Result for "Hard Times Book 1 Sowing" in Literature & Fiction

Team Weird are back causing havoc in the Time Police in this irresistible spin-off series by international bestseller Jodi Taylor, author of The Chronicles of St Mary's. If you love Doctor Who, Ben Aaronovitch and Jasper Fforde, you'll love the Time Police. The Time Police do not have problems...

In the spare, no-nonsense Gradgrind household, Tom and Louisa are raised according to their father's unyielding guiding philosophy: facts - nothing but facts. But while a ban on imagination is mere policy for the Gradgrind children, lack of whimsy is a necessary survival skill in Coketown, the grimy and grim working-class burg devoted to nothing but the relentless advance of industry...

Hard Times is Dickens's most political novel. Set in the industrial north of England, in Coketown, he examines the lives of working people, who are taught by the capitalists Gradgrind and Bounderby to think only of the facts of life and not to indulge in imagination. Gradgrind’s own children have been so educated and as a result are dysfunctional and disconnected from their feelings. Only the travelling circus company of Sleary seems to offer any hope of humanity in Coketown.

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

'Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.' So says Thomas Gradgrind, a wealthy, utilitarian school board superintendent. Father to Tom and Louisa, he shapes the minds of all the young children, including his own, with the exception of only one: the circus-born Sissy Jupe.

In the polluted and poverty-ridden Coketown, Louisa and Tom Gradgrind endure a cold and loveless childhood at the hands of their self-satisfied and unimaginative father Thomas. Starved of affection, Louisa is forced into a miserable marriage with the self-made industrialist Josiah Bounderby...

1967. Four female scientists invent a time travel machine. They are on the cusp of fame; but then one of them suffers a breakdown and puts the whole project in peril... 2017. Ruby knows her beloved Granny Bee was a pioneer, but they never talk about the past. Then they receive a message from the...