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Tales of Unrest (version 2)

Joseph Conrad
A brave Malay chieftain suffers from a surprising vulnerability. After giving birth to a series of unfortunate children, a farmer's wife is determined to bear no more. A spoonful of sugar brings a neophyte ivory trader to a moment of Nietzschean self-realisation. A pompous ass discovers that his wife has run off with another man. Secluded in an eerie lagoon, a Malay carries a guilty secret in his heart. "Tales of Unrest" was the first volume of short fiction Joseph Conrad published in his own lifetime. While some of these tales evoke the settings of Conrad's earliest novels, others clearly anticipate elements of Conrad's subsequent masterworks "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Agent".
Shadow-Line

Joseph Conrad
Dedicated to the author's son who was wounded in World War 1, The Shadow-Line is a short novel based at sea by Joseph Conrad; it is one of his later works, being written from February to December 1915. It was first published in 1916 as a serial and in book form in 1917. The novella depicts the development of a young man upon taking a captaincy in the Orient, with the shadow line of the title representing the threshold of this development. The novella is notable for its dual narrative structure. The full, subtitled title of the novel is The Shadow-Line, A Confession, which immediately alerts the reader to the retrospective nature of the novella. The ironic constructions following from the conflict between the 'young' protagonist (who is never named) and the 'old' drive much of the underlying points of the novella, namely the nature of wisdom, experience and maturity. Conrad also extensively uses irony by comparison in the work, with characters such as Captain Giles and the ship's 'factotum' Ransome used to emphasise strengths and weaknesses of the protagonist. The novella has often been cited as a metaphor of the First World War, given its timing and references to a long struggle, the importance of camaraderie, etc. This viewpoint may also be reinforced by the knowledge that Conrad's elder son, Borys, was wounded in the First World War. Others however see the novel as having a strong supernatural influence, referring to various plot-lines in the novella such as the 'ghost' of the previous captain potentially cursing the ship, and the madness of first mate Mr Burns. Conrad himself, however, denied this link in his 'Author's Note' (1920), claiming that although critics had attempted to show this link, "The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is." Summary by Wikipedia (edited by Expatriate)
Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji)

Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) is a classic work of Japanese literature attributed to the Japanese noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the early eleventh century, around the peak of the Heian Period. It is sometimes called the world's first novel, the first modern novel, the first romance novel, or the first novel to still be considered a classic... The Genji was written for the women of the aristocracy (the yokibito) and has many elements found in a modern novel: a central character and a very large number of major and minor characters, well-developed characterization of all the major players, a sequence of events happening over a period of time covering the central character's lifetime and beyond. The work does not make use of a plot; instead, much as in real life, events just happen and characters evolve simply by growing older. One remarkable feature of the Genji, and of Murasaki's skill, is its internal consistency, despite a dramatis personae of some four hundred characters. For instance, all characters age in step and all the family and feudal relationships are consistent among all chapters. NOTE: this is a highly condensed version of the text, running to just under 200 pages, whereas the original is nearly 1000 pages long!
Outcast of the Islands (Version 2)

Joseph Conrad
This, Conrad's second, novel serves as an illuminating prequel of his first, 'Almayer's Folly', teasing out the origins of the factional tensions that are such a distinctive feature of the social life of the little settlement of Sambir, on the Pantai river in Borneo, that figure so prominently in its predecessor. The central plot has an almost mythic quality ('A foolish king has two sons who are deeply jealous of each other'), the role of the 'king' in this case being played by Captain Tom Lingard, a swashbuckling if somewhat simple-minded freebooter who for many years has meddled in political affairs in the Malacca Straits for reasons both opportunistic and altruistic, and who has occasionally taken on 'lost causes' as his own personal protégés out of mixture of vanity and genuine good-heartedness. Lingard has previously set up one such protégé, Kaspar Almayer, as his employee at an isolated trading station in Sambir. When he learns that another former protégé, Peter Willems, has disgraced himself in Macassar and is on the point of suicide, Lingard takes pity on him and whisks him away to stay with Almayer in Sambir. Almayer and Willems are mutually jealous and hostile, however, and Willems' response to being 'saved' by Lingard is to bite the hand that has fed him in an act of betrayal that shocks Lingard and triggers a devastating dénouement. Among its other qualities, the novel is notable for its frank, even-handed depiction of interracial suspicion and enmity, and for its glorious descriptions of the physical environment of Sambir, where most of the story takes place.
Last Chronicle of Barset (version 2)

Anthony Trollope
LibriVox reader Nicholas Clifford calls this Trollope's best novel in his introduction to the collaborative version of this fine novel - and he is right! A wonderful study of its central character, the proud, irascible, tormented, poverty-stricken clergyman, Josiah Crawley, who pays a heavy price for his human failings when he is brought to trial for the alleged theft of a cheque for twenty pounds. The trial is the source of much grief for his long-suffering family, not least his wife Mary and daughter Grace (the novel's romantic heroine), whilst the Reverend Crawley reminds us more and more of a mad King Lear on the heath.
Under Western Eyes

Joseph Conrad
Under Western Eyes (1911) is a novel by Joseph Conrad. The novel takes place in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Geneva, Switzerland, and is viewed as Conrad's response to the themes explored in Crime and Punishment, Conrad being reputed to have detested Dostoevsky. It is also, some say, Conrad's response to his own early life; his father was a famous revolutionary imprisoned by the Russians, but, instead of following in his father's footsteps, at the age of sixteen Conrad left his native land forever....This novel is considered to be one of Conrad's major works and is close in subject matter to The Secret Agent. It is full of cynicism and conflict about the historical failures of revolutionary movements and ideals. Conrad remarks in this book, as well as others, on the irrationality of life, the opacity of character, the unfairness with which suffering is inflicted upon the innocent and poor, and the careless disregard for the lives of those with whom we share existence.
Montezuma's Daughter

H. Rider Haggard
A moving adventure story narrated by Thomas Wingfield, an Englishman, for Queen Elizabeth 1 of England about the murder of his mother, his trail of vengeance against the murderer which leads him to the Spanish Inquisition, slavery, romance and living under Montezuma in his kingdom which is now called Mexico
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Coningsby, or The New Generation

Benjamin Disraeli
Coningsby is the first of trilogy of political novels that Disraeli published in the 1840s, and gives an insight into his views of the political turmoil following the passage of the Great Reform Bill by the Whigs in 1832 (a second Reform Bill was passed in 1867 under Disraeli’s Tory leadership as prime minister). While Coningsby looks primarily at political questions, its successor -- Sybil, or the Two Nations -- was concerned with the “condition of England” question and the growing social and economic imbalance between rich and poor that in tje writer's view was hastened (though not begun) by the industrial revolution. Granted that Disraeli was not Dickens or Trollope or Eliot or one of the other giants of British letters in the nineteenth century, it’s a bit unfair to suggest (as some have) that the plots are thin and only there to provide the writer with a podium for setting forth his political and social views. It’s true that Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl, but much else happens as well, particularly thanks to the role played by the mysterious figure of the Jewish Sidonia, who in addition to enormous wealth and widespread international connections embodies a kind of wisdom that transcends the mere knowledge acquired by even the best educated Englishmen. Coningsby, himself a product of both Eton and Cambridge, is fortunate enough to be taken under his wing, and intelligent enough to accept his guidance. (Nicholas Clifford)
Fortunes of Nigel

Sir Walter Scott
During the turbulent moment in English history involving King James 1 and 6, Nigel Olifaunt, a Scottish lord, seeks to protect his family home and holdings, but meets with recalcitrance and treachery, which eventually results in his imprisonment. But there are forces of good that help to set him free and right injustices.
Cousin Betty

Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Betty (La Cousine Bette), published in serial format in 1846, was one of the last and greatest of Balzac's works. It was part of his long novel collection titled La Comédie Humaine. Set in mid-19th-century France, it tells the story of a woman who resents her position as a "poor relation." As we follow her schemes to bring ruin upon the more privileged members of her family, we see a society in transition. The stability and idealism of the old order give way to a new bourgeois world in which virtue is strangled in the struggle for power and money. In this novel, Balzac searchingly probes the psychology and motivations of his characters: his work influenced the development of literary realism, as practised by writers such as Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Proust, and Henry James.
Ward No. 6

Anton Chekhov
The line between sanity and insanity is blurred in this classic novella by Anton Chekhov. The disillusioned idealist Dr. Rabin is in charge of a provincial lunatic asylum, overseeing with weary, dubious policies a motley group of patients, a group that mirrors in microcosm all of human and especially Russian society. Seeking answers to profound questions, Dr. Rabin enters into dialogues with both staff members and patients, trying to make sense out of what has become of his life, until it becomes less and less clear who is the doctor and who is the patient. Written with obvious reformist concerns about the dehumanization of "lunatics," the story is also a harrowing parable about the meaning of human existence
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Honoré de Balzac
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life is one of the last great works completed by Balzac for his huge novel series entitled The Human Comedy. Sections of this book, in various groupings and with various titles, were published between 1838 and 1847. It eventually settled into the four sections found in the present edition. The French title — Splendeurs et misères des courtesanes — literally, Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans — has also been translated as A Harlot High and Low. The story picks up at the end of Lost Illusions (1843), an earlier novel by Balzac. At the end of that book, Lucien de Rubempré (born Lucien Chardon), a young provincial poet with great ambitions but feeble moral will, was heading for Paris in the company of a mysterious Spanish priest. In the present book, we quickly discover that the "Spanish priest" is actually Jacques Collin, alias "Vautrin," a master criminal first introduced to readers in Balzac's Father Goriot (1835). Lucien develops a relationship with Esther van Gobseck, a prostitute (the "courtesan" of the title). With these three main figures — Lucien, Vautrin, and Esther — Balzac explores the corruption of the aristocracy, the world of prostitution, the courts, and the prisons of 19th-century Paris. With masterful depictions of society and individual psychology, Balzac is considered a father of realism in fiction.
Island Nights' Entertainments

Robert Louis Stevenson
A marvelous depiction of two sides of South Sea Islands' life through three separate tales. One, the experience of the incoming British keen to live free and exploit the innocent; the other the supernatural as perceived by Stevenson working in the lives of the natives. One tale carries the germ of the story of Madame Butterfly, since become a part of Western culture. Another is an extraordinary retelling of a German horror story transposed to a South Sea Island setting. The last is an effort of the pure Stevensonian imagination and there can be nothing better.
Mortal Coils

Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley is best known as a philosopher and novelist – notably as the author of Brave New World. He also wrote poetry, short stories and critical essays. Most of his work is somewhat dark and mildly sardonic, partly because he came of age just after World War I, when all of Europe was in a state of cultural, political and social confusion. His novel, Crome Yellow, is a prime example.

Mortal Coils includes four short stories and a play, including one of the author’s most famous short works: "The Gioconda Smile."
Dream of the Red Chamber Book II

Xueqin Cao
The Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone) is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of China, and considered the greatest of them all. Almost 40 main characters and some 500 minor characters tell the fortunes of the Chia family; the book details mainly the life of Chia Pao-yü, the heir apparent, who is described as very intelligent, but also as carefree and self-indulging. The already wealthy Chia family rises to new heights when Pao-yü's elder sister becomes an imperial consort. On her first visit home, a lush garden is built, where much of the rest of the story takes place. The intrigues surrounding Pao-yü and his cousins, especially Lin Tai-yü who he loves, and Hsüeh Pao-ch'ai who he is finally tricked into marrying, make up a large part of the story. The decline of the Chia family begins with the death of the imperial consort, and when they fall into disfavour with the emperor, their mansions and the garden are eventually destroyed.

The whole book has 120 chapters, only 80 of which were written by Cao Xueqin before his death in 1764. Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E claimed to have access to Cao's papers, and published what is now known as the Cheng-Gao version in 1791. Henry Bencraft Joly translated only part of the book written by Cao. Book I contains the first 24 chapters, Book II ends abruptly with chapter 56; a Book III was never published.
Lost Girl

D. H. Lawrence
"There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl. She was cut off from everything she belonged to."

In this most under-valued of his novels, Lawrence once again presents us with a young woman hemmed in by her middle-class upbringing and (like Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow) longing for escape. Alvina Houghton's plight, however, is given a rather comic and even picaresque treatment. Losing first her mother, a perpetual invalid, and later her cross-dressing father, a woefully ineffectual small-scale entrepreneur, Alvina feels doomed to merge with the tribe of eternal spinsters who surround her in the dreary mining community of Woodhouse.

Into this drab environment enter the Natcha-Kee-Tawara: a polyglot, poly-amorous troupe of travelling players united, on- and off-stage, in a fantasy of Native American nomadism. Enter Ciccio, the surly dark-eyed horseman. The Italian's potent and threatening physicality overwhelms Alvina and soon will propel her into - what? Perdition, or the paradoxical freedom of a girl who 'like(s) being lost'?
Duel (version 2)

Anton Chekhov
Known for his plays and short stories, Anton Chekhov also wrote a series of novellas, astonishing for their psychological complexity and compelling human portraiture. In The Duel, the wastrel and libertine Laevsky absconds to the Caucasus with another man's wife, Nadyezhda Fyodorovna. While there, he forms several acquaintanceships with a colorful array of characters: Von Koren the zoologist, Samoylenko the doctor, and Pobyedov the giddy deacon. Before long, both Laevsky and his mistress succeed in offending local society by their dissolute lifestyles, leading to the inevitable insult, challenge, and duel. Duels having been exploited as plot twists throughout the writings of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky (all ironically alluded to by the author), the challenge for Chekhov is to make it work one more time in 1891, at a time when duelling had nearly died out in both society and literature. The result is a richly layered, utterly original, philosophically and psychologically ambiguous story of human love and friendship. ( summary by Expatriate)
Weird Tales, Volume 2

E. T. A. Hoffmann
Paradoxically, it is variety that unites the tales you are about to read. They take place in widely separated countries and historical periods, and their outcomes—fortunate or tragic—cannot always be predicted with accuracy. The characters too speak with varied voices; even the narrative voice is not uniform, for the author often frames story within a story, using a character in one tale to narrate another.

The reader will sometimes feel as though the author is extending an invitation to enter his workshop to observe him at his trade and admire his craftsmanship. Narrative techniques, for instance, such as suspending the detailed account of events in order to summarize what follows or occasionally interrupting the story line to offer a bit of background or exposition, are introduced by referring to “the indulgent reader,” “my kindly reader,” or even (once) a direct address: “dear reader.” This device is common to much Romantic literature, but Hoffmann’s self-conscious use of it renders it satirical.

He frequently shifts from seriousness to mockery, characterized by an arch tone as he knowingly overworks Romantic clichés like apostrophes to absent or non-sentient entities and especially hyperbole, which he mercilessly burlesques. Yet his mercurial sensibility can then shift in a moment back into the serious use of Romantic conventions: overwrought descriptions, pathetic fallacies, sudden reversals of fortune, unlikely coincidences, gloomy intimations of the cruelty of destiny, dark secrets, and men fulsomely unburdening themselves of their inmost feelings, not without tears. He even takes up the age-old theme of friendship vs. romantic love and their rival claims to be the nobler sentiment. In short, although clearly an early Romantic himself, Hoffmann nevertheless shares Jane Austen’s rational criticism of the Romantic temperament, “sentimental” being a term of reproach in this volume.
Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage Vol. 1 (version 2)

Dorothy Richardson
"Pointed Roofs" is the first volume of "Pilgrimage," a series of thirteen autobiographical novels by Dorothy Richardson considered to have pioneered the "stream of consciousness" technique of writing. In a review of Pointed Roofs (The Egoist April 1918), May Sinclair first applied the term "stream of consciousness" in her discussion of Richardson's stylistic innovations. Richardson, however, preferred the term "interior monologue." Miriam Henderson, the central character in Pilgrimage, is based on the author's own life between 1891 and 1915. Richardson also important as a feminist writer because of the way her work assumes the validity and importance of female experiences as a subject for literature. Her wariness of the conventions of language, her bending of the normal rules of punctuation, sentence length, and so on, are used to create a feminine prose, which Richardson saw as necessary for the expression of female experience. Virginia Woolf in 1923 noted that Richardson "has invented, or, if she has not invented, developed and applied to her own uses, a sentence which we might call the psychological sentence of the feminine gender." ( Wikipedia [edited by Expatriate])
Amelia (Vol. 1)

Henry Fielding
This is the first volume of a three volume novel. In this novel, Amelia marries William Booth against her mother's desires, and the two must move to London. Fielding explores the issues of married life such as infidelity and whether women's intelligence is equal to men's.
Awkward Age

Henry James
Nanda Brookenham is coming of age, and thus 'coming out' in London society - which leads to complications in her family's social set in London's fin de siècle life. James presents the novel almost entirely in dialogue, an experiment that adds to the immediacy of the scenes but also creates serious ambiguities about characters and their motives
Cousin Pons

Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Pons is one of the final works in Balzac's long novel series titled The Human Comedy. It was published in 1847, along with Cousin Betty, as one of a complementary pair of novels, collectively titled Poor Relations. While Cousin Betty tells the story of a bitter woman who seeks revenge on her wealthier relations, in Cousin Pons, Balzac turns to the story of an timid, innocent man who is exploited and victimized by the wealthier members of his extended family.

Balzac offers probing character portraits and an indictment of greed and materialism in this detailed portrait of mid-19th-century French life. He is considered one of the finest European novelists of his century and a significant influence on the development of literary realism.
Limbo

Aldous Huxley
This is Aldous Huxley's first collection of short stories, which consists of 6 stories and a play.
Rider on the White Horse

Theodor Storm
Hauke Haien, a young man of 24 years, has just beome dikemaster in Northern Frisia. Against the resistance of many of the townfolk, he has a new dike built, not according to the old customs, but to his own specifications. For years, everything goes well, but when the big storm hits the land, a small oversight will cost him dearly.

Storm tells the life of Hauke Haien from his beginnings as the clever son of a small landowner to his rise as dikemaster, where Hauke has to weather many storms - both literally and figuratively speaking. The story inside a story inside a story is considered Theodor Storm's masterpiece.
Mardi Vol. 2

Herman Melville
Mardi is Melville's first purely fictional work. In it he contemplates man's beliefs, and questions whether or not one faith has value over another--or is it all simply a sham? Mardi is a poetically existential analysis of religious truths as told through the protagonist's allegorical wanderings across the South Pacific. But is this all that Mardi is?
Tales From Dickens

Hallie Erminie Rives
The Old Curiosity Shop; Hard Times; A Tale of Two Cities; Oliver Twist; The Pickwick Papers. Have you read any or all of these famous Dickens stories? The author of this marvelous book, Rives Ermine, a highly successful author in her own right, simply wanted to retell the basic elements of some of Dickens best beloved novels and story lines. Now is your chance to revisit these stories and revive the memories of great reads. Of it you haven't gotten around to some of these classics, this would be a marvelous chance to listen to what they are about so you can enjoy them even more in the original later. The synopsis of each book by Dickens, broken into 3 or 4 sections, is read by a single LibriVox reader for a more consistent and understandable flow. As an added treat, the author's essay on Charles Dickens has been added as the last section of this audiobook.
Mr. Britling Sees It Through

H. G. Wells
"Mr. Britling Sees It Through" is H. G. Wells' attempt to make sense of World War I. It begins with a lighthearted account of an American visiting England for the first time, but the outbreak of war changes everything. Day by day and month by month, Wells chronicles the unfolding events and public reaction as witnessed by the inhabitants of one house in rural Essex. Each of the characters tries in a different way to keep their bearings in a world suddenly changed beyond recognition. This book was published in 1916 while the war was still in progress, so no clear resolution was possible. Wells did not know how long the war would last or which side would ultimately win, but he hoped that somehow, something good might eventually come of it.
Growth of the Soil

Knut Hamsun
Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde) is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. The essential elements of this novel are expressed in the words of the English translator W.W. Worster in his footnote in December 1920: 'It is the life story of a man in the wilds, the genesis and gradual development of a homestead, the unit of humanity, in the unfilled, uncleared tracts that still remain in the Norwegian Highlands. It is an epic of earth; the history of a microcosm. Its dominant note is one of patient strength and simplicity; the mainstay of its working is the tacit, stern, yet loving alliance between Nature and the Man who faces her himself, trusting to himself and her for the physical means of life, and the spiritual contentment with life which she must grant if he be worthy. . .The story is epic in its magnitude, in its calm, steady progress and unhurrying rhythm, in its vast and intimate humanity. The author looks upon his characters with a great, all-tolerant sympathy, aloof yet kindly, as a god.'
Rescue

Joseph Conrad
"The Rescue" is the third of Conrad's novels to feature Captain Tom Lingard, an independent buccaneer operating in the Malayan archipelago. Tom Lingard was probably based on the real-life William Lingard, a runaway from an English landed family who owned several ships and traded extensively (and perhaps illegally) around the Macassar Strait in the mid-nineteenth century. In this prequel to both "An Outcast of the Islands" and "Almayer's Folly", Tom Lingard, after several years of expensive preparation, is right on the verge of pulling off a noble plan to restore a tribal prince and princess to their rightful realm with the help of native allies through a show of force when he learns that a wealthy and arrogant Englishman has accidentally run his pleasure yacht aground right in the middle of his own proposed field of operations. The yacht owner refuses Lingard's pleas to leave his yacht for a few days to allow Lingard to carry out his plans, and matters soon get even stickier when a group of Lingard's notional 'allies' on shore capture the yacht's owner just as Lingard and the yacht owner's wife find they are falling in love.
Clarissa Harlowe, or the History of a Young Lady - Volume 6

Samuel Richardson
It tells the tragic story of a heroine whose quest for virtue is continually thwarted by her family, It is generally regarded as Richardson's masterpiece. This is Volume six out of a series of nine Volumes.

Letter 6 read by TriciaG, wib66, Timothy Ferguson and Adonis. ( Michele Eaton )
Mark the Match Boy or Richard Hunter's Ward

Horatio Alger, Jr.
In this third installment from the “Ragged Dick” series by Horatio Algers, Jr., the reader is reacquainted with some old friends and meets young Mark Manton. Mark is a match boy plagued by bad luck and an even worse guardian. But, with new friends, hard work, and smart choices, Mark may just find his luck taking a turn for the better.
Lady Barbarina

Henry James
Rich and beautiful American girls heading to England to find themselves noble titles through marriage, and using their New World wealth to prop up the waning strength of the aristocracy, was almost a staple of late Victorian literature. "The Buccaneers," Edith Wharton called them, and their day is not over yet (think of Downton Abbey's Earl of Grantham, and his American heiress countess). In Lady Barbarina, however, Henry James explores the obverse of this old tale: what if the wealth is in the hands of an American man, in love with the beautiful daughter of an old and titled (but no longer so very rich) family? Legal marital settlements, common in England, less so in America, can be a problem. Think of them as the Victorian equivalent of modern pre-nuptial contracts, introducing a note, not of suspicion perhaps, but of cautious prudence in what otherwise might be seen as a match of pure love. For all their similarities, Britain and the United States remain divided by three thousand miles of open water.
Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages

Various
A delightful collection of short stories by some of the luminary authors of the Victorian era. These stories explore the truth behind the Victorian marriage.
Some Do Not...

Ford Madox Ford
Set immediately before and during the Great War, Some Do Not... is a tale of social cruelty among the English upper classes that pits real honour against shameless duplicity and subjects its principal characters to extremes of mental suffering that appear to be analogous to the (never directly described) physical horrors of the actual fighting. The plot revolves around the mores and desires of the intellectually brilliant but impossibly high-minded Christopher Tietjens, his icy wife Sylvia, and Valentine Wannop, a poor but well-educated young woman who loves Christopher, and is in many ways his moral and intellectual equal. In its time, the novel was unusual for its daring, often disorienting, use of flashbacks within scenes, for its scrambling together of interior and spoken dialog, and for the demand it places on the reader to interpret what is "really" taking place on the basis of slender and widely dispersed clues. As Julian Barnes has written "It will be a very rare reader who does not intermittently look up from the page to ask, ‘But did I know that? Have we been told that already or not?’ " Notwithstanding these difficulties, Malcolm Bradbury has described Parade's End, the tetralogy of which Some Do Not... forms the first part, as being, in toto, "the greatest modern war novel from a British writer".

As the text sometimes mentions persons' names out of context, the following list of characters is included to help the listener keep track of who is who:
Christopher Tietjens: intellectually brilliant youngest son of a wealthy landowner.
Sylvia Tietjens, née Sattherthwaite: Christopher Tietjens' wife.
Mrs Satterthwaite: Sylvia Tietjens' mother.
Father Consett: an Irish priest, friend of the Satterthwaites.
Vincent Macmaster: a colleague and friend of Christopher Tietjens.
General Campion: an old friend of Christopher Tietjens' father.
Lady Claudine Sandbach: sister of General Campion. Wife of Paul Sandbach.
Paul Sandbach, Conservative politician, husband of Lady Claudine Sandbach.
Mrs Duchemin: wife of the Rev. Mr. Duchemin, an Anglican clergyman.
Valentine Wannop: daughter of Professor Wannop, deceased (an old friend of Christopher Tietjens' father) and Mrs Wannop.
Gertie Wilson: friend of Valentine Wannop, wanted by police for allegedly criminal suffragette activities.
Mrs Wannop: an accomplished novelist and journalist fallen on hard times.
Lord Port Scatho: manager of one of London's greatest and most respected banks.
Mr Brownlie ("Brownie"): banker and nephew of Lord Port Scatho. Hopes to marry Sylvia Tietjens if/when she divorces Christopher.
Mark Tietjens: Christopher Tietjens oldest but childless brother. Current occupant of Groby, the Tietjens' estate.
Ruggles: A friend of Mark Tietjens who shares his London quarters and deals extensively in gossip.
Glorvina: Nickname of a 'great lady' who is the mother of two of Sylvia Tietjens' closest friends.
Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes

Joseph Conrad
In the 1870s, supporters of the pretender to the throne of Spain take advantage of a young man's attraction to the sea to persuade him to run dangerous missions on their behalf, with the financial support of a beautiful but exceedingly baffling young heiress, with whom the young man is soon giddily in love. Told largely in the first person, the novel is unusual, for Conrad, in focusing largely on the evolving psychology of a young man in the throes of a great romantic passion.
Elsie Venner

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Bernard Langdon is close to earning his degree in medicine when his family finds itself in financial difficulties, forcing Langdon to interrupt his studies for a time in order to earn money with which to fund the rest of his degree. He therefore leaves Boston in order to teach at a school in a village in the area. One of his students is Elsie Venner, a seventeen year-old girl, who is avoided by her peers and keeps apart. Somehow, Elsie exerts a great fascination on Langdon, as there is something distinctly different about her with her strangeness and quick temper.

Elsie Venner is one of Oliver Wendell Holmes' "medicated novels", in which he explores a medical condition of a character. Holmes was teaching at Harvard Medical School when this book was published, and he chose to let a professor of medicine narrate the story. Elsie Venner is notable for its strong Boston local colour, being at the same time the book in which Holmes coined the term "Boston Brahmin".
Royal Highness

Thomas Mann
Royal Highness is the story of Prince Klaus Heinrich, a member of a struggling German duchy and an exotic American heiress who comes to live as his neighbor. The novel is a microcosm of Europe before World War I, with Mann's depiction of a decaying society that is rejuvenated by modern forces. A true modern day fairy tale.
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, volume 12

Various
The Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, is a work of enormous proportions. Setting out with the simple goal of offering "American households a mass of good reading", the editors drew from literature of all times and all kinds what they considered the best pieces of human writing, and compiled an ambitious collection of 45 volumes (with a 46th being an index-guide). Besides the selection and translation of a huge number of poems, letters, short stories and sections of books, the collection offers, before each chapter, a short essay about the author or subject in question. In many cases, chapters contemplate not one author, but certain groups of works, organized by nationality, subject or period; there is, thus, a chapter on Accadian-Babylonian literature, one on the Holy Grail, and one on Chansons, for example.The result is a collection that holds the interest, for the variety of subjects and forms, but also as a means of first contact with such famous and important authors that many people have heard of, but never read, such as Abelard, Dante or Lord Byron. According to the editor Charles Dudley Warner, this collection "is not a library of reference only, but a library to be read."This twelfth volume contains chapters from "Diderot" to "Duruy".
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

George Gissing
This novel consists of selections from the diary of an author, starting soon after his retirement and continuing until just before his death. There is very little in the way of plot, but a great deal of quiet musing about art, nature, society, and the things that make life worth living. Although this is a work of fiction, there are clear parallels between the narrator's life and Gissing's own life. This leads many commenters to view it as semi-autobiographical.
Moorland Cottage

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
"Maggie Brown is torn between her mother who constantly tells her to live for her selfish brother (to whom she gives all her love) to her wish to marry Frank and live for herself. Maggie's plight for independence shows the change in women's role, which started to take place during that time. But it also keeps to the tradition of an almost Cinderella story: the pure woman does the best for everyone but herself and is rewarded for that. In addition, this is a very interesting story, written in Gaskell's remarkable style. When you read it, you are transported to another time, and place".
Under the Shadow of Etna: Sicilian Stories

Giovanni Verga
The short stories of Giovanni Verga, one of the leading authors of Italian verismo, or realism, tell mostly of working-class characters in rural, 19th-century Sicily. One of these stories, "Rustic Chivalry," or "Cavalleria rusticana," was the basis for the opera of the same name by Mascagni.
Bridge Builders

Rudyard Kipling
A tale of the revenge of the earth, in this case, specifically, Mother Gunga, Goddess of the River Ganga, against the men who confine her power, The Bridge Builders is also a tale of the death of the Gods as their place in the earth is taken by the things of science. A close description of the building of a bridge across the River Ganges, the tale also tells of a vision of the Gods in an opium dream like a dream in the mind of Brahma; and when Brahma wakes, the Gods die. Or do they? ( Tony Addison)
Lost Illusions: Ève and David

Honoré de Balzac
Ève and David (1843) is the final book in Balzac’s Lost Illusions trilogy, which is part of his sweeping set of novels collectively titled La Comédie Humaine. The story is set in post-Napoleonic France. In the first volume of the trilogy (Two Poets, 1837), we meet Lucien Chardon, an aspiring poet frustrated by the pettiness of provincial life. In the second volume (A Distinguished Provincial at Paris, 1839) Lucien, now using the more aristocratic-sounding surname "de Rubempré," leaves his family in order to seek fame and fortune in the literary world of Paris. By the end of that book, he faced imminent emotional and financial collapse.

In this present volume, the reader is returned to the provincial town of Angoulême, where Lucien's sister Ève and her husband, Lucien's friend David, have been desperately struggling against clever competition to keep a their printing shop afloat. Their situation is complicated when Lucien's financial distress spills over into their lives.

Balzac’s work was hugely influential in the development of realism in fiction. The Lost Illusions trilogy is one of his greatest achievements, and is named in the reference work 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.
Hide and Seek

Wilkie Collins
The artist Valentine Blyth has a very generous heart. He lovingly cares for his invalid wife, rescues a deaf orphan girl from maltreatment in a traveling circus and adopts her, and mentors a young man who gets in trouble with his tyrannical father. The girl, who received the nickname ‚Madonna’, falls in love with the young man, Zack. Because one of Valentine’s biggest fears is that Madonna’s blood relations will one day trace her and take her away from his home, he keeps the little that he knows of her origins a strict secret. One day, Zack befriends a mysterious stranger, who has just returned from years of rough life in the American wilderness. From that moment, the plot thickens, in mid-19th century dramatic style.

This is Wilkie Collins’ third published novel (1854, read from the 1861 edition)
Vignettes of San Francisco

Almira Bailey
A collection of observations and stories about San Franciscan life - the people, the buildings, the parks, the food, the street-cars, the bay, Alcatraz, the sounds and the smells and the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of this fascinating city. Excerpt...IN the same way that the poets have loved Rome and made their pilgrimages there - as good Moslems travel toward Mecca, so there are some of us who have come to San Francisco. Then when we arrive and find it all that we have dreamed, our love for it becomes its highest tribute.
London Life

Henry James
A devoted sister attempts to check her sibling's scandalous behavior in the world of British high society. A delightful comedy of Anglo-American manners and a fascinating glimpse of late Victorian London
Ormond

Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth was one of the most popular writers of her time, a sharp and witty observer of society manners, and a favorite author for Jane Austen.

“Ormond,” published in 1817, is a “coming-of-age” novel, tracing a young man’s development as he approaches the age of majority. When we meet him, Harry Ormond has his “heart in the right place,” but is unsettled of character, naïve and impulsive. The central issue is: “What kind of man will he become?”

In part, Harry is influenced by the books he reads: Fielding’s “Tom Jones,” Richardson’s “Sir Charles Grandison,” and works of the French Enlightenment. More important, however, are influences from the company he keeps, much as Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” takes shape as a reflection of the people around him. As an orphan, Harry had been adopted by Sir Ulick O’Shane, a man of society, full of subtlety and strategies, who exploits his public trust for private advantage (a practice known at that time as “jobbing”). Harry also spends time with Sir Ulick’s cousin Cornelius, a Falstaffian figure of hearty good cheer and eccentric rural lifestyle. (He enthrones himself on a tiny island in an Irish lake, calls himself the “King of the Black Islands” and nicknames Ormond “Prince Harry.”) Later, Harry follows Cornelius’s daughter to Paris, where he witnesses the glamorous dissipation of French society in the years before the Revolution.

This novel explores the challenges of bringing together apparent oppositions: reconciling promised loyalty with assertion of self, Anglo-Irish landlords with their Irish tenants, Catholics with Protestants, and the impulsive heart with the rational head.

“Ormond” is named in the reference list “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.”
Hazard of New Fortunes

William Dean Howells
Howell’s novel is set in New York of the late nineteenth century, a city familiar to readers of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Basil March, a businessman from Boston of a literary bent, moves with his family to New York to edit a new journal founded by an acquaintance. Its financial support, however, comes from a Mr. Dryfoos, a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer suddenly become millionaire by the discovery of natural gas on his property, and now living in New York with his family in a style he hopes will befit his new wealth.
Is it his new fortune that presents a hazard? Or is it the new wealth of New York City in the Gilded Age? Both March and his literary creator are increasingly aware of some of the social and economic contradictions that beset the city of the time (though some of Howell’s analysis sounds as if it well might fit New York today). Characters such as, among others, Dryfoos’s children, a German socialist immigrant who fought for the Union cause, an impoverished Southern colonel still persuaded that a reformed slavery might work, a young woman drawn from the upper reaches of Old New York society, help to enrich the story and its setting with their differing viewpoints. ( Nicholas Clifford)
Hieroglyphic Tales

Horace Walpole
Surreal and satirical, these stories by the eighteenth century man of letters, Whig politician, art historian and antiquarian are '"...mere whimsical trifles, written chiefly for private entertainment, and for private amusement... an attempt to vary the stale and beaten class of stories and novels, which, though works of invention, are almost always devoid of imagination...." Horace Walpole
Woman of Genius

Mary Hunter Austin
In this 1912 novel, Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934) draws inspiration from her own life to tell the story of a gifted woman caught between her public ambition and her private desire. Beginning with her post-Civil War Midwestern girlhood, Austin chronicles the tumultuous life -- its romantic and artistic challenges -- of "tragic actress" Olivia Lattimore. With lyrical insight, she explores the many social and economic obstacles talented women like Olivia face in their pursuit of self-fulfillment. In America’s cynical Gilded Age, Austin asks, can a “woman of genius” find both happiness and success? Summary by Amy Dunkleberger
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