‘As a man loved a woman, that was how I loved…It was good, good, good…’Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents – a fencer, a horse rider and a keen s...więcej »
There is only one book to a man' Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden, his most ambitious novel. Set in the rich farmland of Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel follows the int...więcej »
Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, ho...więcej »
Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by John R. Williams. Goethe's Faust is a classic of European literature. Based on the fable of the man who traded his soul for superhuman powers and knowl...więcej »
Holly Golightly, glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while down. She's up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She's a shoplifter, a d...więcej »
Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives – interesting, n...więcej »
Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent ...więcej »
With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull.Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisiti...więcej »
A novel of high adventure, great storytelling and moral purpose, based on an extraordinary true story of eight years in the Bombay underworld.'In the early 80s, Gregory David Roberts, a...więcej »
Martin Chuzzlewit is Charles Dickens' comic masterpiece about which his biographer, Forster, noted that it marked a crucial phase in the author's development as he began to delve deeper into the 's...więcej »
Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that ful...więcej »
Wilde's works are suffused with his aestheticism, brilliant craftsmanship, legendary wit and, ultimately, his tragic muse. He wrote tender fairy stories for children employing all his grace, artist...więcej »
A Pair of Blue Eyes, though early in the sequence of Hardy's novels, is lively and gripping. Its dramatic cliff-hanging episode, for example, is at once tense, ironic, feministic and erotic.<...więcej »
Under the Greenwood Tree is Hardy's most bright, confident and optimistic novel. This delightful portrayal of a picturesque rural society, tinged with gentle humour and quiet irony, established Har...więcej »
Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka’s world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidde...więcej »
The Shirley of the title is a woman of independent means; her friend Caroline is not. Both struggle with what a woman's role is and can be. Their male counterparts - Louis, the powerless tutor, and...więcej »
When literature student Anastasia Steele interviews successful entrepreneur Christian Grey, she finds him very attractive and deeply intimidating. Convinced that their meeting went badly, she tries...więcej »
'Yes, I loved her, it's the name I gave, still give alas, to what I was doing then. I had nothing to go by, having never loved before, but of course had heard of the thing, at home, in school, in b...więcej »
"War and Peace" is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his gr...więcej »
Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury.This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, ...więcej »