CLASSICS

Barchester Towers is Anthony Trollope's comic masterpiece. Ranged either side of the unfathomable Victorian divide between the High Anglican clergy and their modern, evangelical brethren we meet the saintly Septimus...

Miss Jean Brodie is a rare breed of teacher, passionate, independent-minded and romantically inspired, with not the slightest care for convention. Small surprise then that she soon garners a devoted...

The Great Gatsby lives in a luxurious Long Island mansion, playing lavish host to hundreds of people, and yet no-one seems to know him or how he became so rich....

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University which he left in 1917 to join the army. Fitzgerald was said to have...

The most poetic and magical of Shakespeare's comedies, The Tempest contrasts lyrical fantasy surrounding the spirit Ariel and the savage Caliban, with a tale of political intrigue focused around Prospero,...

When Rosalind is banished by her uncle, who has usurped her father's throne, she flees to the forest of Arden where her exiled father holds court. There, dressed as a...

Alfred Edward Housman's A Shropshire Lad is the wonderful collection of poems that are so evocative of 'the blue remembered hills' of his youth. In this half-imaginery 'land of lost...

This collection of Poe's work contains some of the most exciting and haunting tales ever written. They range from the poetic to the mysterious and the darkly comic, yet all...

This terrifying tale of Joseph K, a respectable functionary in a bank who is suddenly arrested and must defend his innocence against a charge about which he can get no...

Playwright, novelist, essayist, poet and epigrammatist, Oscar Wilde was Ireland's greatest and most inspired wit. Today he is remembered for the brilliance of his writing, and this complete edition of...

Robinson Crusoe is among the first novels written in English. Thanks to its extraordinary realism and drama, it is easily the longest-enduring work of popular fiction in the language. The...

Shakespeare's history of Henry V's remarkable victory over the French at Agincourt and the subsequent peace between the two nations is also a study of war and kingship. From his...

"David Copperfield" was Dickens' 'favourite child', and is a novel of personal development with richly comic as well as deeply poignant moments. "Great Expectations" also traces the progress of a...

This collection of Poe's work contains some of the most exciting and haunting tales ever written. They range from the poetic to the mysterious and the darkly comic, yet all...

Set in Scotland in 1751, Kidnapped tells of how young David Balfour, orphaned, and betrayed by his uncle Ebenezer who should have been his guardian, is kidnapped, and falls in...

Following his adventures foiling the plans of the Black Stone gang in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay is called in to investigate rumours of an uprising in the Muslim world,...

One of the first great spy novels, The Riddle of the Sands is set during the long suspicious years leading up to the First World War. In spite of good...

Black Beauty tells the story of the horse's own long and varied life, from a well-born colt in a pleasant meadow to an elegant carriage horse for a gentleman to...

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is one of few nineteenth-century novels to address alcoholism, psychological abuse, violence and the inequality of women's property rights. In a powerful psychological narrative, Anne...