Showing results by narrator "Martin Shaw" in All Categories

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work.

An immediate success when it was first published in 1874, Thomas Hardy's "pastoral tale" of the wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene, her three suitors, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, the lonely widower Farmer Boldwood, and the dashing but faithless Sergeant Troy, and the tragic consequence of her eventual choice remains one of the most enduring and popular English novels.

Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs.