Modern Literature

//Modern Literature
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  • Roger Brook 1. Later he will become Prime Minister Pitt's most resourceful secret agent. For now, in 1783, the handsome Brook is out to seek his fame and fortune.  He might never have set out at all were it not for the beautiful, wicked Georgina Thursby. And he would not have become entangled in French foreign policy except for the lonely Athenais de Rochambeau...
  • Two weeks before D-Day, the French Resistance attacks a chateau containing a telephone exchange vital to German communications - but the building is heavily guarded and the attack fails disastrously. Flick Clairet, a young British secret agent, proposes a daring new plan: she will parachute into France with an all-woman team known as the 'Jackdaws' and they will penetrate the chateau in disguise. But unknown to Flick, Rommel has assigned a brilliant, ruthless Intelligence colonel. Dieter Franck, to crush the Resistance. And Dieter is on Flick's trail...
  • The sequel to Strumpet City and described as a rich  tapestry of Irish life from 1914 to the end of World War II.  It's about growing up:  Tim McDonagh and his two close friends move through childhood and adolescence to early manhood,  each adapting in his own way to the varied and complex strands of the Irish heritage. The Church is, of course, a powerful influence; as is the  strong blood-myth of race and a pervasive nostalgia for the lost, golden age of the Gael: a crowded, mythological world of gods, warriors and hero-poets. There's also the passionate antagonisms of the Civil War which had so recently marked the setting-up of the new State and turned the triumph of the uprising to dust and ashes. There are characters personifying these influences: O'Sheehan, the eccentric old librarian and Celtic scholar who believes he is Oisin, - son of Finn MacCumhaill of Gaelic mythology (and therefore about 2,000 years old...) Cornelius Moloney publican and politician, who hopes to make his fortune by training greyhounds; and petty politicians and feuding Treatyites and Anti-Treatyites who were at one time brothers-in-arms.
  • Jane and Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice are well-known - but what of their sister Mary, of the staidly religious mind and awful singing voice?  Colleen McCullough imagines a life for Mary, twenty years after the close of Jane Austen's novel.  Each of Mary's sisters is settled in one way or another; Jane is happily married and the mother of many children; Elizabeth has to cope with unwelcome social pre-eminence; Lydia is still enchanted with military officers; and Kitty is a star of the fashionable London salons. When circumstances free Mary from her family obligations she is fired with zeal by the newspaper letters of the mystery man 'Argus' and she resolves to publish a book about the plight of London's poor - a goal which has her plunging from one predicament to another and ultimately to the surprising identity of 'Argus'.
  • There are two standing orders in my life, God's and the Army's. Both bolt me together. These two moral imperatives dictate the life and destiny of young David Andersen as he battles the obscene and inhuman horrors of the Korean War - Korea, where it seemed to Andersen that the ice in the streams would never melt and that spring was gone forever - where the young subaltern learns that battle, like his childhood, is a solitary business. He struggles to earn the respect of his men, to preserve standards of decency in an increasingly desperate , bloody and terrifying combat with a seemingly invincible enemy. He gets used to death; he kills and prays for forgiveness and learns to be content in his spiritual isolation until he is befriended by Tom Fleetwood, an English officer. All that Andersen learns in Korea, on his return to the family home in Victoria, he shares only with Elinor, a neighbour's wife - with whom he falls in love.
  • Features Joe Wilson's Courtship; Water Them Geraniums; Spuds and a Woman's Obstinacy; The Chinaman's Ghost; Jimmy Grimshaw's Wooing and many more yarns from this master story-teller's pen.
  • The sequel to The Guns of Navarone. Keith Mallory, Andrea and Dusty Miller are parachuting into war-torn Yugoslavia on a mission to ostensibly rescue a division of trapped partisans. In fact, it is to convince the Germans that a major Allied assault on Yugoslavia is imminent and thus draw troops from the Italian front.  Helped - and sometimes hindered - by a trio of Commando sergeants and a blind folk singer and his sister, the three need all the courage, darling and special techniques to accomplish their dual objective.
  • In 1920, Eve Tozer, the attractive daughter of an American tycoon with huge trading interests in China, disembarked from a P. and O. liner at Tilbury. Hardly had she checked into the Savoy when a mysterious Oriental was announced.  Her father, who she believed to be safe and sound in Shanghai had been kidnapped by a warlord. The ransom demanded was a priceless statuette Eve had in her possession.  The closing date  for the hand-over is eighteen days - and even the fastest liner sailing on the next day will not get her back to China in time. The only hope is to fly - in a day before airlines and airports.  Eve, herself a qualified pilot, found a couple of ex-R.F.C. pilots on their uppers -  they bought and equipped three Bristol two-seaters, evaded trouble in France and ran into it in Germany. Historical personages - Mao Tse Tung and Mustafa Kemal - play a part as do wild and strange characters from the Balkans, Waziristan and India.

  • According to the Geneva Convention, red crosses on a ship guarantee immunity from enemy attack. The San Andreas is a hospital ship but the crew do not trust the night lights or the red crosses to keep her safe  - and they do not trust the enemy U-boats. Suddenly, the the hour before dawn, the ship's power is cut. The lights go out. Someone on board the British hospital ship is intent on sabotage...Cover art by Paul Wright.