David Duff

The Glittering story of Europe's most extraordinary royal couple -- Napoleon III, who with the Second Empire restored the Bonapartes to power for twenty years, and his Spanish wife, Eugenie, one of the loveliest women of all time.

The most autobiographical novel by the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov--and the namesake of Elif Batuman's debut novel, The Idiot Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naive epileptic Prince Myshkin-- known as the "idiot"--pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph...

Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and our modern world, and is still known worldwide as the quintessential Russian novel. Readers of all backgrounds have debated its historical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, probing the moral and ethical dilemmas that Dostoevsky so brilliantly stages throughout his narrative. Yet, at its heart, this...

As an unusual illness plagues Russian public official Ivan Ilyich, his life is forever changed as he deals with doctors who cannot diagnose or treat him, as well as a certain death sentence.

From the Introduction: "The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is one of our planet's most compelling and recognizable landforms. ... It is the rare individual who, upon seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, does not ask, 'How could this have formed?' ... It took centuries, even millennia, for humans to comprehend that the history of our planet is contained in rocks, but once this insight was achieved, the story of planet Earth began to be understood....