Whilst cleaning a chimney, Tom, emerges in the bedroom of Ellie, who mistakes him for a thief. He runs away, and hot and bothered he slips into a cooling stream, falls asleep and becomes a Water Baby. After an arduous quest to the Other-end-of-Nowhere he achieves his heart's desire.
Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith.
The diary is that of someone who acknowledges that he is not a "somebody" - Charles Pooter, a clerk in the city of London, chronicles with often hilarious detail the everyday life of the lower middle classes during the great Victorian Age.
Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance, and no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.
E. F. Benson was a master of the ghost story and now all his rich, imaginative, spine-tingling and beautifully written tales are presented together in this bumper collection.
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is the first book of modern political economy, and still provides the foundation for the study of that discipline. Along with important discussions of economics and political theory, it mixes plain common sense with large measures of history, philosophy, psychology and sociology.