Books published by Valancourt Books

Three teenage boys, the sole survivors of a shipwreck, find themselves marooned on a deserted island in the South Pacific. With little more than a telescope and a broken knife, the youths must find food and shelter and learn to survive. But though the coral island is a tropical paradise, full of natural beauty and exotic fruits and wildlife, dangers and adventures abound: sharks, pirates, and even bloodthirsty cannibals!Scottish-born R.M. Ballantyne (1825-1894) wrote more than ninety books for young people during the Victorian era, the most famous of which is The Coral Island (1857), a tale whose popularity has proved so enduring that it has never been out of print. A thrilling story in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe and a key influence on later classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and William Golding's Lord of the Flies, The Coral Island is presented here in a new scholarly edition that includes the unabridged text of the first British edition, a new introduction and notes by Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher, and the original illustrations by the author.

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) was the most popular and best-selling novelist of her time, earning a widespread readership and previously unheard-of sums of money for her Gothic novels The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). But after publishing The Italian, at the height of her powers, she disappeared from the literary scene and never published another novel. Or did she? Lusignan; or, The Abbaye of La Trappe, issued anonymously in 1801 by the great purveyor of Gothic fiction, the Minerva Press, is the story of the ill-fated love between the virtuous Emily de Montalte and the handsome Lusignan, and it bears remarkable similarities in theme and style to Radcliffe's works. With a quintessentially Gothic plot that features all the trappings of the genre, including a haughty aristocrat, a scheming monk, lovers immured in dungeons and convents, and a subterranean chapel haunted by a horrible spectre, Lusignan will be of great interest to both scholars and fans of Gothic fiction alike, whether the book is in fact by Radcliffe or merely an unusually skilled imitator. This first-ever republication of Lusignan, a novel so rare that it survives in only one known copy worldwide, includes the unabridged text of the original four-volume edition as well as a substantial new scholarly introduction and extensive annotations by Dr. Jacqueline Howard, who has previously argued in a published article that Lusignan could be the work of Radcliffe.