Once he was Andre-Louis, lawyer to the upper class, and destined for the upper echelons of French society. Now, he is Scaramouche. Speaking out against the injustices of the French government, he dons the garb of a clown with a band of wandering actors - a passionate jester with a vital message....

Sir Oliver Tessilian, a Cornish nobleman, is abandoned or betrayed by everyone he ever loved. He is framed for murder, affronted and shunned by his fiancee and sold into slavery by his half-brother.

For Captain Charles Hunter, gold in Spanish hands is gold for the taking, and the law of the land rests with those ruthless enough to make it. Word in port is that the galleon El Trinidad, fresh from New Spain, is awaiting repairs in a nearby harbor. Heavily fortified, the impregnable harbor is guarded by the bloodthirsty Cazalla, a favorite commander of the Spanish king himself. With backing from a powerful ally, Hunter assembles a crew of ruffians to infiltrate the enemy outpost and commandeer El Trinidad, along with its fortune in Spanish gold.

On Stranger Tides follows the exploits of John Chandagnac, who travels to the new world after the death of his puppeteer father to confront his uncle, who has apparently made off with the family fortune. During the voyage, he befriends Beth Hurwood and her father, Benjamin Hurwood, an Oxford professor. Before they arrive at their destination, their ship is waylaid by Blackbeard and his band of pirates.

With the Reign of Terror at its peak, and the death toll mounting, France's violent revolutionists suddenly find themselves frustrated by a mysterious vigilante. Known as the Scarlet Pimpernel, the enigmatic hero rescues the country's ill-fated aristocrats from the doom of the guillotine and whisks them away to safety, with a band of gallant cohorts at his aid.

When Humphrey Van Weyden finds himself struggling in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay, he thinks the worst that can happen to him is drowning. After he is rescued by the Ghost and its captain, Wolf Larson, Humphrey discovers that there are fates far worse than death. On Larsen's hell-ship, the dilettante hero is forced to slave as cabin boy and humble seaman. And over the seven months' voyage to the sealing grounds off Siberia, he engages in an epic duel with his ruthlessly Nietzschean skipper.

Allan Quatermain, hero of King Solomon's mines, tells a moving tale of his first wife, the Dutch-born Marie Marais, and the adventures that were linked to her beautiful, tragic history. This moving story depicts the tumultuous political era of the 1830s, involving the Boers, French colonists and the Zulu tribe in the Cape colony of South Africa. Hate and suspicion run high between the home government and the Dutch subjects.

It is 1547, and Scotland has been humiliated by an English invasion and is threatened by machinations elsewhere beyond its borders, but it is still free. Paradoxically, her freedom may depend on a man who stands accused of treason. He is Francis Crawford of Lymond, a scapegrace nobleman of crooked felicities and murderous talents, possessed of a scholar's erudition and a tongue as wicked as a rapier. In The Game of Kings, this extraordinary antihero returns to the country that has outlawed him to redeem his reputations even at the risk of his life.

Written in 1819 but set in 12th-century England, Ivanhoe is a tale of love struggling to survive against a violent backdrop of politics and war. Wilfred of Ivanhoe was thrown out of his father's home when he fell in love with his father Cedric's ward, Lady Rowena. Ivanhoe later returns from fighting in the Crusades and is wounded in a jousting tournament. A series of events follows, including the return of King Richard to England, resulting in Ivanhoe's reconciliation with Cedric and his marriage to Rowena.

In a meteoric career that spanned a mere 12 years, Robert E. Howard single-handedly invented the genre that came to be called sword and sorcery. From his fertile imagination sprang some of fiction's most enduring heroes. Yet while Conan the Cimmerian is indisputably Howard's greatest creation, it was in his earlier sequence of tales featuring Kull, a fearless warrior with the brooding intellect of a philosopher, that Howard began to develop the distinctive themes and the richly evocative blend of history and mythology .

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King - who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer - takes listeners on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.

In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive.

Daughter of a cold, controlling mother and an anonymous donor, studious, obedient Elizabeth Fitch finally let loose one night, drinking too much at a nightclub and allowing a strange man’s seductive Russian accent to lure her to a house on Lake Shore Drive. Twelve years later, the woman now known as Abigail Lowery lives alone on the outskirts of a small town in the Ozarks.

They look alike, but they live in very different worlds. Tom Canty, impoverished and abused by his father, is fascinated with royalty. Edward Tudor, heir to the throne of England, is kind and generous but wants to run free and play in the river - just once. How insubstantial their differences truly are becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing - and roles. The pauper finds himself caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wanders horror-stricken through the lower strata of English society.

There is no ancient evil to defeat, no orphan destined for greatness, just two guys in the wrong place at the wrong time. Royce Melborn, a skilled thief, and his mercenary partner, Hadrian Blackwater, make a profitable living carrying out dangerous assignments for conspiring nobles until they become the unwitting scapegoats in a plot to murder the king. Sentenced to death, they have only one way out...and so begins this tale of treachery and adventure, sword fighting and magic, myth and legend. Avempartha is the second of a six book series entitled the Riyria Revelations.

One of the great adventure novels of our language creates a most engaging central character, Nostromo. A picturesque man of action and popular hero, Nostromo lives to be "well-spoken of" by the citizens of Costaguana, the mythical South American banana republic where the story takes place. Around this figure, Conrad spins a story of revolution, politics, and racial conflict as complex as Nostromo, the man whose greatest enemy is himself.

A blood-red flower is his calling card, daring rescues are his mission. The Scarlet Pimpernel is a daring English aristocrat who rescues French nobles from death at the hands of Madame Guillotine, patron saint of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. This popular romantic adventure is filled with skin-of-the-teeth escapes and spine-tingling intrigue. It is presented here in unabridged form so you won't miss a moment of swashbuckling suspense.

On one level...Melville’s tale is an historical adventure telling the story of life aboard ship shortly after the mutiny at Spithead in 1797. Billy is taken from a homeward bound merchantman to serve on the ‘Seventy Four’ HMS Indomitable. He falls foul of Claggart, the ‘Master at Arms’, and the final confrontation results in death. Billy becomes an unwilling martyr - what passes for justice must be implemented because of the rebellious climate of the time.

Ancient Constantinople, the glorious capital of the Eastern Roman Empire for over 1,000 years, and the jewel of Christendom, is the setting for this incredible historical novel. No other city in the world could compare with it in grandeur, splendor, and wealth. And when it fell to the Turks in 1453, it must have seemed like the end of the world to Christians. Famed author Mika Waltari takes us into the last months of this dying city as revealed in the diary of John Angelos, a strange man hopelessly in love with the daughter of an eminent Byzantine official.

London: 1793. Young firebrand John Pearce, on the run from the authorities, is illegally press-ganged from the Pelican tavern into brutal life aboard HMS Brilliant, a frigate on her way to war. In the first few days, Pearce discovers the Navy is a world in which he can prosper. And he is not alone; he is drawn to a group of men who eventually form an exclusive gun crew, the Pelicans, with Pearce their elected leader.

In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son, who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew, who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny.

The land of Terre d'Ange is a place of unsurpassing beauty and grace. It is said that angels found the land and saw it was good...and the ensuing race that rose from the seed of angels and men live by one simple rule: Love as thou wilt.

Young nobleman d’Artagnan has arrived in Paris intent on joining the guardians of King Louis XIII. He befriends the regiment’s most formidable musketeers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, and together they unite in their commitment to uphold justice. Soon, a royal indiscretion thrusts them into an audacious escapade of courtly intrigue, thwarted romance, and daring rescue. But it’s the Machiavellian schemes of a powerful enemy and the wicked seductions of an ingenious female spy that will be their greatest challenges.

At the time of the French Revolution, one of Britain's most skillful naval officers, Charles Saunders Hayden, is a young lieutenant, the son of an English father and a French mother. His abilities and his loyalty to the king of England are beyond dispute, yet his career seems doomed by his "mixed" heritage and lack of political connections. Consequently, Hayden is assigned to an aging frigate, the Themis, under the command of Captain Josiah Hart, a man known as "Faint Hart" throughout the service.

Jack London worshiped strong and virtuous heroes, and his stories give great weight to the inevitable triumph of good over evil. His telling of the adventures of Humphrey van Weydon in The Sea Wolf is in keeping with this theme of moral man. His powerful and gripping saga of van Weydon's capture by a seal-hunting ship and the ensuing tangles with its dreaded captain, Wolf Larsen, makes this a classic American tale of peril and victory.

In the wild, unexplored coastal jungles of West Africa lives a wild human boy named Tarzan, the adopted son of a tribe of fierce almost-human anthropoid apes - but in reality, the unknown heir of a wealthy and titled English noble family. Then one day, a small party of American treasure-seekers is marooned on Tarzan's beach, including a lovely Baltimore belle named Jane Porter.

Written at the start of the Great War, when his son Borys was at the Western Front, The Shadow-Line is Conrad's supreme effort to open man's eyes to the meaning of war through the stimulus of art. In many ways an autobiographical narrative, this masterpiece of his final period relates the story of a young and inexperienced sea captain whose first command finds him with a ship becalmed in tropical seas and a crew smitten with fever.

October 1772, Portsmouth. Sixteen-year-old Richard Bolitho waits to join the Gorgon, ordered to sail to the west coast of Africa and to destroy those who challenge the King's Navy. For Bolitho, and for many of the crew, it is a severe and testing initiation into the game of seamanship.

Merle Johnson has here gathered together in one volume all of the nineteenth-century author-artist's classic pirate stories that had been scattered through many magazines and books. Well researched and with richly drawn characters, Pyle's work will appeal to students of history and adventure lovers alike.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson tells the tale of the crew of the Hispaniola as they travel across the sea in search of the long-lost treasure of the infamous Captain Flint. When Jim Hawkins finds a treasure map in the sea chest of an old sailor who had been staying at his parents' inn, he sets off on an adventure in search of the captain's hidden fortune.

Dr. Peter Blood is arrested and sentenced to hang for treating a wounded rebel. Instead of death, he is sent to Barbados as a slave. When the Spanish attack the port city of Bridgetown, he and his fellow slaves capture the Spanish ship and set out to sea, where he becomes the notorious pirate, Captain Blood. With battles on sea and on land, daring escapes, sword duels to the death, a touch of romance, and a magnificent score by Jeffrey Gage, Captain Blood is a swashbuckling adventure on a very grand scale!

George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman novels, praises this hearty saga as "one of the great unrecognized novels of the 20th century." Doctor Peter Blood's quiet life is shattered when he is convicted of treason for helping a wounded nobleman in the 1685 rebellion against King James II.

When young, penniless Bellarion finds himself thrust into a murderous intrigue, his sharp wit and scholarly background allow him to see things invisible to others. Set in 15th century Italy, and cast with a rogues’ gallery of colorful villains, Bellarion adroitly navigates the complicated world of dukes, counts, and countesses to rise to unusual prominence and serve a purpose all his own.

On Stranger Tides follows the exploits of John Chandagnac, who travels to the new world after the death of his puppeteer father to confront his uncle, who has apparently made off with the family fortune. During the voyage, he befriends Beth Hurwood and her father, Benjamin Hurwood, an Oxford professor. Before they arrive at their destination, their ship is waylaid by Blackbeard and his band of pirates.

A classic tale of adventure and romance, Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood tells the story of Peter Blood, doctor and military veteran, who is mistaken for a rebel, arrested, tried, and transported to Barbados, where he is sold into slavery. Escaping his captivity during a raid on the colony, Blood and his fellow convicts capture a Spanish ship and sail off to become the most successful pirates in the Caribbean.