There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of 71 and a man of 78 ascend a gangplank and begin one of the...
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...
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...
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...
Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in ...
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...
A burlesque epic in the tradition of THE GOOD SOLDIER SCHWEIK, CATCH-22 exposes the absurdity of war by applying its own demented logic to America's involvement in Korea. The 'catch' is that soldie...
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...
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...
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...
As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderful...
Scott Fitzgerald was called the laureate of the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby (1926) is a cynical celebration of the post-Great War Long Island/ New York world of get-rich-quick. The narrator, Nick Ca...
The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world's storytellers. This anthology gathers a dazzling variety of stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne du Maurier's haunt...
The strange and wonderful tale of man's experiences on Mars, filled with intense images and astonishing visions.The classic work that transformed Ray Bradbury into a household name. Written in the ...
This most romantic of fairy tales is found in many versions, and the story of the beautiful girl who falls into a long sleep, to be awakened by a lover, has been interpreted by some as an allegory ...
In this beautifully packaged anthology A. S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Bowen, Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Anita Desai, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore and many others reflect upon...
Woven through all these tales are the unique histories and mythologies of the regions of Southern Italy, encompassing Sicily, Calabria, Cantania, Basilicata, Apulia and Campania. Theocritus, Virgil...
The stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," O. Henry's "The Marry Month of May," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Bridal P...
This story of two spoilt and lonely children, whose happiness is regained as they bring to life a neglected garden, has become the best-loved of all Mrs. Burnett's books, but it did not acquire uni...
Baron Munchausen’s absurd adventures have entertained adults and children alike for more than two centuries. First published in England in 1785, his traveller’s tales soon became as wel...