Fleming Community Library

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing oficer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...

"Marina Makarova is a woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life. Swept up on the tides of the Russian Revolution, Marina joins the marches for workers' rights, falls in love with a radical young poet, and betrays everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn. As her country goes through tremendous upheaval, Marina's own coming-of-age unfolds, marked by deep passion, devastating loss, and the private...

"London, August 1881. After a difficult few months, the World's End Investigation Bureau is thriving. Affairs, sex scandals, divorces . . . Lily Raynor is delighted to have so much work for herself and her capable assistant, Felix Wilbraham, but she can't help wishing for a case that doesn't involve the rich, over-indulged - and not terribly moral - upper classes. It's a wish she soon has cause to regret. The Reverend James Jellicote arrives at the...

Four works by great 19th-century Russian author: "The Nose," a savage satire of Russia's incompetent bureaucrats and its snobbish and complacent upper classes; "Old-Fashioned Farmers," a pleasant depiction of an elderly couple living in rustic seclusion; "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich," one of Gogol's most famous comic stories; and "The Overcoat," widely considered a masterpiece of form.