"Pride and Prejudice", which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it, the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only on...
The Man in the Iron Mask is the final episode in the cycle of novels featuring Dumas' celebrated foursome of D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, who first appeared in The Three Musketeers. Some ...
There are four of them - George, Harris, the writer himself and that dog, Montmorency - all participants in a boating expedition on the Thames. The difficulties and vicissitudes heaped upon these i...
From its first publication in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been printed in over 700 editions. It has inspired almost every conceivable kind of imitation and variation, and been the subject of plays, o...
One of the most celebrated and popular historical romances ever written, The Three Musketeers tells the story of the early adventures of the young Gascon gentleman, D'Artagnan and his three friends...
First published in 1900, Lord Jim established Conrad as one of the great storytellers of the twentieth century. Set in the Malay Archipelago, the novel not only provides a gripping account of marit...
Shakespeare’s Macbeth is one of the greatest tragic dramas the world has known. Macbeth himself, a brave warrior, is fatally impelled by supernatural forces, by his proud wife, and by his own...
Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts,...
The Last Man is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting i...
De Profundis is Wilde's eloquent and bitter reproach from prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. He contrasts his behaviour with that of his close friend Robert Ross who became Wilde's literary ...
Prepare to be shocked. This novel, written in 1796, is a Gothic festival of sex, magic and ghastly, ghostly violence rarely seen in literature. The Monk is remarkably modern in style and tells a br...
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she will never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ever...
Philip Marlowe, the original hard-boiled private eye, returns to walk the mean streets of the American underworld again in these three classic novels. In The Lady in the Lake a business tycoon sets...
Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family -...
This book contains over forty of the best-loved fairy stories, retold by Flora Annie Steel, and beautifully illustrated by Arthur Rackham.Favourites such as Jack the Giant-killer, Jack ...
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...
Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify ...
Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the ‘Jazz Age’.<...
Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a 'heroine whom no one but myself will much like', but Emma is irresistible. 'Handsome, clever, and rich', Emma is also an 'imaginist', 'on fire with spe...
Mr Dombey is a man obsessed with his firm. His son is groomed from birth to take his place within it, despite his visionary eccentricity and declining health. But Dombey also has a daughter, whose ...