In this comic novel, Mr. Polly is a timid man who prefers reading books of adventure rather than working in a draper's shop. A life with little money and a spiteful wife is one of woe. A disenchanted Mr.Polly plans to burn down his shop and kill himself. His plan fails and a turn of events leads him to a genuinely brighter future, especially after a dead man has been mistakenly identified as Mr.Polly.

Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best selling novel of the nineteenth century. The book is named for the central character and depicts the harsh reality of slavery. The book had such a significant impact that on meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln said; "So this is the little lady who made this big war". A product of it's time, the book is interesting also for it's illustration of stereotypes that even abolitionists could not recognise.

1894 Best Seller.

A fictionalised 'autobiography' of the true story of a dog named 'Beautiful Joe'. Joe's abusive original owner savagely mistreated him. The book became very popular and greatly contributed to the worldwide awareness of animal cruelty.

"No one has taken this premise to such pitiless lengths - and depths - as Watts ... In a claustrophobic setting enlivened by periodic flashes of beauty and terror, the crew of Beebe Station come across as not only believable but likeable as they fight for equilibrium against their own demons, one another, their superiors and their remorselessly hostile surroundings."

- The New York Times (Notable Book of the Year)

"The story drives like a futuristic locomotive. It's a hypnotic read, somber and compelling. Best thing I've read in a long time. Peter Watts is an author to watch for."

- Robert Sheckley

ßehemoth ... is the most gripping and the most thought-out [book that Watts has yet written] ... Like Greg Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful", Watts is arguing for an entirely different way of understanding and presenting character, one that reconfigures both how personality is constructed and how actions are to be understood. This seems to me a unique and particularly science-fictional contribution ... For all Watts's dark humor, and for all the incidental thrills of his future, ßehemoth caps a series which is one of the two or three most challenging works I've read in the last decade.

- Graham Sleight, The NY Review of Science Fiction

The books tells the true story of attacks by man-eating lions on the Uganda railway in Tsavo Kenya in 1898. Over one hundred people were killed in under a year. The attacks stopped only after the all the lions had been tracked down and killed by Patterson.

In the 1996 film The Ghost and the Darkness Val Kilmer played Patterson.

Will Shetterly is a Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and author of many novels

The floridian magical realism of Dogland follows the Nix family as they move across the country to create DOGLAND and the US moves into the turbulent sixties

Though the novels setting in a tourist attraction featuring hundreds of dog breeds might seem pure whimsy, it is apparently autobiographical.