Ralph Cosham

Marlow comes face to face with the corruption and despair that lies at the heart of human existence when he undertakes a journey on behalf of a Belgian trading company up the Congo River in search of the tormented white ivory trader, Kurtz.

Victor Frankenstein has discovered the secret of generating life from lifeless matter, and has created a monster being by using this terrible power.

A horse in nineteenth-century England recounts his experiences with both good and bad masters.

When David Copperfield's widowed mother remarries, David suffers from his stepfather's abuse. At age 8, David is sent away to a harsh school where the principal routinely beats the students. David's circumstances become even worse when he is removed from school and, at age 10, forced to labor from morning to night in a London warehouse. David then decides to take desperate action. He will run away to his great-aunt, who lives in Dover. Having never...

A psychologically thrilling tale, The Black Monk delves into the murky region between fantasy and reality and asks what separates self-confidence from self-delusion. Our protagonist Andrei Kovrin, a brilliant scholar who takes a leave of absence from academia due to stress, and recuperates at the house of his former guardian Pesotsky. He grows close to Pesotsky's daughter Tatiana as they tend the orchard together. Kovrin enjoys taking long walks in...

Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four is the second novel in the Sherlock Holmes series, following the enormously successful novel A Study In Scarlet. With the mysterious disappearance of a British Indian army officer, a one-legged hooligan, a stolen treasure, and a nefarious pact between four con-men, this novel of revenge and love is an exquisite classic of crime fiction. In the infamous opening of the novel, Dr. Watson finds Sherlock Holmes in...

Joining the cast of a musical loosely based on She Stoops to Conquer, actor/detective Charles Paris is soon regretting his decision, irked as he is by the odious theatre and television star who is backing, producing and starring in the show. But when rehearsals are hampered by a strange series of mishaps, including the rehearsal pianist being shot in the hand and an actor falling and breaking his leg, Paris investigates and quickly decides that the...

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today—not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind...

Set in Rome, The Raphael Affair features the perpetually beset General Bottando of the Italian National Art Theft Squad; his glamorous assistant, Flavia di Stefano; and Jonathan Argyll, a British art historian. When Jonathan is arrested for breaking into an obscure church in Rome, he claims that it contains a long-lost Raphael hidden under a painting by Mantini. The painting disappears—then reappears in the hands of the top British art dealer,...

With amazing insight, Anton Chekhov wrote of the lives of the Russian common man as well as the landowner. He established the style of the modern short story and influenced many great writers, including George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf. Includes "The Black Monk" -- a tale of a man who blissfully chats with the vision of a wise, mysterious monk -- and "The Kiss," "The Helpmate," and "Expensive...