ALMA BOOKS

(P/B) THE PROPHET
Having lived in the city of Orphalese for twelve years, the revered Prophet is about to board a ship taking him back to the isle of his birth. Before he departs, a group of people gather round and ask him to share his wisdom. Written as a collection of poetic essays, and detailing such diverse and sprawling topics as love, death, pleasure and prayer, The Prophet was an immediate success on its initial publication in 1923, and has since been translated into more than a hundred languages. This edition also features the twelve illustrations p...
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(P/B) A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Against the backdrop of growing discontent in Paris, Doctor Manette is released from the Bastille after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment and begins a new life in England with his devoted daughter Lucie. There, the gifted but dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton and the exiled French nobleman Charles Darnay find their lives increasingly intertwined with those of the Manettes. Yet soon both men are drawn ineluctably from the peaceful English capital to the horror and bloodshed of the Paris Terror and the looming threat of the guillotine. Repr...
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(P/B) MRS DALLOWAY
As Mrs Dalloway works on the preparations for a dinner party, her thoughts throughout the day wander from memories of the past to interrogations about the present and lead her to assess the choices she has made in life and love. Her monologue interweaves with the account of the distress, on that same day, of the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Warren Smith, whose trauma and hallucinations end in tragedy, as the links between the two characters unfold. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE FATAL EGGS
Professor Persikov, an eccentric zoologist, stumbles upon a new light ray that accelerates growth and reproduction rates in living organisms. In the wake of a plague that has decimated the country's poultry stocks, Persikov's discovery is exploited as a means to correct the problem. As foreign agents, the state and the Soviet media all seize upon the red ray, matters get out of hand. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) WE
WE takes place in a distant future, where humans are forced to submit their wills to the requirements of the state, under the rule of the all-powerful Benefactor, and dreams are regarded as a sign of mental illness. In a city of straight lines, protected by green walls and a glass dome, a spaceship is being built in order to spearhead the conquest of new planets. Its chief engineer, a man called D-503, keeps a journal of his life and activities: to his mathematical mind everything seems to make sense and proceed as it should, until a chanc...
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(P/B) LEAVES OF GRASS
First published in 1855 and extended by the author over the course of more than three decades, Leaves of Grass embodies Walt Whitman's lifetime ambition to create a new voice that could capture the spirit and vibrancy of the young American nation, while celebrating at the same time "Nature without check with original energy". Famously written in free verse and brimming with sensuous imagery and an unbridled love of nature and life in all its forms, and containing celebrated poems such as the ebullient 'Song of Myself' - described by Jay Pa...
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(P/B) DEAD SOULS
A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town and proceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual and somewhat macabre proposition. He offers to buy the rights to the dead serfs who are still registered on the landowner's estate, thus reducing their liability for taxes. It is not clear what Chichikov's intentions are with the dead serfs he is purchasing, and despite his attempts to ingratiate himself, his strange behaviour arouses the suspicions of everyone in the town. A biti...
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(P/B) DEATH ON CREDIT
When Celine's first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, was first published in 1932, it created an instant scandal, being extravagantly praised by its supporters and savagely attacked by its horrified opponents. Four years later came the sequel, Death on Credit. Both were a new kind of novel, frank about the author's thoughts and actions in ways that readers had never encountered, ultra-realistic - and full of incidents that could not possibly be true to life, and characters that stretched the imagination. In Death on Credit, Ferdinand...
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(P/B) THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Dorian Gray is having his picture painted by Basil Hallward, who is charmed by his looks. But when Sir Henry Wotton visits, and seduces Dorian into the worship of youthful beauty with an intoxicating speech, Dorian makes a wish he will live to regret: that all the marks of age will now be reflected in the portrait, rather than on Dorian's own face. The stage is now set for a masterful tale about appearance, reality, art, life, truth, fiction and the ultimate burden of conscience. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE METAMORPHOSIS
When the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, his shock and incomprehension are coupled with the panic of being late for work and having to reveal his appearance to family and colleagues. Although over the following weeks he gradually becomes used to this new existence confined within the bounds of the apartment, and his parents and sister adapt to living with a grotesque bug, Gregor notices that their attitudes towards him are changing and he feels increasingly alienated. One of the masterp...
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(P/B) THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS
When strange things are reported to be floating in rivers in rural Vermont after a flood, old myths about hill-dwelling monsters who abduct humans resurface in subsequent debates, much to the annoyance of local academic Albert N. Wilmarth. However, when he starts receiving letters from a man named Henry Wentworth Akeley about the supposed presence near his farmhouse of an extraterrestrial race worshipping ancient cosmic deities, Wilmarth finds himself drawn into an astonishing correspondence that leads to a harrowing discovery. A seminal e...
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(P/B) The New Dress and Other Stories (Alma Classics)
As Mabel Waring takes off her cloak and steps into the drawing room of Clarissa Dalloway, she immediately realizes that something is not right: her pale-yellow silk dress, which she has had specially made for the occasion, is clearly old-fashioned, dowdy and out of place. Everyone seems to be looking at her in dismay or mocking her appearance. Crushed at once by her insecurity, Mabel is pervaded by a sense of selfloathing, and feels utter revulsion for the social world she has tried so hard to impress. Written in 1924 and perhaps intended ...
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(P/B) THE TRAGEDY OF THE KOROSKO
As a group of Western tourists travel down the Nile on the steamer Korosko towards the historical sites near Egypt's southern border, they are kidnapped by a marauding band of dervishes who demand their conversion to Islam. Cut off from the world, deprived of the comforts of civilized society and shaken in their beliefs, they will have to overcome the most arduous obstacles to regain their freedom and safety. Written towards the end of the Victorian era and permeated with a sense of fear and uncertainty, The Tragedy of the Korosko calls in...
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(P/B) ULYSSES
Controversial, scandalous, erudite and funny, Ulysses is undisputedly a landmark of twentieth-century modernism. It charts one day - 16th June 1904 - in the lives of three inhabitants of Dublin: the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, the artist Stephen Dedalus and Bloom's wife Molly. Their peregrinations, thoughts and encounters form the basis of the narrative, which becomes a celebration of all human experience through the lives of specific individuals in a specific place at a specific time. Ulysses is both an experimental novel and a bo...
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(P/B) The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants
Presented in a new translation by Roger Cockrell, The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants was originally conceived as a play and first published in 1859, shortly after the author's release from forced military service. Gogolian in style and tone, and waspish in its description of the villainous Opiskin, it is a sustained exercise in caricatural cruelty and a comedic tour de force. The young Sergei is summoned from St Petersburg by his uncle, the retired colonel Yegor Rostanev, to the remote country estate of Stepanchikovo. Rostane...
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(P/B) PLAYS: THE CHERRY ORCHARD, THREE SISTERS, THE SEAGULL AND UNCLE VANYA
The most widely staged dramatist after Shakespeare, Chekhov left a deep mark both on the development of Russian literature and world theatre, with plays that were remarkable not just for their dialogue but their atmosphere and the tensions expressed between the lines. Collected in this volume are Chekhov's four most celebrated plays - The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard - in a brand-new translation by Hugh Aplin. In these personal stories of unfulfilled love, failed ambition and existential ennui, set against a b...
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(P/B) A STUDY IN SCARLET
On his return to London after serving in the Second Anglo-Afghan War as an assistant surgeon, Doctor Watson is looking for a place to live. He is introduced to a certain Mr Holmes, an eccentric, pipe-smoking gentleman who shows an interest in chemistry and is currently engaged in a test to detect human haemoglobin. What begins as a simple house-sharing enquiry soon turns into a fully fledged "study in scarlet", a case of blood, murder and betrayal that will transport the reader from the streets of London to the early settlements of Salt La...
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(P/B) A Clergyman’s Daughter
Twenty-eight-year-old Dorothy Hare leads a life of drudgery and self-abnegation in the house of her father, the rector of Knype Hill, helping him stave off his creditors and making costumes for fund-raising events. When, after being invited to dinner by Mr Warburton, a local atheist and libertine, she is glimpsed in his arms by the village gossip, Mrs Semprill, Dorothy suffers a breakdown and, struck by amnesia, embarks on journey that will see her join a group of vagrants, pick hops in the fields of Kent, stay in a hotel for "working girl...
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(P/B) GULLIVER'S TRAVELS
Shipwrecked on an unknown island, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself surrounded by its six-inch-tall natives, the Lilliputians. But this is only the first in a long line of wonderful discoveries, as his adventures take him to other far-off lands such as Brobdingnag, populated by a race of giants, Luggnagg, home to the eternally ageing Struldbrugs, and the country of the Houyhnhnms, a race of benevolent talking horses. Parodying the popular travel accounts of its time, Gulliver's Travels is not only a tour de force of imaginative and com...
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(P/B) DIABOLIAD
In Bulgakov's "Diaboliad", the modest and unassuming office clerk Korotkov is summarily sacked for a trifling error from his job at the First Central Depot for the Materials for Matches, and tries to seek out his newly assigned superior Kalsoner, responsible for his dismissal. His quest through the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy takes on the increasingly surreal dimensions of a nightmare. This early satirical story, reminiscent of Gogol and Dostoevsky, was first published in 1924 and incurred the wrath of pro-Soviet critics. Along with th...
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