Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

This new edition of Swift's satiric classic is based on the 1726 text—the edition textual scholars now consider the most authoritative. It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. "Contexts" collects materials that influenced Swift's writing of the novel, as well as documents that suggest its initial reception, including Swift's correspondence, Alexander Pope's poems on Gulliver's Travels , and... (more)

Candide

by Voltaire

Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a benevolent cosmic plan.... (more)

The Musician's Daughter

by Susanne Emily Dunlap

Murder and love — from the halls of Vienna’s imperial family to a perilous gypsy camp Amid the glamour of Prince Nicholas Esterhazy’s court in 18th-century Vienna, murder is afoot. Or so fifteen-year-old Theresa Maria is convinced when her musician father turns up dead on Christmas Eve, his valuable violin missing, and the only clue to his death a strange gold pendant around his neck. Then her father’s mentor,... (more)

Dear America

The Winter of Red Snow

The Revolutionary War Diary of Abigail Jane Stewart

by Kristiana Gregory

In her beloved diary, eleven-year-old Abigail Jane Stewart chronicles the despair and the hope of the winter of 1777 and 1778, when she witnesses the struggles of George Washington and his soldiers on the fields of Valley Forge.

The Red Necklace

by Sally Gardner

Clever and head-turningly attractive, fourteen-yearold Yann is an orphan who has been raised in Paris by Têtu, a dwarf with secrets he has yet to reveal to the gypsy boy. It's the winter of 1789, and the duo have been working for a vain magician named Topolain. On the night when Topolain's vanity brings his own death, Yann's life truly begins. That's the night he meets shy Sido, an heiress with an ice-cold ... (more)

The Fifth of March: A Story of the Boston Massacre

The Fifth of March: A Story of the Boston Massacre

by Ann Rinaldi

Rachel Marsh is a servant in the Boston household of John Adams. But her loyalty to the Adams family is tested by her friendship with Matthew Kilroy, a British private who leads his soldiers in firing upon a mob of Boston citizens.

Moll Flanders

by Daniel Defoe

With an Introduction and Notes by R.T.Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York Moll Flanders follows the life of its eponymous heroine through its many vicissitudes, which include her early seduction, careers in crime and prostitution, conviction for theft and transportation to the plantations of Virginia, and her ultimate redemption and prosperity in the new World.

The Last of the Mohicans

by James Fenimore Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper, Les Martin, N. C. Wyeth, Deanna McFadden

The wild rush of action in this classic frontier adventure story has made The Last of the Mohicans the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Deep in the forests of upper New York State, the brave woodsman Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo) and his loyal Mohican friends Chingachgook and Uncas become embroiled in the bloody battles of the French and Indian War. The abduction of the beautiful... (more)

Tom Jones

by Henry Fielding

Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury Tom Jones is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential English novels. It is certainly the funniest. Tom Jones, the hero of the book, is introduced to the reader as the ward of a liberal Somerset squire. Tom is a generous but slightly wild and feckless country boy with a weakness for young women.... (more)

Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson's cherished, unforgettable adventure magically captures the thrill of a sea voyage and a treasure hunt through the eyes of its teenage protagonist, Jim Hawkins. Crossing the Atlantic in search of the buried cache, Jim and the ship's crew must brave the elements and a mutinous charge led by the quintessentially ruthless pirate Long John Silver. Brilliantly conceived and splendidly executed,... (more)

Push Not the River

by James Conroyd Martin

A panoramic and epic novel in the grand romantic style, Push Not the River is the rich story of Poland in the late 1700s--a time of heartache and turmoil as the country's once peaceful people are being torn apart by neighboring countries and divided loyalties. It is then, at the young and vulnerable age of seventeen, when Lady Anna Maria Berezowska loses both of her parents and must leave the only home she has... (more)

Devil Water

by Anya Seton

This fiercely beautiful novel tells the true story of Charles Radcliff, a Catholic nobleman who joined the short-lived Jacobite rebellion of 1715, and of his daughter, Jenny, by a secret marriage. Set in the wilds of Northumbria, teeming London, and colonial Virginia—where Jenny eventually settled on the estate of the famous William Byrd of Westover—Jenny’s story reveals one young woman’s loyalty, passion, and... (more)

Pirates of New Spain, 1575-1742

by Peter Gerhard

By the sixteenth century, Spain had acquired the lion's share of territories in the New World, with the rest of Europe eager to share in the flow of wealth from the newfound mines. Attempts at peaceful trade were rebuffed by Spanish colonial officials, and by 1540, piracy in the Caribbean had become a thriving trade. Freebooters seeking plunder cast their gaze westward, to the less-fortified Pacific coast of the... (more)

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

by Walter Isaacson

Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and back, Isaacson chronicles the... (more)

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

by Amanda Foreman

The winner of Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize and a bestseller there for months, this wonderfully readable biography offers a rich, rollicking picture of late-eighteenth-century British aristocracy and the intimate story of a woman who for a time was its undisputed leader. Lady Georgiana Spencer was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales, and was nearly as famous in her day. In 1774,... (more)

Place Called Freedom, A

by Ken Follett

Sentenced to a life of misery in the Scottish coal mines, twenty-one-year-old Mack McAsh hungers for escape. His only ally: beautiful high-born Lizzie Hallim, who is trapped in her own kind of hell. In 1766, from the teeming streets of London to the infernal hold of a slave ship headed for the American colonies to a sprawling Virginia plantation, two restless young people, separated by politics and position, are... (more)

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Book 1

The Pox Party

by M. T. Anderson

A gothic tale becomes all too shockingly real in this mesmerizing magnum opus by the acclaimed author of FEED. It sounds like a fairy tale. He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the finest of classical educations. Raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother — a princess in exile from a faraway land — are the only persons in their household assigned... (more)

Marie Antoinette: The Journey

by Antonia Fraser

France’s beleaguered queen, Marie Antoinette, wrongly accused of uttering the infamous “Let them eat cake,” was the subject of ridicule and curiosity even before her death; she has since been the object of debate and speculation and the fascination so often accorded tragic figures in history. Married in mere girlhood, this essentially lighthearted, privileged, but otherwise unremarkable child was thrust into an... (more)

Burning Bright

by Tracy Chevalier

The wonderful new novel from the much loved author of 'Girl With a Pearl Earring' and 'Falling Angels'. Flames and funerals, circus feats and seduction, neighbours and nakedness: Tracy Chevalier's new novel 'Burning Bright' sparkles with drama. London 1792. The Kellaways move from familiar rural Dorset to the tumult of a cramped, unforgiving city. They are leaving behind a terrible loss, a blow that only a... (more)

The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn

by Thomas Hoobler, Dorothy Hoobler

Fourteen-year-old Seikei dreams of being one of the legendary warriors, a samurai. But samurai are born, not made, and Seikei is a tea merchant’s son. Then a priceless ruby intended for the shogun—the military governor of Japan—is stolen by a ghost, and Seikei finds himself having to display all the courage of a samurai. He is the only person to have seen the thief, and now the famous samurai magistrate,... (more)

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Tags: 1700s

by Jonathan Swift