Benbrook Public Library

Survival for Ki Lim and Sang Ly is a daily battle at Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal waste dump in all of Cambodia. They make their living scavenging recyclables from the trash. Life would be hard enough without the worry for their chronically ill child, Nisay, and the added expense of medicines that are not really working. Just when things seem most bleak, Sang Ly learns a secret about the hated, ill-tempered woman, the "the rent collector"-she

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Sang Ly lives at Cambodia's city dump where survival is a daily struggle, but when she develops an unlikely friendship with the ill-tempered rent collector, Sopeap, who teaches her to read. Sang embarks on a life-changing journey to give her son, Nisay, a better life and future.

Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indignation at the fallen state of mid-Victorian society. Crammed with persons and incidents in whose recreation nothing is accidental or spurious, containing, in its picture of the Circumlocution Office, the most witheringly exact satire of a bureaucracy we possess, Little Dorrit is a stunning...

Keno is twenty-three, a high-school dropout working as a rent collector for a slum landlord. Apart from hitting on the office secretary, Cass, his life is bleak. His job takes him into sad, mean places where kids wail, drunks fight and women get beaten up. He works his territory with Jaco, who's tougher and shiftier than any of the folks they're sent to shake rent out of. One night Keno and Jaco finally catch up to one of their targets. But she'll...

The people of Holand in South Dalemark are bitterly oppressed by the tyrannical earl Hadd. Informers, secret police, and cruel rent-collectors terrorize the countryside, and Mitt has grown up with more than enough reasons for joining the freedom fighters. When his protest against the tyrannical government fails, a young boy escapes, with two other children, to the mysterious Holy Islands where they learn the identity and the power of two folk figures...

Suffragettes learned jiu-jitsu, repelled policemen with their hatpins, burnt down football stadiums and planted bombs. They rented a house near to Holloway Prison and sang rebel anthems to the Suffragettes inside. They barricaded themselves into their homes to repulse tax collectors. They arranged mass runs on Parliament. They had themselves posted to the Prime Minister, getting as far as the door of No. 10. Indomitable older members applied for gun...

Glancing quickly over the bar, he saw the bartender lying face down in a pool of blood, senselessly gunned down simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. New York City in the prohibition era, and Bill Sutton's wife thinks he earns an honest crust as a rent collector. Instead, he leads an extraordinary double-life as 'Willie the Actor', a notorious bank robber. Based on a true story, the novel's protagonist is a gentle gunman who...

John Atkinson Hobson (1858 - 1940) was an English social scientist and economist most famous for his work on imperialism-which notably had an influence on Vladimir Lenin-as well as his theory of underconsumption. His early work also questioned the classical theory of rent and predicted the Neoclassical "marginal productivity" theory of distribution. In his 1891 work "Problems of Poverty", Hobson explores the subject of poverty and the industrial condition...

All the Shadowed Places is a two-part saga set in the beautiful hills of the Cotswolds and the streets of the dangerous Victorian Eastend slums. When a childhood challenge ends in disaster, Horatio Woodley shoulders the blame for the death of his sister, Angelica, and the ultimate death of his father, James. Becoming caught up in the dark attractions of the Eastend Hero finds solace in bare-knuckle fighting, where he encounters the unscrupulous Jolly...

All the Shadowed Places is a saga set in the beautiful hills of the Cotswolds and the narrow, dangerous streets of the Victorian East End slums. When a childhood challenge ends in disaster, Horatio Woodley shoulders the blame for the death of his sister, Angelica, and the ultimate death of his father, James. After being sent away to school, Hero, encouraged by his friend, Alec Silverman, the son of a wealthy Jewish immigrant, finds solace bareknuckle...