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"Illegitimate children Fiction."
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The bamboo stalk
Josephine escapes poverty by coming to Kuwait from the Philippines to work as a maid, where she meets Rashid, an idealistic only son with literary aspirations. Josephine, with all the wide-eyed naivety of youth, believes she has found true love. But when she becomes pregnant, and with the rumble of war growing ever louder, Rashid bows to family and social pressure, and sends her back home with her baby son, Jose. Brought up struggling with his dual identity, Jose clings to the hope of returning to his father's country when he is eighteen. He is ill-prepared to plunge headfirst into a world where the fear of tyrants and dictators is nothing compared to the fear of 'what will people say'. And with a Filipino face, a Kuwaiti passport, an Arab surname and a Christian first name, will his father's country welcome him? The Bamboo Stalk takes an unflinching look at the lives of foreign workers in Arab countries and confronts the universal problems of identity, race and religion.
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Bleak House
A tale of family secrets and the damaging corruption of the British legal system from the author of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. In Bleak House , Charles Dickens not only pries apart the stultifying and ponderous conduct and contracts of British moneyed society, but also takes specific aim at an English judicial system in desperate need.
eBook
The Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne has committed one of the worst crimes in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston: adultery.To make matter worse, she is pregnant.As punishment, she is shamed and forced to wear a large red \"A\" on her chest at all times.Despite interrogations from the villagers, Hester refuses to reveal the father's identity.
eBook
Adam Bede
George Eliot's debut novel tells a story of love in rural eighteenth-century England. Adam Bede is an upstanding, hardworking, intelligent young man, the kind of person who knows what he wants—and what he wants is the incredibly shallow Hetty Sorrel. Though Hetty is a milkmaid, she harbors dreams of becoming a dignified member of the upper class. To that end, she has set her sights on Captain Arthur Donnithorne, a squire and heir to much of the town's wealth. Meanwhile, Dinah Morris, Hetty's compassionate cousin, harbors irrepressible romantic feelings for Adam. This love rectangle forms the character basis for one of the greatest English novels of all time. Upon its release in 1859, Adam Bede was immediately lauded as a seminal work for its depiction of English country life at the turn of the nineteenth century, garnering the praise of Charles Dickens. Eliot's deft mixing of the fictional with the real has made Adam Bede a timeless classic. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
eBook
Bleak House
'Your mother, Esther, was your disgrace and you are hers.' These words were Esther's earliest memory. But who was Esther's mother ? What was the disgrace ? And why did the ghost walk at Chesney Wold ? (From back cover) Also includes points for understanding.
Book
Women at War
In the final section of Sarah Waters's The Night Watch (2006), which describes events taking place in 1941, Viv has her first encounter with Reggie, who at this point is in the army, attached to an Officer Cadet Training Unit. The dated sections of this novel are organised in reverse chronological order, with 1947 followed by 1944 and 1941, and so the reader is already aware that this meeting between a young single woman and a married man will develop into a relationship that, by 1947, when the novel begins, is proving difficult for Viv to sustain. Her initial conversation with Reggie takes place through the door of the toilet cubicle on a train, and, being told that he has lost his travel permit, she lets him in and shelters him from the ticket inspector. She is ‘self-consciously aware of the smallness of the space’ they are occupying but ‘like everyone else she'd had to get used to sharing odd spaces with strangers recently.’ Her pretence to the guard that she is alone in the cubicle immediately reminds the reader that her relationship with Reggie, here just beginning, will have to be conducted clandestinely. Throughout the novel Waters is concerned with how illicit relationships might have been conducted during the war; the conditions of wartime appear to facilitate such dalliances, offering opportunities for couples to be thrown together, as Viv discovers. But, as Viv also finds out, any apparent freedom comes at the price of an intensified surveillance of private life.
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The soul of power
\"When Sophy Dunbarron, the king's illegitimate daughter, assumes the throne, she must learn to embrace her own powers in the riveting conclusion to the trilogy that began with The Waking Land and The Memory of Fire. Sophy Dunbarron has always felt like an imposter. Separated from her birth mother, raised by parents mourning the loss of their true daughter, and unacknowledged by her father, Sophy only desires one thing: a place and a family to call her own. But fate has other ideas. Caught up in Elanna Valtai's revolution, Sophy has become the reigning monarch of a once-divided country--a role she has been groomed her whole life to fill. But wearing a crown is quite a different thing to actually keeping a crown. With an influx of magic-bearing refugees pouring across the border, resources already thinned by war are stretched to the breaking point. Half the nobility in her court want her deposed, and the other half question her every decision. And every third person seems to be spontaneously manifesting magical powers. When Elanna is captured and taken to Paladis, Sophy's last ally seems to have vanished. Now it is up to her alone to navigate a political maze that becomes more complex and thorny by the day. And worse, Sophy is hiding a huge secret--one that could destroy her tenuous hold on the crown\"-- Provided by publisher.
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The Importance of Being Marie-Aurore de Saxe
MARIE-AURORE was only two years old in 1750 when her illustrious father, Maurice de Saxe, marshal of the French Army, died. Because she was so young and he had been away on military campaigns during most of her early years, he could not have made much of an impression on her. The distance between them was accentuated by her being the illegitimate daughter of his former mistress Marie Rinteau. Nevertheless, the connection with such a powerful and prominent man was the shaping force of Marie-Aurore’s life.
During the first third of that life, Marie-Aurore waged a battle to gain, if
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