Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging b...
Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies: a spectacular, widely-ranging drama of love and war, passion and politics. Antony is divided between the responsibilities of imperia...
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) relates the hair-raising journey made as a wager by the Victorian gentleman Phileas Fogg, who succeeds - but only just! - in circling the globe within eighty ...
Great art has dreadful manners……The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they ...
An immediate best-seller on publication, Ben Hur remains a dazzling achievement by any standards. A thoroughly exhilarating tale of betrayal, revenge and salvation, it is the only novel that ranks ...
Black Beauty is a perennial children's favourite, one which has never been out of print since its publication in 1877. It is a moralistic tale of the life of the horse related in the form of an aut...
Anna Sewell's Black Beauty was an immediate success on its publication in 1877, and has gone on to sell an estimated 50 million copies. Black Beauty is a horse with a fine black coat, a white foot ...
Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that ful...
Bonita is a 34 year-old former prostitute from Pennsylvania trying to fight back against the demons in her life. Now being held at the county jail awaiting trial in her connection to the homicide o...
The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) are world famous animal stories. Set in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, The Call of the Wild is about Buck, the magnificent...
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...
During his life, Geoffrey Chaucer (born c.1340) was courtier, diplomat, revenue collector, administrator, negotiator, overseer of building projects, landowner and knight of the shire. He was serva...
Explains in non-technical terms how to use the Chelsea filter and synthetic emerald filter to identify diamonds and colored gems, and how to separate natural gems from imitations, treated gemstones...
‘I was conscious of a most horrible smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and moving slowly over it, and of several - I don't know how many - legs and arms or ten...
Wilde, glamorous and notorious, more famous as a playwright or prisoner than as a poet, invites readers of his verse to meet an unknown and intimate figure. The poetry of his formative years includ...
Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and return...
That is not dead that can eternal lie And with strange aeons even death may die Millenia ago, the Old Ones ruled our planet. Since that time, they have but slumbered. But when a massive sea tremor ...
The Communist Manifesto was first published in London in 1848, by two young men in their late twenties. Its impact reverberated across the globe and throughout the next century, and it has come to ...
The story of Edmund Dantes, self-styled Count of Monte Cristo, is told with consummate skill. The victim of a miscarriage of justice, Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and empowered by a ...
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,...