'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, The Waves. Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in...
The Turn of the Screw is the classic ghost story for which James is most remembered. Set in a country house, it is a chilling tale of the supernatural told by a master of the genre.The ...
Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and cons...
The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet - the Little Pri...
With an Introduction and Notes by Sara Haslam, Department of English, The Open University.The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, an inspiration for many later, ...
Anton Chekhov is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of short stories. He constructs stories where action and drama are implied rather than described openly, and which leave much to the ...
This book is with an introduction and notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading. "To the Lighthouse" is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on...
Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.The diffident and much put-upon he...
Complete and unabridged, this title comes with a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, "Ulysses", t...
"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...
What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most ...
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...
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,...
A new translation by David Horrocks.At first sight Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society and repul...
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from...
From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happ...
Burroughs’ first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever ...
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 ...
In this thoughtful and moving novel, four men find themselves inextricably bound together by their past histories. The aged Judge Clane dreams of resurrecting the confederacy, while his grandson, J...
Carson McCullers' prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lone...