the background of a society pulled both toward and against change as it feels the influence of the West.

    A sensitive and intelligent commentary on human nature, Turgenev’s Smoke endures for its high aesthetic standards and its universal qualities of understanding.