Secondhand Classics

This festive follow-up to The Little Book of Saints and The Little Book of Angels explores the wonderful rituals and rich history surrounding Christmas. From the story of the nativity...

An incredible adventure from the master of science fiction. Jules Verne's imagination plays out beautifully in this thrilling tale of discovery. On translating an ancient manuscript which professes to tell...

Amy thought The Hotel Parthenon in Greece would be a nice change for her husband, Labour MP Tom Jones, grumpily recovering from an operation for piles. But first they meet...

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets...

Wilkie Collins is a master of mystery, and "The Woman in White" is his first excursion into the genre. When the hero, Walter Hartright, on a moonlit night in North...

'Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.'With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester...

In The Marquise of O-, a virtuous widow finds herself unaccountably pregnant. And although the baffled Marquise has no idea when this happened, she must prove her innocence to her...

Read this perilous and astonishing adventure into the earth's core.After decoding a scrap of paper in runic script, the intrepid Professor Lidenbrock and his nervous nephew Axel travel across Iceland...

Robert Fagles's award-winning translations of Homer's twin works The Iliad and The Odyssey have sold more than a million copies and become classics in their own right. With this stunning...

Dark and violent, Macbeth is also the most theatrically spectacular of Shakespeare's tragedies. Indeed, for 250 years - until early this century - it was performed with grand operatic additions...

During the 1790s, with Ireland in political crisis, Maria Edgeworth made a surprisingly rebellious choice: in Castle Rackrent , her first novel, she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate...

In these four stories, written between 1900 and 1902, Joseph Conrad bid gradual farewell to his adventurous life at sea and began to confront the more daunting complexities of life...

One of the most famous manhunts of all time, for an innocent man - Richard Hannay, the hero whose appeal will never die. When a mystery man whom he has...

The Woman in White (1859-60) is the first and greatest `Sensation Novel'. Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison,...