CLASSICS

When the corpse of Sir Charles Baskerville is found on the grounds of his Dartmoor estate next to a mysterious animal footprint, thoughts turn to a fabled family curse: that...

Sara, the American wife of a French aristocrat, has had two encounters with her compatriot Cedric Killian, one a youthful idyll in North Carolina and the other during the First...

Sense and Sensibility is the story of the two Dashwood sisters, who embody the conflict between the oppressive nature of "civilized" society and the human desire for romantic passion. Elinor...

Fathers and Children, arguably the first modern novel in the history of Russian literature, shocked readers when it was first published in 1862 - the controversial character of Bazarov, a...

The Good Soldier tells the stories of two outwardly happy couples who meet at a health spa in Germany just before the start of the First World War, and whose...

After an accident, Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of impoverished peasants, decides to call on the aristocratic d'Urbervilles, as she believes that she is also descended from their ancient Norman lineage...

When the publishers of the Pickwick Papers, Chapman & Hall, brought out the anonymous 'Sketches of Young Ladies' in 1837, their resounding success prompted the twenty-six-year old Dickens to write,...

Regarded as one of the most influential horror stories of all time and the inspiration for countless literary spin-offs, the tale of the young Englishman Jonathan Harker's journey into the...

Hadji Murat, one of the most feared and venerated mountain chiefs in the Caucasian struggle against the Russians, defects from the Muslim rebels after feuding with his ruling imam, Shamil....

This collection of Pushkin's stories begins with 'The Queen of Spades', perhaps the most celebrated short story in Russian literature. The young Hermann, while watching some friends gambling, hears a...

Eichendorff's prose masterpiece - a picaresque account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his father, and who eventually finds love with the...

As a group of Western tourists travel down the Nile on the steamer Korosko towards the historical sites near Egypt's southern border, they are kidnapped by a marauding band of...

Four sailors discover a copper cylinder containing a manuscript written by the adventurer Adam More, who was shipwrecked in the southern hemisphere. They read its contents out to one another,...

By writing what he called a "secret book" - taking the shape of a conversation between himself and St Augustine - Petrarch aimed to compose a cathartic text which would...

While on a journey with his wife to Prague for the opening night of Don Giovanni, Mozart is caught picking an orange on the grounds of a stately home. But...

Set in an unspecified island kingdom, A Regicide tells the story of the statistician Boris who, after the electoral victory of the Church party in the country's elections, decides to...

A young Harvard graduate with bright prospects, Bill Frothington is invited on board a steamer hosting a high-school dance, where he meets and falls in love with the seventeen-year-old Mae....

Having been found guilty of adultery, Hester Prynne is forced to wear an embroidered scarlet letter A as a punishment for her sin. While her vengeful husband embarks on a...

Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator, undaunted by the warnings of the locals, invites a party of friends over; on Twelfth Night he and his guests gather...

Happily engaged to the poet Amandus, Fraulein Anna is horrified to discover that a beautiful ring, mysteriously deposited upon her finger whilst tending her kitchen garden, forces her into marriage...

On a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells his story to a stranger: how his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated from one of love and passion to jealousy and resentfulness, culminating...

Stevenson published this collection of his early fiction in 1882, after the pieces had appeared in various magazines. The first half features two popular detective-story cycles, The Suicide Club and...

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of one of the most poignant and enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century, left only a few other pieces of fiction when he...

Trapped in an unhappy marriage with a boorish, inattentive and socially ambitious husband, Julie de Chaverny enjoys a flirtatious dalliance with the elegant Major de Chateaufort. However, the sudden reappearance...

As Mrs Dalloway works on the preparations for a dinner party, her thoughts throughout the day wander from memories of the past to interrogations about the present and lead her...

Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, one of the collections Arthur Conan Doyle published at the end of his career, anthologizes some of his best short fiction outside of the...

While he is now mostly associated with his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle was also celebrated for the many masterful tales he wrote outside of that cycle. In this...

Micromegas is a six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old, thirty-nine-kilometre-high giant from the planet Sirius who can speak a thousand languages and has been expelled from his homeland for writing a heretical tract. On Saturn...

Although he is best known to the public as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and other pioneering works of detective fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle successfully contributed to other...

One of Twain's most celebrated novellas, 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a satirical retelling of the Garden of Eden story in the Bible, in which the author, mocking the...

On a boat in the Thames estuary, Marlow tells his travelling companions of his reconnaissance expedition for a Belgian trading company to its most remote outpost in central Africa, which...

Published soon after Fitzgerald's debut novel This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers was the author's first collection of short fiction, a form through which he had gained notoriety in...

Begun in 1920 while Bulgakov was employed in a hospital in the remote Caucasian outpost of Vladikavkaz, and continued when he started working for a government literary department in Moscow,...

First published in 1831, Belkin's Stories was the first completed work of fiction by the founding father of Russian literature. Through a series of interlinked stories purporting to have been...

In the Twilight, the third collection of short stories compiled by Anton Chekhov himself, was his first major success and won him the prestigious Pushkin Prize when it was published...

One of Dickens's finest novels, Great Expectations chronicles the fortunes of its young protagonist Pip as he is unexpectedly endowed by a mysterious benefactor with the life of a gentleman,...

The Mudfog Papers, a collection of sketches by Dickens published in Bentley's Miscellany between 1837 and 1838, describes the local politics of the fictional town of Mudfog - such as...

The young student Nathanael remains haunted by his childhood fears: he is convinced that Coppelius, a strange night-time visitor who used to come to his house to conduct alchemical experiments...

Set in the year after the 1929 crash and incorporating many autobiographical elements, 'Babylon Revisited' tells the story of the widower Charlie Wales, a reformed alcoholic and successful businessman returning...

A master of many literary genres, Arthur Conan Doyle excelled particularly in the short-story form, and was acclaimed in his day as much for his detective stories as for his...

When an ageing, impoverished nobleman decides to style himself "Don Quixote" and embarks upon a series of daring endeavours, it is clear that his ability to distinguish between reality and...

Basil and Josephine charts the coming of age of two privileged youths from quiet Midwestern towns, Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry - based on Fitzgerald himself and a combination...

Based on a true story, The Jew's Beech centres on two brutal murders in rural Westphalia - the first of a local forester and the second of a Jewish moneylender...

Monroe Stahr is a film producer at the height of his career, revered by the industry and in control of every aspect of his business empire. In his ruthless rise...

The tale of Heathcliff and Cathy's ungovernable love and suffering, and the havoc that their passion wreaks on the families of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, shocked the book's first...

Originally hand-printed at her Hogarth Press in Richmond, Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short stories that Virginia Woolf published during her lifetime, providing a fascinating insight into...

Jane Tressider has never been afraid of speaking her mind, even if she admits that she may have occasionally given offence by doing so. But as a busy mother of...

Set in Paris during the years of the Reign of Terror, 'The Gods Want Blood' centres on the rise to power of Jacobin sympathizer Evariste Gamelin, a young painter who...