Alma Books Three Novellas. The Devil, Family Happiness and A Landowner’s Morning Толстой Лев Николаевич

While holidaying at a villa on the French Riviera, Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy American couple, meet the young film star Rosemary Hoyt. Her arrival causes a stir in their social circle and exposes the cracks in their fragile marriage. As their relationship unravels, glimpses of their troubled past emerge, and a series of disturbing events unfolds • Peopled by an unforgettable cast of aristocrats and high-fliers, Tender Is the Night is at once a scathing critique of the materialism and hypocrisy of the Roaring Twenties and a poignant and sensitive account of personal tragedy and disillusionment

The influence of Antonin Artaud on the contemporary theatre has only become evident since the early Sixties, although writers and directors have been directly or indirectly influenced by his thinking and innovations for many years. Today his pre-eminence as a founder of modern theatrical style is rivalled only by Brecht, with whom he has much in common • The man and his work, as Martin Esslin persuasively argues in this perceptive study, are inseparable and must be considered together. Genius or madman, everything about Artaud is fascinating – his extraordinary life, his passions, his wide-ranging interests, the brilliance and originality that he brought to his plays, his productions and his other writings. Artaud died in 1948 at the age of fifty-two, but accomplished a revolution in his short life that is still bearing fruit today

When Tudy’s first husband tragically dies, she takes up the offer of Tom, a family friend, to pay for her to go to study in France. After she and her benefactor become close, she agrees to marry him in Provence later that year. But as the wedding approaches, Tom discovers that his fiancee has become involved with Riccard, a dashing French pilot and his near-double • A tale of broken trust and infidelity based on Zelda Fitzgerald’s own dalliance with a French pilot, ‘Image on the Heart’ is here presented with other lesser-known stories written by Fitzgerald in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which develop many of the themes found in his novels and his more famous works of short fiction • Contains: ‘Zone of Accident’, ‘Fate in Her Hands’, ‘Image on the Heart’, ‘Too Cute for Words’, ‘Inside the House’, ‘Three Acts of Music’, ‘An Author’s Mother’, ‘“Trouble”’, ‘The Guest in Room Nineteen’, ‘In the Holidays’, ‘The End of Hate’, ‘On an Ocean Wave’, ‘The Woman from Twenty-One’ and ‘Discard (Director’s Special)’

Bathsheba Everdene is a headstrong young woman who attracts the attentions of a succession of ill-matched suitors: a quiet sheep farmer, a handsome soldier and an older, wealthy landowner. As the men vie for her affections, she struggles to retain her independence of spirit in the face of their declarations • Introducing readers to the fictional county of Wessex, Thomas Hardy's fourth work of fiction was one of his greatest triumphs, both commercially and critically. Its tale of passion, jealousy and unrequited love is now regarded as one of the finest novels of the nineteenth century, and one of the greatest love stories of all time

What could be better during the golden age of boating on the Thames than a relaxing row up the river? So think J., George and Harris - not forgetting Montmorency the dog - but little do they suspect the mishaps, the scrapes and the japes that lie along the winding way • From becoming impossibly lost in the maze at Hampton Court to battles with tins of pineapple chunks, all the while attempting to limit the destruction wrought by the mischievous Montmorency, Jerome K. Jerome's classic novel of humorous misadventures and comedic authorial digressions is a paean to the banalities of everyday life and has entertained readers for more than a century

On a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells his story to a stranger: how his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated from one of love and passion to jealousy and resentfulness, culminating in a mad act of desperation while she practised Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with her violin teacher • An uncompromising examination of lust, suspicion and infidelity which was once forbidden by censors in Russia and banned in the US due to its shocking content, Tolstoy’s controversial novella – here presented in a new translation, along with ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’, ‘Master and Man’ and ‘After the Ball’ – is now considered one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy’s late period

On a visit to a provincial town to see his sister Nina who is suffering from cancer, Alexei Laptev, who works for his father's Moscow haberdashery business, falls in love with Yulia, the daughter of her doctor, and proposes to her. Although she does not reciprocate his feelings, she agrees to marry him and live with him in the capital, where the couple's relationship is marred by tensions: Yulia is filled with regrets about her choice and boredom with her new existence, while Alexei is nagged by the suspicion that she married him for his money alone. However, as time passes and misfortune strikes, they both learn to reassess all of their assumptions • Chekhov's second longest prose work after "The Steppe", "Three Years" is, in the author's own words, "a novel of Moscow life" and an examination of it's merchant classes

When an army of invading Martians lands in England, panic and terror seize the population. As the aliens traverse the country in huge three-legged machines, incinerating all in their path with a heat ray and spreading noxious toxic gases, the people of the Earth must come to terms with the prospect of the end of human civilization and the beginning of Martian rule. Inspiring films, radio dramas, comic-book adaptations, television series and sequels, The War of the Worlds is a prototypical work of science fiction which has influenced every alien story that has come since, and is unsurpassed in its ability to thrill, well over a century since it was first published

After an accident, Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of impoverished peasants, decides to call on the aristocratic d’Urbervilles, as she believes that she is also descended from their ancient Norman lineage and that they can rescue her family from indigence. Unfortunately she is taken under the wing of the immoral libertine scion Alec d’Urberville, who seduces and scorns her. While she attempts to rebuild her life, she falls in love with the virtuous farmer Angel Clare and must find a way to defeat the demons of her past • Controversial when it was first published for challenging Victorian morals, Tess of the d’Urbervilles has become Thomas Hardy’s most popular novel, catching the imaginations of generations of readers with its high drama, endearing heroine and powerful evocations of the southern English countryside

Published in 1880, one year before Verga’s influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic shift towards the verismo school of Italian realism. The collection’s centrepiece, ‘Rustic Honour’ (‘Cavalleria rusticana’) – which was famously adapted into a play by the author before becoming an opera by Mascagni – tells the tale of Turiddu, a poor young man who returns from military service and finds himself embroiled in adultery and a feud with a rival • Also including the well-known stories ‘She-Wolf’ and ‘Foxfur’, Life in the Country captures, in an objective, non-judgemental prose, the difficult conditions and personal struggles of the peasant class in his native Sicily at the turn of the twentieth century • Contains: ‘A Reverie’, ‘Jeli the Herdboy’, ‘Nasty Foxfur’, ‘Rustic Honour’, ‘She-Wolf’, ‘Bindweed’s Lover’, ‘The War of the Saints’ and ‘Crackpot’

From the transcendent beauty of nature observed on the Yorkshire moors to fierce and forceful confrontations of mortality, Emily Bronte’s poems are powerful and passionate works that eloquently elaborate upon her sister Charlotte’s description of her as “a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove” • While only twenty-one of Emily Bronte’s poems were published in her lifetime, her poetic oeuvre is rich and varied, and not only includes visionary poems such as ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’ and ‘Remembrance’, but also features the poems that describe the imagined realm of Gondal and its inhabitants, which she created with her sister Anne • Though Earth and moon were gone, • And suns and universes ceased to be, • And Thou wert left alone, • Every Existence would exist in Thee

A collection of early short stories which helped make Fitzgerald’s name, Tales of the Jazz Age combines period pieces – the most notable of which is the novella-length ‘May Day’ – with more fanciful creations, such as the fantastical ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, recently made into a Hollywood film. Also containing the now classic story ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’, as well as lesser-known sketches and tales, this diverse selection, compiled by Fitzgerald himself from material published in newspapers and magazines, showcases both the variety of his writing and early examples of the themes and characters which would find their way into his later novels