Blog EBE English Book Education
Looking for poolside page-turners you can dive into while you’re away on a Summer getaway? We’re highlighting a range of options you can tote along on your summer vacation. Before you start packing, take a look at these must-have reads.
Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham is the basis of Being Julia, a major worldwide movie release in October 2004 starring Annette Benning and Jeremy Irons.
Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. On stage she is a true professional, in full possession of her emotions. Off stage, however, she is bored with her husband, less disciplined about her behaviour. She is at first amused by the attentions of a shy but ambitious young fan, then thrilled by his persistence — and at last wildly but dangerously in love. Although Maugham is most celebrated as a novelist and short-story writer, it was as a playwright that he first knew success. Theatre is both a tribute to a world from which he had retired and a persuasive testimony to his enthusiasm for drama and the stage.
‘He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.’
Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway’s magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. It was The Old Man and the Sea that won for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here, in a perfectly crafted story, is a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man’s challenge to the elements in which he lives. Not a single word is superflous in this widely admired masterpiece, which once and for all established his place as one of the giants of modern literature.
When Kino, a Mexican pearl-diver finds ‘the Pearl of the World’ he believes that his impoverished life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana in the church and their son, Coyotito, will go to school. Obsessed by his dream, Kino is blind to the greed, fear and even violence the pearl arouses in his neighbours – and in himself.
Only connect.’ is the idea at the heart of this book, a heartbreaking and provocative tale of three families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes, the gentle, idealistic Schlegels and the lower-middle class Basts. As the Schlegel sisters try desperately to help the Basts and educate the close-minded Wilcoxes, the families are drawn together in love, lies, and death.
Frequently cited as E. M. Forster’s finest work, Howards End brilliantly explores class warfare, conflict and the English character.
She decided she would teach him to speak and he was very soon able to say, ‘Pretty boy!’, ‘Your servant, sir!’ and ‘Hail Mary!” With pathos and humour, Flaubert imagines the unexamined life of a servant girl. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin’s 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.
‘…ever-present, phantom thing; My slave, my comrade, and my king.’ Some of Emily Bronte’s most extraordinary poems. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin’s 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.
