Full AspenCat Catalog

For nearly a century, Victorian London relied on "climbing boys" - orphans owned by chimney sweeps - to clean flues and protect homes from fire. The work was hard, thankless, and dangerous. Eleven-year-old Nan Sparrow is quite possibly the best climber who ever lived, and a girl. With her wits and will, she's managed to beat the deadly odds time and time again. But when Nan gets stuck in a deadly chimney fire, she fears her time has come. Instead,...

Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's thirteenth novel. It is his second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. Great Expectations is a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel, and it is a classic work of Victorian literature. It depicts the growth and personal development of an orphan named Pip. The novel was first published in serial form in Dickens's weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860...

The story of Oliver Twist - orphaned, and set upon by evil and adversity from his first breath - shocked readers when it was published. After running away from the workhouse and pompous beadle Mr Bumble, Oliver finds himself lured into a den of thieves peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the Artful Dodger, vicious burglar Bill Sikes, his dog Bull's Eye, and prostitute Nancy, all watched over by cunning master-thief Fagin. Combining elements...

In nineteenth-century London, sixteen-year-old Sally, a recent orphan, becomes involved in a deadly search for a mysterious ruby.

"Two women, bound by a child, and a secret that will change everything. London, 1754. Six years after leaving her illegitimate newborn at the Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright returns to reclaim the daughter she has never known. Dreading the worst, that she has died in care, she is astonished to discover someone pretending to be Bess has already claimed her. Her life is turned upside down as she tries to find out who has taken her little girl--and why....

As a nearly full-fledged member of the Agency, the all-female detective unit based in Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls, Mary Quinn, disguised as a poor apprentice builder, must brave the sinister underworld of Victorian London in order to unmask a murderer.

Mary Quinn has a lot on her mind. James Easton, her longtime love interest, wants to marry her; but despite her feelings, independent-minded Mary hesitates. Meanwhile, the Agency has asked Mary to take on a dangerous case: convicted fraudster Henry Thorold is dying in prison, and Mary must watch for the return of his estranged wife, an accomplished criminal herself who has a potentially deadly grudge against James. Finally, a Chinese prizefighter...

A precocious orphan evacuee and a debt-ridden widow con artist forge an unlikely alliance and take advantage ofunscrupulous money-making opportunities in the bombed suburbs of World War II England.

Two of Dicken's novels are republished. The first follows a group from the tranquil roads of London to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror. The second follows the life of the orphaned Pip from the wild Kent marshes through a series of events as he abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman.

Jem Barbary becomes a bogler's apprentice in 1870's London and gets the fright of his life in a city where science clashes with superstition and monsters lurk in every alley.