A biting satire on dictatorship written during the Second World War and published in 1945, ANIMAL FARM is perhaps the most celebrated twentieth-century English satire after the same writer's NINETE...więcej »
Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. IF THIS IS A MAN describes his deportation to Poland and the twenty months he spend working in Auschwitz. THE TRU...więcej »
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121 180) succeeded his adoptive father as emperor of Rome in a.d. 161 and Meditations remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever writ...więcej »
This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the character of Sidney Carton who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine' it is...więcej »
James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on one day in June 1904. It is considered to be one of the most important wo...więcej »
Here are libraries modest, mobile, mystical (Borges of course) and magical (Helen Oyeyemi's enchanting 'Books and Roses'); public and private, provincial and prestigious. Little that happen in Eliz...więcej »
Variations on a musical theme by a striking range of authors, among them Flaubert, Turgenev, Proust, Nabokov, Katherine Mansfield, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Bernard MacLaverty and...więcej »
German Romantic poetry is both fluid and formed, and it is full of song: the poems themselves are often intrinsically lyrical, and many of them inspired some of the best-known musical compositions ...więcej »
Now a classic feminist text, Jane Eyre was the first of Charlotte Brontë’s novels to be published, in 1847. Like her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights, which it matches in power, Ch...więcej »
The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and...więcej »
A major book in the history of feminism, which, when it was first published in the 1950s, was considered a radical thesis. But its claim that the subordination of women is not a fact of nature but ...więcej »
London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll-call of story-tellers includes cultural giants who changed the way the world thought about writing, like Shakespeare, D...więcej »
The unforgettable canines gathered here include Kipling's heroically faithful 'Garm', Bret Harte's irrepressible scoundrel of a 'yaller dog' and the aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull ...więcej »
In Lord Byron's lifetime, details of his travels were widely known through poems set in different countries, ranging from his homes in Scotland and England, through Europe and the Middle East, to t...więcej »
A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin - and every bit their equal - Chester Himes was the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories and essays, as well as the classic cri...więcej »
The archetypal Romantic, killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37, Alexander Pushkin was effectively the founder of modern Russian literature. Though famous as a poet, he was equally at home in pr...więcej »
Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, ...więcej »
Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gl...więcej »
Writers have always been uniquely inspired by New York City, and the classic stories collected here provide a kaleidoscopic vision of the metropolis in all its grittiness and glamour. Acclaimed wr...więcej »
Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of Winston Smith, an ordinary man struggling against the overwhelming power of a totalitarian state. Although he enjoys brief moments of love and freedom, Smith...więcej »
Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their h...więcej »
His stories are fillled with the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corrupt...więcej »
Published in 1916 when Joyce was already at work on Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is exactly what its title says and much more. In part a vivid picture of Joyce’s own youth...więcej »
The doppelgänger, the ghostly double infecting the soul, was a popular fictional subject for late nineteenth-century writers, and it found its most brilliant realization in Robert Louis Steven...więcej »
That Machiavelli’s name has become synonymous with cold-eyed political calculation only heightens the intrinsic fascination of The Prince – the world’s pre-eminent how-to manual o...więcej »
Tales about ghosts are as old as human culture itself but the ghost story as a distinguished literary form reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As traditional re...więcej »
An immaculate success on its publication in 1726, Gulliver’s Travels has since had an odd double life as both a classic traveller’s tale for children and a scathing satire of the human ...więcej »
Emma Woodhouse ‘had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her’, but during the course of this, the wisest and most disturbing of Jane Austen&rsq...więcej »
The Edwardian era was the Golden Age of childhood, of high adventure and fantasy, and home for tea in the nursery. Or not... The story of the boy who took the quest for untrammelled freedom to its ...więcej »
Set in British India in the 1920s, this book looks at racial conflict. The characters struggle to overcome their own differences and prejudices, but when the Indian Dr Aziz is tried for the alleged...więcej »
During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the presen...więcej »
In the eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne explores the temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eye-witness account of the Revolu...więcej »
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed . If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repr...więcej »
In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrato...więcej »
An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the ANCIEN REGIME of the Austro-Hungarian empire, THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK recreates the age-old figure of the simple soldier whose sheer determinatio...więcej »
Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel (1811), which, though revised late...więcej »
Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of ...więcej »
As Scheherazade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller's art, with its ancient roots in fantastical leg...więcej »
T. S. Eliot called The Moonstone ‘the first, the longest and the best of detective novels’. Combining a teasing plot with a vivid portrait of Victorian England, Collins makes his charac...więcej »
A glorious collection of some of the best sleuths in the business. Including creators such as Poe and Conan Doyle to Hammet, Christie, Chandler, Rendell and Rankin. Perfect gift editionwięcej »
