CLASSICS

G.K. Chesterton's quiet and unassuming little priest has long since joined the pantheon of great literary detectives. Combining the shrewdness of Miss Marple, the insight of Sherlock Holmes and the...

Many of the characters are well-known: Valjean, the criminal trying to escape his reputation; Javert, the police agent trailing him; the unfortunate Fantine and her daughter, Cosette; the rascally Thenardier;...

This is the novel that first established Nabokov's reputation with a large audience tour-de-force of comic satire on sex and the American ways of life.

While on a duck-hunting holiday sailing in the Frisian Isles, Carruthers and his friend Davies become suspicious of German naval activity off the North Sea Coast. The pair decide to...

More than a century after the Norman Conquest, England remains a colony of foreign warlords. The dissolute Prince John plots to seize his brother's crown, his barons terrorize the country,...

A parable of commitment, loneliness, hope and loss, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a powerful and moving portrayal of two men striving to understand their own unique...

Beautiful Emma Rouault yearns for the life of wealth, passion and romance she has encountered in popular sentimental fiction, and when her doctor, the well-meaning but awkward and unremarkable Charles...

'I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,' wrote Dodgson, describing how Alice was conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in...

Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very...

When the spring came the people - what was left of them - moved back by the old paths from the sea. But this year strange things were happening, terrifying...

Ireland, 1880 and a prosperous, provincial family observes the three great autumnal feasts of the Church. As Teresa Mulqueen lies dying, her family gather round her and beneath this drama...

Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter. Whilst his betrayal of family, duty and honour gives...

'We have heard much of the rage of fanaticism in former days, but nothing to this'A wretched young man, 'an outcast in the world', tells the story of his upbringing...

Jane Austen revolutionized the literary romance, using it as a platform from which to address issues of gender politics and class consciousness among the British middle-class of the late eighteenth...

Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and...

When the weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he becomes a miser and vows to turn his back on the world. But an...

In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The...

Drawing on his fascination with African lore and his love of adventure to create a seminal work of fantasy, H. Rider Haggard's She is edited with an introduction by Patrick...

Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double...

The narrator is a young governess, sent off to a country house to take charge of two orphaned children. She finds a pleasant house and a comfortable housekeeper, while the...

This moving parable of wealth and the evil it can bring is based on a Mexican folktale. The simple life of Kino, a pearl fisher, changes for ever when he...

An ancient bridge collapses over a gorge in Peru, hurling five people into the abyss. It seems a meaningless human tragedy. But one witness, a Franciscan monk, believes the deaths...

Perhaps the most haunting and tragic love story ever written, Wuthering Heights is the tale of Heathcliff, a brooding, troubled orphan, and his doomed love for Catherine Earnshaw. His desire...