Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a Wizarding classic, first came to Muggle readers’ attention in the book known as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Now, thanks to Hermione Granger’s new translation from the ancient runes, we present this stunning edition with an introduction, notes, and illustrations by J. K. Rowling, and extensive commentary by Albus Dumbledore. Never before have Muggles been privy to these... (more)

My Cup Runneth Over

by Cherry Whytock

I'm, um, LARGE. Yes, "large" just about covers it, although to be quite honest, not many things do -- cover it, I mean. Angelica Cookson Potts, better known as Angel, loves food, both cooking it and eating it, and plans to be a famous chef someday. But she thinks she's just too big -- her mother is a skinny ex-model, her best friends are all smaller than she is, and she feels like a huge, wobbly whale in... (more)

The Reluctant Landlady

by Bernadette Strachan

A wonderfully engaging and romantic comedy about Evie Crump and the residents of 18 Kemp Street...When struggling actress Evie Crump inherits a sprawling Victorian pile from an old family friend in Camden, it would seem to be a dream ticket for Evie and best-friend Bing to escape from the leaky-flat-from-hell. Except it comes with a proviso: she may not evict the existing tenants under any circumstances. There's... (more)

Sense and Sensibility

by Jane Austen

'Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security'. Jane Austen's sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggle of two very different sisters to achieve respectability. "Sense and Sensibility" is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two... (more)

How I Live Now

by Meg Rosoff

“Every war has turning points and every person too.” Fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from Manhattan to England to visit her aunt and cousins she’s never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after Daisy arrives. The next day bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy. As power fails, and systems fail, the farm becomes more isolated.... (more)

Mansfield Park

by Jane Austen

This title contains introduction and notes by Dr Ian Littlewood, University of Sussex. Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned... (more)

The Power and the Glory

by Graham Greene

In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical and moral cowardice in order to find redemption. Introduction by John Updike

Thursday Next: Book 4

Something Rotten

by Jasper Fforde

Thursday Next, Head of JurisFiction and ex-SpecOps agent, returns to her native Swindon accompanied by a child of two, a pair of dodos and Hamlet, who is on a fact-finding mission in the real world. Thursday has been despatched to capture escaped Fictioneer Yorrick Kaine but even so, now seems as good a time as any to retrieve her husband Landen from his state of eradication at the hands of the Chronoguard. It's... (more)

Nursery Crimes: Book 1

The Big Over Easy

by Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde does it again with a dazzling new series starring Inspector Jack Spratt, head of the Nursery Crime Division Jasper Fforde’s bestselling Thursday Next series has delighted readers of every genre with its literary derring-do and brilliant flights of fancy. In The Big Over Easy , Fforde takes a break from classic literature and tumbles into the seedy underbelly of nursery crime. Meet... (more)

Thursday Next: Book 2

Lost in a Good Book

by Jasper Fforde

The inventive, exuberant, and totally original literary fun that began with The Eyre Affair continues with Jasper Fforde’s magnificent second adventure starring the resourceful, fearless literary sleuth Thursday Next. When Landen, the love of her life, is eradicated by the corrupt multinational Goliath Corporation, Thursday must moonlight as a Prose Resource Operative of Jurisfiction—the police force inside... (more)

Thursday Next: Book 3

The Well of Lost Plots

by Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde has done it again in this genre-bending blend of crime fiction, fantasy, and top-drawer literary entertainment. After two rollicking New York Times bestselling adventures through Western literature, resourceful literary detective Thursday Next definitely needs some downtime. And what better place for a respite than in the hidden depths of the Well of Lost Plots, where all unpublished... (more)

Nursery Crimes: Book 2

The Fourth Bear

by Jasper Fforde

Jack Spratt and Mary Mary return in their second adventure from the inimitable Jasper Fforde Five years ago, Viking introduced Jasper Fforde and his upsidedown, inside-out literary crime masterpieces. And as they move from Thursday Next to Jack Spratt’s Nursery Crimes, his audience is insatiable and growing. Now, with The Fourth Bear , Jack Spratt and Mary Mary take on their most dangerous case so far... (more)

The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

With a new introduction by Monica Ali The love affair between Maurice Bendix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. Two years later, after a chance meeting, Bendix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.

Pirates!

The True and Remarkable Stories of Minerva Sharpe and Nancy Kington, Female Pirates

by Celia Rees

Nancy Kington, daughter of a rich merchant, suddenly orphaned when her father dies, is sent to live on her family's plantation in Jamaica. Disgusted by the treatment of the slaves and her brother's willingness to marry her off, she and one of the slaves, Minerva, run away and join a band of pirates. For both girls the pirate life is their only chance for freedom in a society where both are treated like property,... (more)

Sorceress (Witch Child)

by Celia Rees

For the legions of readers spellbound by WITCH CHILD, here’s the fascinating next chapter - thanks to a Native American descendant with an uncanny link to the past. Agnes closed her eyes in the heat and steam of the sweat lodge. She woke to air that was dry and cold around her. She was no longer Agnes, or even Karonhisake, Searching Sky. She was no longer American or Haudenosaunee. She was English, and her... (more)

Witch Child

by Celia Rees

Enter the world of young Mary Newbury, a world where simply being different can cost a person her life. Hidden until now in the pages of her diary, Mary’s startling story begins in 1659, the year her beloved grandmother is hanged in the public square as a witch. Mary narrowly escapes a similar fate, only to face intolerance and new danger among the Puritans in the New World. How long can she hide her true... (more)

The Great Indoors

by Sabine Durrant

What happens when life and love intrude on a woman's perfectly ordered existence?

Harry Potter: Book 7

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

by J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the seventh and final of the Harry Potter novels written by British author J. K. Rowling. It chronicles the events directly following Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Thursday Next: Book 5

First Among Sequels

by Jasper Fforde

Literary sleuth Thursday Next is out to save literature in the fifth installment of Jasper Fforde’s wildly popular series Beloved for his prodigious imagination, his satirical gifts, his literate humor, and sheer silliness, Jasper Fforde has delighted book lovers since Thursday Next first appeared in The Eyre Affair , a genre send-up hailed as an instant classic. Since the no-nonsense literary... (more)

Dashwood Sisters' Secrets of Love, The

by Rosie Rushton

The Walker sisters have always lived a privileged life in their beloved Holly House in Sussex. Even though their father, Max Walker, has left the family to live with his new macrobiotic-food-obsessed trophy wife, Pandora, he has always doted on his girls. But then one day, reality crashes down around them when Max has a heart attack and passes away, uncovering the truth that he was knee deep in debt. The Walkers... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: brit. lit.

by J. K. Rowling

by Cherry Whytock

by Bernadette Strachan

by Jane Austen

by Meg Rosoff

by Jane Austen

by Graham Greene

by Jasper Fforde

by Jasper Fforde

by Jasper Fforde

by Jasper Fforde

by Jasper Fforde

by Graham Greene

The True and Remarkable Stories of Minerva Sharpe and Nancy Kington, Female Pirates

by Celia Rees

by Celia Rees

by Celia Rees

by Sabine Durrant

by J. K. Rowling

by Jasper Fforde

by Rosie Rushton