In this lovely African tale, set long, long ago, the leopard has a splendid new drum - and the Sky God wants it. Along the way, the tortoise gets a shell and thunder is made for the very first time.

Leopard loves to bang his drum, but when he refuses to share it with the Sky God, he finds himself in a lot of trouble! Simply written in lively, flowing text Usborne First Reading books are designed to capture the imagination and build the confidence of beginner readers. This book includes audio and links to downloadable worksheets and teacher's notes. "Irresistible for children learning to read. " - Child Education Plus

The Sky God agrees to give Ananse some stories for the children of Earth if Ananse will bring to him a leopard, hornets that sting and the fairy that no man sees.

SOON TO BE A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES • “A majestic, melancholy, and beautiful novel” (The New Yorker), THE LEOPARD is one of the best-selling Italian novels of the twentieth century and an acclaimed masterpiece of world literature. This beautiful hardcover edition, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, also includes two short stories and a brief memoir of the author’s childhood. Set in Sicily in the 1860s, during the tumult of Italian unification, THE LEOPARD tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, fading aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of revolution and democracy. Its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, who was the last in a line of Sicilian princes, wrote the novel in the 1950s, inspired by the decline of his own family. Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, remains skeptical and stoic as he finds himself beset by civil war, social change, and his family’s loss of wealth and status. While his beloved nephew, Tancredi, more practical and flexible than he, joins the nationalist rebels and marries the ambitious daughter of a newly rich upstart, Don Fabrizio takes refuge in his love of astronomy, gazing at the unchanging stars while the world as he has known it crumbles around him. The dramatic sweep and richness of Lampedusa’s observation, his seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and his sure grasp of human frailty imbue THE LEOPARD with its melancholy beauty and power. “No novel in Italian literature has aroused so much passion or caused so much argument… The book is more than the memorable invocation of a certain place in a certain epoch. It is a work of art that will survive, long after the last sad palaces of Palermo have gone, because it deals with the central problems of the human experience.” —from the Introduction by David Gilmour "The genius of its author and the thrill it gives the reader are probably for all time."—The New York Times Book Review "A masterwork . . . A superb novel in the great tradition and the grand manner."—Newsweek Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

This is a collection of 75 Ashanti tales recorded in the Ashanti and Kwawu areas of Ghana.Each folktale in Twi/Akan dialect of the Tshi language, is followed by an English translation. The English translation is, throughout, made as nearly literal as possible.(At this point, one meets a certain difficulty in a conflict between a desire for accuracy and an endeavour to give a translation acceptable to English ears). First published in 1930 by R.S. Rattray, this edition features a modern Akan/Twi orthography with a brief introduction to the Language. Ashanti folktales often tell a moral lesson, describe a myth, or answer a question about the natural world. Most of the Ashanti tales use animal characters to represent human qualities such as jealousy, honesty, greed, and bravery. Ananse, the spider, is a trickster figure who appears in many of the Ashanti tales. With regard to the classification of these stories, it will be observed that the majority of them fall under one or other of the well-known headings: drolls and cumulative tales; apologues or tales with a moral; aetiological stories, accounting for physical characteristics in men and beasts, e.g. How the Leopard became Spotted; etymological tales, e.g. How the Ram came to be called Odwanini. Each and all of the stories in this volume would, however, be classed by the Akan-speaking African under the generic title of “Anansesɛm” (Spider stories), whether the spider appeared in the tale or not.