Love and loss between the Blitz and the Dublin bombings April 1941. German bombers are in the air, about to attack Belfast. Oskar is a Luftwaffe conscript whose sweetheart, Elsa, was forced to flee Berlin for Ireland two years before. War-weary, he longs for escape. In remote Dunkerin, Kitty awakes to find a parachute trapped in one of the lime trees. When she discovers Oskar, injured and foraging for food in her kitchen, he becomes a rare and exciting secret. But Ireland during the "Emergency" is an uneasy place, and word of the parachute soon spreads. Meanwhile, Elsa is haunted by the plight of the parents she left behind. With the threat of the Nazi invasion, she feels far from secure. A chance encounter with Elsa, and Charlie, a young medical student, finds himself falling in love. Oskar, Kitty, Elsa, and Charlie's lives intertwine in a climate of war, exile, and ever-uncertain neutrality.

Gritty City is a love letter to Winnipeg, a prairie metropolis born out of rebellion, a river city marooned in the middle of a continent. Maybe there is something in the water that makes us different... Gritty City is the first book to tackle the history of Winnipeg hip-hop, treating it not as a passing fad or a subgenre of rock, but as its own distinct and significant culture and artform. Much like the city itself, hip-hop locally was born out of struggle, out of the intense racism that plagued elements of Winnipeg for much of the 1980s. As the culture blossomed and gained acceptance, slowly but surely the community became more and more prominent, leading from the DIY ‘90s to the heyday of the early 2000s. Gritty City traces this timeline from the early 1980s to 2005 in an oral history format, making it seem like you’re just sitting around with your cousins and their friends as they reminisce. Featuring over 100 voices of Winnipeg rappers, producers, DJs, promoters, and community members, Gritty City is a one of a kind chronicle of an important but until now unknown chapter in Canadian music history.

In this classically simple tale of the disastrous impact of outside life on a secluded community in Dorset, now in a new edition, Hardy narrates the rivalry for the hand of Grace Melbury between a simple and loyal woodlander and an exotic and sophisticated outsider. Betrayal, adultery, disillusion, and moral compromise are all worked out in a setting evoked as both beautiful and treacherous. The Woodlanders, with its thematic portrayal of the role of social class, gender, and evolutionary survival, as well as its insights into the capacities and limitations of language, exhibits Hardy's acute awareness of his era's most troubling dilemmas.

Three novels of love, ambition, and nineteenth-century English society. This volume includes three of the greatest works by the iconic Victorian novelist. The Return of the Native: Eustacia Vye yearns to escape the village of Egdon Heath, but her marriage to a well-traveled man doesn’t bring the adventure she craves, in this novel that brilliantly evokes the dangerous allure of romantic fantasies. Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A young woman struggles against tradition and circumstance in this story of love, class, and deceit. The Woodlanders: Grace Melbury is torn between a wealthy, unfaithful husband and the humble woodsman she truly loves in this novel that examines the perils of social ambition.

Grace Melbury, daughter of a rich local wood-trader, has been raised beyond her family through years of expensive education. Coming home, she finds herself pulled between her love for her childhood friend Giles Winterborne, and the allure of the enigmatic Doctor Fitzpiers. Giles and Edgar have their own admirers too, and the backdrop of the bucolic pastures and woodlands of an impressionistic take on south-west England provides the perfect setting for their story. The Woodlanders was commissioned by Macmillan’s Magazine in 1884, and was serialized and later published as a novel in 1887. The story’s themes of infidelity and less-than-blissful marriage were unusual for the time and drew ire from campaigners, but on its publication it garnered immediate critical acclaim. Thomas Hardy later regarded it as the favorite of his stories, and it’s remained perennially popular as a novel and as a series of adaptations to theatre, opera and film. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.