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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
Included here are famous tales like 'Sound of Thunder', in which the carelessness of a group of time-travellers leads to disastrous consequences, and 'The Veldt', in which two seemingly innocent yo...