'Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your immediate feelings...'Adam Bed...
Agnes Grey is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a ...
Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density. Tolstoy considered this book to be his fi...
Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits several targets with fierce and comic satire: organised religion, t...
The sheer variety and accomplishment of Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction is amazing. This new volume contains six of her finest stories that have been selected specifically to demonstrate this, ...
George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), follows the intertwining lives of the beautiful but spoiled and selfish Gwendolene Harleth and the selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they ...
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is an ominous fable about the pursuit of great wealth. Readers will be transported to a fabulous fantasy land of such opulence that its very existence has to remain a...
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...
With this intensely moving short novel, Edith Wharton set out ‘to draw life as it really was’ in the lonely villages and desolate farms of the harsh New England mountains. Through the e...
Far From the Maddening Crowd, by Thomas Hardy, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including...
Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From...
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’.<...
Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted envir...
"Jane Eyre" ranks as one of the greatest and most perennially popular works of English fiction. Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an ind...
Kim is Rudyard Kipling’s finest work. Now controversial, this novel is a memorably vivid evocation of the life and landscapes of India in the late nineteenth century. Kim himself is a resourc...
One of the great classics of western literature, Les Misérables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description.Characters s...
One of the great classics of western literature, Les Misérables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description.Characters s...
The phrase `life's little ironies' is now proverbial, but it was coined by Hardy as the title for this, his third volume of short stories. While the tales and sketches reflect many of the strengths...
Little Dorrit is a classic tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, while Dickens' working title for the novel, Nobody's Fault, highlights its concern with personal responsibility in pr...
London Labour and the London Poor is a masterpiece of personal inquiry and social observation. It is the classic account of life below the margins in the greatest Metropolis in the world and a comp...