The action is set in the Hall of David Bliss'' house at Cookham, Berkshire, by the River Thames. ;A Saturday afternoon in June Sorel and Simon Bliss, a brother and sister, exchange artistic and bohemian dialogue. Judith, their mother, displays the absent-minded theatricality of a retired star actress, and David, their father, a novelist, is concentrating on finishing his latest book. Each of the four members of the Bliss family, without consulting the others, has invited a guest for the weekend. Judith announces that she has decided to return to the stage in one of her old hits, Love''s Whirlwind. She and Sorel and Simon amuse themselves acting out a melodramatic passage from the play beginning, "Is this a game?" "Yes, and a game that must be played to the finish!" They are interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell. Clara, Judith''s former dresser and now her housekeeper, opens the door to the first of the four guests, Sandy Tyrell, a sporty fan of Judith''s. The next arrival is the vampish Myra Arundel, whom Simon has invited. The other two guests arrive together: Richard Greatham, a diplomat, and Jackie Coryton, a brainless but good-hearted young flapper. Tea is served. Conversation is stilted and eventually grinds to a halt. The scene ends in total and awkward silence. ;After dinner that night The family insists that everyone should join in a parlour game, a variety of charades in which one person must guess the adverb being acted out by the others. The Blisses are in their element, but the guests flounder and the game breaks up. Simon and Jackie exit to the garden, Sorel drags Sandy into the library, and David takes Myra outside. Left alone with Richard, Judith flirts with him, and when he chastely kisses her she theatrically overreacts as though they were conducting a serious affair. She nonplusses Richard by talking of breaking the news to David. She in turn is nonplussed to discover Sandy and Sorel kissing in the library. That too has been mere flirtation, but both Judith and Sorel enjoy themselves by exaggerating it. Judith gives a performance nobly renouncing her claim on Sandy, and exits. Sorel explains to Sandy that she was just playing the theatrical game for Judith''s benefit, as "one always plays up to Mother in this house; it''s a sort of unwritten law." They leave. David and Myra enter. They too indulge in a little light flirtation, at the height of which Judith enters and finds them kissing. She makes a theatrical scene, with which David dutifully plays along. Simon rushes in violently, announcing that he and Jackie are engaged. Sorel and Sandy enter from the library, Judith goes into yet another bout of over-theatrical emoting. In the ensuing uproar, Richard asks "Is this a game?" Judith, Sorel and Simon seize on this cue from Love''s Whirlwind and trot out the melodramatic dialogue as they had in Act I. David is overcome with laughter and the uncomprehending guests are dazed and aghast as Judith ends the scene by falling to the floor as if in a faint. ;The next morning A breakfast table has been laid in the hall. Sandy enters and begins eating nervously. At the sound of someone approaching he escapes into the library. Jackie enters, helps herself to some breakfast and bursts into tears. Sandy comes out and they discuss how uncomfortable they were the night before and how mad the Bliss family are. When they hear people approaching, they both retreat to the library. Myra and Richard now enter and begin breakfast. Their conversation mirrors that of Sandy and Jackie, who emerge from the library to join them. All four decide that they are going to return to London without delay. Sandy agrees to drive them in his motor car. They go upstairs to collect their things. Judith comes down, asks Clara for the Sunday papers and begins reading aloud what the gossip columns say about her. The rest of her family enter. David proposes to read them the final chapter of his novel. Immediately, a minor detail about the geography of Paris is blown into a full-scale family row, with everyone talking at once about whether the Rue Saint-Honoré does or does not connect with the Place de la Concorde and hurling insults at each other. They are so wrapped up in their private row that they do not notice when the four visitors tiptoe down the stairs and out of the house. The Blisses are only momentarily distracted when the slam of the door alerts them to the flight of their guests. Judith comments, "How very rude!" and David adds, "People really do behave in the most extraordinary manner these days." Then, with no further thought of their four tormented guests, they happily return to David''s manuscript and to what passes for their normal family life.

Hay Fever

It''s a winter day in Dalton (a New England town near Boston) and Leonidas Witherall, "the man who looks like Shakespeare", is stepping off a bus after having been accused of bothering a beautiful young woman in a scarlet wimple (who promptly becomes known as the Scarlet Wimpernel). He takes refuge in a hardware store run by a former student, Lincoln Potter. Potter is inclined to be helpful, until the Wimpernel''s purse is discovered in Witherall''s pocket and Witherall is incautious enough to admit that he saw Potter''s cash register being emptied by a man in a green satin suit carrying a small harp. He heads for the home of a former teaching colleague, Marcus Meredith, and finds him murdered -- and missing his artificial left leg. Potter is enlisted by Witherall for help in solving the murder, along with intrepid housewife Topsey Beaton. Together they deceive an entire rummage sale, enlist the Scarlet Wimpernel to play a role, find the man in green satin, locate the left leg, and solve the murder.

The Left Leg

The novel begins approximately three weeks after the events of the story "The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal" in The Holy Terror. Simon Templar, accompanied by his lover/partner Patricia Holm, has departed England on a well-deserved holiday from crime-fighting. While visiting Innsbruck, Austria with their friend, book editor Monty Hayward (making his first appearance in the series), the trio are out for a late-night walk when they see a man being attacked by thugs. They stop the attack, but the victim is particularly ungrateful, forcing Templar to knock him out, too. Intrigued by the man''s attitude -- as well as by a steel box attached to his wrist (which later turns out to be a miniature safe filled with recently-stolen diamonds), Templar decides to take the unconscious man back to his hotel room. Before long, however, the man is stabbed to death in Templar''s bed and Templar finds himself in yet another encounter with Prince Rudolf -- one of the men responsible for the death of his friend Norman Kent in The Last Hero. Simon and Patricia (with very reluctant adventurer Monty in tow) find themselves on a cross-continent race against Rudolf and his minions (who are pursuing the diamonds) and the police (who want Templar and Monty for the murder of the courier). Along the way, the trio picks up a female crime reporter who takes part in the adventure in her quest for a career-making scoop on The Saint. Whereas the previous book, The Holy Terror, takes place over the course of nearly a year, the events of Getaway take place over little more than 24 hours. The text indicates that this story takes place about two years after the events of The Last Hero. It is the first Saint story to take place completely outside of Great Britain since the novella "The Wonderful War" in Featuring the Saint. Some editions of the novel (such as the Fiction Publishing Co. edition) omit a prologue that recaps the events of "The Melancholy Journey of Mr. Teal". According to this prologue (and later repeated within the main body of the text), the Saint has been "buccaneering" for 10 years by the time of this novel, during which time he had amassed a personal fortune of approximately 100,000 pounds, which was finally topped up by his absconding with a villain''s diamonds at the end of "Melancholy Journey". Much of the book is told from Monty Hayward''s point of view. According to The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television 1928-1992 by Burl Barer, the character was based upon Charteris'' real-life editor, Monty Haydon.

Getaway

In an attempt to return Abernathy to his former human self, court wizard Questor Thews inadvertently sends the canine court scribe, along with Ben Holiday''s royal medallion, to Earth. Specifically, Abernathy ends up with the medallion in the menagerie of Michel Ard Rhi, a cruel former prince of Landover who was banished from Landover years ago. Ard Rhi is now a Washington state billionaire who keeps a collection of rare and magical items in his personal castle. As part of the botched spell, Abernathy is exchanged for one of Ard Rhi''s magical artifacts, and a strange bottle appears in Landover in Abernathy''s place. The bottle contains a Darkling, a creature similar to an evil genie that corrupts its master. The bottle is stolen by the G''home Gnomes Filip and Sot, and Ben gives chase along with Questor, Willow, and Bunion. Ben and Willow later decide to use Questor''s magic to travel to Earth to find Abernathy. With the help of Miles, Ben''s old law partner, and Elizabeth, the daughter of one of Ard Rhi''s employees, Abernathy is rescued. However, Ard Rhi uses his influence to have the party detained at a police station. Meanwhile, Questor continues to pursue the Darkling. He finds that through a series of thefts, the bottle has ended up in the hands of the evil witch Nightshade. Knowing that only the High Lord can defeat Nightshade, Questor decides to try to convince the dragon Strabo to fly him through the fairy mists to Earth. Using an itch spell, Questor gets the dragon to agree. They arrive at the last moment to rescue Ben and his friends from the police station and fly them back to Landover, but not before Questor uses his magic to restore Ard Rhi''s conscience and convince him to give away his vast estate. Ben and Questor confront Nightshade, and Ben uses his medallion to summon his knight champion, the Paladin. Nightshade, however, uses the Darkling to conjure a perverse version of the Paladin, and the creations give battle. Questor, meanwhile, manages to shrink himself and act as a stopper in the Darkling''s bottle, cutting off the source of its power. The Darkling is destroyed, Nightshade flees, and order is restored to Landover.

Wizard at Large

An undefined military intelligence organisation, based in Blackfriars Road, London and referred to throughout the book as "The Department," has been resting on its laurels since its successes running agents against the Nazis during the Second World War. Its tasks are gradually being taken over by the more experienced Circus, led by "Control" and his right hand man George Smiley. The Department expends most of its energies on administrative tasks and on a bureaucratic turf war with the more professional Circus. The Department comes across uncertain and weak evidence that Soviet missiles are being placed at Rostock, near the West German border. The Department''s chief, LeClerc, seizes the opportunity to re-live glory days and regain prestige for his organization. He decides to send an agent into enemy territory to discover the truth without involving the Circus, thereby enhancing The Department''s status. The Department reactivates one of its World War II agents, a naturalised Pole named Fred Leiser, and sends him into East Germany to investigate the missiles. The inexperienced Department''s operation is clumsy, and Leiser makes errors -- including his killing a young East German border guard and making overly-long transmissions. Consequently, the East Germans determine almost immediately that security has been breached, and they set out to find Leiser''s location. Smiley informs LeClerc and his colleagues about the debacle. He tactfully convinces LeClerc to abandon the operation, with Leiser still trapped in East Germany. The story comes to its inevitable end when Leiser, not knowing the fate of the operation, and receiving no response to his transmissions, continues with his mission. He follows the "War Rules" and plays out the losing game to the end. Leiser''s prolonged and slow transmissions give away his location and he is captured. Leiser''s fate is unknown at the conclusion of the story.

The Looking-Glass War

Horselover Fat believes his visions expose hidden facts about the reality of life on Earth, and a group of others join him in researching these matters. One of their theories is that there is some kind of alien space probe in orbit around Earth, and that it is aiding them in their quest. It also aided the United States in disclosing the Watergate scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974. There is a filmed account of an alternate universe Nixon, "Ferris Freemont" and his fall, engineered by a fictionalised Valis, which leads them to an estate owned by the Lamptons, popular musicians. Valis (the fictional film) contains obvious references to identical revelations to those that Horselover Fat has experienced. They decide the goal that they have been led toward is Sophia, who is two years old and the Messiah or incarnation of Holy Wisdom anticipated by some variants of Gnostic Christianity. She tells them that their conclusions are correct, but dies after a laser accident. Undeterred, Fat goes on a global search for the next incarnation of Sophia. Dick also offers a rationalist explanation of his apparent "theophany", acknowledging that it might have been visual and auditory hallucinations from either schizophrenia or drug addiction sequelae.

VALIS

Harry Clavering is the only son of Reverend Henry Clavering, a well-to-do clergyman and the paternal uncle of the affluent baronet Sir Hugh Clavering. At the novel''s beginning, Harry is jilted by his fiancée, the sister of Sir Hugh''s wife, who proceeds to marry Lord Ongar, a wealthy but debauched earl. Harry''s father urges him to make the church his profession; but Harry aspires to become a civil engineer, of the type of Robert Stephenson, Joseph Locke, and Thomas Brassey. To this end, he becomes a pupil at the firm of Beilby and Burton. A year and a half later, Harry has become engaged to Florence Burton, the daughter of one of his employers. He presses her for an early marriage; but although she loves him deeply, she refuses, insisting that they wait until he has an income adequate to support himself and a family. At this point, Lord Ongar dies, and his widow returns to England. Sir Hugh, her nearest male relative, is a hard and selfish man, and refuses to see her upon her arrival. This lends spurious credence to rumours about her conduct; and it forces her sister, Lady Clavering, to ask Harry to assist her when she returns. Harry fails to tell Lady Ongar of his engagement; and, in a moment of weakness, he embraces and kisses her. This puts him in a position where he must behave dishonourably toward one of the two women in his life: either he must break his engagement, or he must acknowledge that he has gravely insulted Lady Ongar. Although he loves Florence Burton and knows that she is the better woman, he is unwilling to subject Lady Ongar to further misery. Lady Ongar, because of her considerable wealth, is pursued by others. She is courted by Count Pateroff, one of her late husband''s friends, and by Archie Clavering, Sir Hugh''s younger brother. Count Pateroff''s scheming sister Sophie Gourdeloup, the only woman who will see Lady Ongar because of the rumours about her conduct, wants her to remain single so that Mme. Gourdeloup can continue to exploit her. Mme. Gourdeloup sees to it that Lady Ongar learns about Harry''s engagement. Meanwhile, Florence Burton learns that Harry has been seeing Lady Ongar regularly, and decides that she must release him if he does not truly love her. Through the good influence of his mother, Harry comes to realize that Florence Burton is the better woman and the less deserving of dishonorable treatment. To her letter offering to end their engagement, he responds with a reaffirmation of his love for her. He also writes to Lady Ongar, regretting his past conduct toward her and making it clear that he intends to remain true to his fiancée. Soon thereafter, Sir Hugh and Archie Clavering are both drowned when their yacht goes down off Heligoland. This makes Harry''s father the new baronet and the possessor of Clavering Park, with Harry the heir apparent. This increase in wealth allows him to marry immediately and to give up engineering, a profession for which he almost certainly lacked sufficient self-discipline. Lady Ongar gives up much of her property to the family of the new earl, and retires into seclusion with her widowed sister.

The Claverings

The story circulates around the main character, Gennaro Accuci, and how he leaves his family behind in Italy in order to make riches in America. He takes over the business of an old friend by force, and soon rises to power and becomes an influential member of early Italian-American society in New York. After seven years of cheating on his wife, he finally calls for his family to come over to the new country. His oldest, rebellious son, is caught trying to rape a neighbor, and subsequently is forced to marry her by Gennaro, who often beats his son for being lazy. They children soon have an annulment, and the neighbor goes to a Protestant asylum where she is Americanized. She returns to her family, her parents move to the country, the oldest son (Domenico) is killed in the Spanish-American War, and Gennaro''s wife dies of sadness. Gennaro then marries Carmela who is now much older, although his youngest son also has feelings for her. However, in the recession of 1907, an old enemy of Gennaro''s shows up and kills him (Gennaro stole his business from him when first coming to the country in the 1880s).

The Grand Gennaro

Like much Gothic fiction, The Werewolf of Paris opens with a frame story in which the author explains his struggle with the fantastic elements of his tale. Here the narrator, an anonymous American working on his doctoral research in Paris, discovers a manuscript in the hands of some trash-pickers. He describes it as "the Galliez report: thirty four sheets of closely written French, an unsolicited defense of Sergeant Bertrand Caillet at the latter''s court-martial in 1871." A descendant of the cursed Pitamont clan, which destroyed itself in a long feud with the neighboring Pitavals, Bertrand is born one Christmas Eve to an adolescent girl who had been raped by a priest, Father Pitamont. Bertrand grows up with strange sadistic and sexual desires which are usually expressed as dreams. Sometimes the dreams are memories of actual experiences in which he had transformed into a wolf. His step-uncle, Aymar Galliez, who raises the boy (along with his mother Josephine and a servant Françoise), soon learns of Bertrand''s affliction. Bertrand flees to Paris after his assault on a prostitute, his incestuous union with his mother, and his murder of a friend in their home village. Aymar tries to find Bertrand by studying the details of local crimes, such as the mutilation of corpses and various murders. Bertrand joins the National Guard during the Franco-Prussian War, doing little fighting and finding love from a girl who volunteers at a canteen, the beautiful and wealthy Mlle. Sophie de Blumenberg. Masochistic and obsessed with death, Sophie helps Bertrand avoid the violent effects of his transformation by allowing him to cut into her flesh in order to suck her blood. Aymar finds Bertrand in Paris during the Paris Commune, but thinking that love has cured Bertrand, he decides not to take action. Fearing that he''ll accidentally kill Sophie, Bertrand goes out one night to feed on someone else. He is caught attacking a fellow soldier and arrested. Aymar supports burning Bertrand at the stake, and provides the court with a summary of Bertrand''s crimes, but the court sentences him to treatment at the infirmary of La Santé prison. Aymar transfers Bertrand to an asylum after the reactionary Versaillists have retaken Paris, with great loss of life among the Communards, who are executed en masse. Unbeknownst to Aymar, Bertrand suffers in a small cell, drugged when he is visited by his uncle. Bertrand eventually commits suicide by jumping from the building with another inmate whom he delusionally believes is Sophie. Their deaths are similar to a suicide fantasy that Bertrand and Sophie enjoyed; the real Sophie had previously committed suicide on her own, unable to deal with her separation from Bertrand. The narrative proper is followed by a grisly appendix citing a municipal report on the cemeteries of Paris. The report indicates that the grave of one "Sieur C ... (Bertrand)" contained the body "of a dog, which despite 8 years in the ground was still incompletely destroyed."

The Werewolf of Paris

Young Moth had grown up in Calio, the mountain city -and he considered himself lucky to live in this very special place. For in Calio a man could be a Skyknight, one of the elite pilots who flew the fragile, beautiful, newfangled flying machines called dragonflies. Any man who dreamed of flying belonged in only one place, Calio, the city on the edge of the world. And young Moth, who had worked at the aerodrome since he was ten, wanted to fly more than anything. To the north of Calio stretched the Reach, looking like a sea of fog that never ended. There were numerous tall tales about the lands beyond the Reach, and Moth heard the oddest of them regularly now that he was living with Leroux. When Moth was ten, and first taken in by Leroux, he had been especially fascinated by Leroux''s stories of the Skylords, but at the grown-up age of thirteen, Moth was becoming increasingly skeptical about the existence of these mysterious, powerful, and frightening beings from beyond the Reach. But Moth''s life was about to change in ways he could not even imagine, and soon the land of the Skylords would become more real and more threatening than the most outlandish tales Leroux could have spun. For soon Moth would have a key to another world -the world beyond the Reach...

Starfinder

Following events in the first novel, in which Carpenter learned that it is possible to leave Hell, Carpenter wants to help others in the way his benefactor helped him. Carpenter meets and travels through all the circles of the Hell described by Dante. He is accompanied in his travels by Sylvia Plath (whom he rescues from the Wood of the Suicides by burning her tree, causing her physical body to reform itself), attempting to understand the purpose of Hell and free many of the damned. Carpenter discovers that, apparently because he returned to Hell of his own free will to help others, he now possesses powers and abilities such as his mentor, Benito, also displayed. In his travels, Carpenter meets many well-known individuals deceased as of 2009. In addition to Plath, some of the notables encountered by Carpenter include: * Lester del Rey * Anna Nicole Smith * Else Frenkel-Brunswik * George Lincoln Rockwell * Ted Hughes * Charles Francis Adams, Sr. * Albert Camus * Carl Sagan * Seung-Hui Cho * Kenneth Lay * Aimee Semple McPherson * Peter Lawford * J. Edgar Hoover * Melvin Belli * Reinhard Heydrich * Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell * Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet * Jesse M. Unruh * Leon Trotsky * Pontius Pilate * J. Robert Oppenheimer * Frank Harris In the end, and partly as the consequence of some unusual changes to Hell itself, Carpenter not so much escapes as that he is shown the door for being a troublemaker.

Escape from Hell

The first part is an extension of the first person accounts previously supplied by Mendoza, which accounts are apparently previous chapters in her journal, written on any material she can get. Somehow all of this manages to stay intact for the unknown amount of time, perhaps 3000 years, that Mendoza spends in exile on Santa Catalina. The period is uncertain because Mendoza herself cannot remember living through some portions of it. From time to time she looks down at her plants, and next time she looks up months or years have slipped by. She may just be doing the cyborg version of ''zoning out'', but since she has already slipped forward in time once, there''s no telling what might be happening. What is certain is that she is about 150,000 years in the past, growing fruit and vegetables for a Company resort on Santa Cruz island. One day, a man shows up in a Company Time Shuttle. These previously unknown vessels let the Company ship tourists back to the past, but can only be piloted by cyborgs. Nonetheless the man is the image of her two previous lovers, and she does unto him what she did unto them. This time, however, he leaves behind genetic material when he goes back to the future. She is able to learn from this that he is no more human than she, but in a different way. His name is Alec Checkerfield. Next we learn about "Smart Alec", precocious scion of rich privileged 24th century Londoners, who leave him in the care of their housekeepers so they can get on with their lives away from dismal, puritanical England. Alec affects all around him, especially machines. Given a highly controlled moral teaching unit at a young age, he is able to re-program it by instinct to become his personal assistant and, eventually, partner in crime. This entity becomes "The Captain", after the pirate Captain Morgan. They resolve to rule the oceans of the world, using smuggling to pay the bills. Since meat, alcohol, chocolate etc. are illegal in most of the developed world, this is both easy and lucrative. With the assistance of the Captain, Alec outwits the Company and becomes master of his own time machine. This is in no small part thanks to Mendoza, who disables the self-destruct device on the one he initially stole from the Company. However, at the peak of his achievements, he finds he has committed one of the most heinous crimes of history. He, Mendoza and the Inklings all become aware of their parts in this. All are left desolated, filled with self-loathing and worse.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Hay Fever

By Noël Coward

The Left Leg

By Phoebe Atwood Taylor

Getaway

By Leslie Charteris

Wizard at Large

By Terry Brooks

The Looking-Glass War

By John le Carré

VALIS

By Philip K. Dick

The Claverings

By Anthony Trollope

The Grand Gennaro

No Author Listed

The Werewolf of Paris

By Guy Endore

Starfinder

No Author Listed

Escape from Hell

By Jerry Pournelle

The Life of the World to Come

By Kage Baker