Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry...

The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other...

The Custom of the Country is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is...

The Radetsky March is subtle and touching study of family life at the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Writing in the...

This volume contains two of the world's great love stories - First Love, and Spring Torrents, which show Turgenev at his very...

In the third novel of the Barsetshire series, Trollope continues his study of a small cathedral city and the surrounding rural...

George Eliot's last novel, published in 1876, weaves together two stories, one about Gwendolen Harleth, the spoilt beauty who...

This novel renews the Victorian family saga in a modern setting, tracing the history of the Brangwens through several...

The story of young Nanda Brookenham's struggle to preserve her honesty in the brilliant but corrupt world of her parents is a...

An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the Ancien Regime of the Austro-Hungarian empire, The Good Soldier Svejk...

A biting satire on dictatorship written during the Second World War and published in 1945, Animal Farm is perhaps the most...

D H Lawrence remarked that Hardy's best novels were about 'the struggle into love and the struggle with love', and The Major of...

The Tin Drum presents Hitler's rise and fall through the eyes of the dwarfish narrator whose magic powers become symbolic of the...

Kafka was an obsessive writer who produced a huge volume of stories, novels, diaries and letters in his brief lifetime. The...

Set in the Malay Archipelago, where Conrad spent much of his youth as an officer in the British Merchant Navy, Victory is a...

This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the...

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

Albert Camus’ laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in colonial Algeria is famous for diagnosing a state of...

Summoned to take up the position of a land surveyor to the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself...

The Scarlet Letter is the story of Hester Prynne, a woman taken in adultery, arraigned by her Puritan community, and abandoned by...

The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed original of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused...

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) made one reputation during his lifetime with his Utopian satire Erewhon, and a second reputation after...

When the shy Maggie Verver marries an Italian Prince and her widowed father becomes the husband of the Prince's former mistress,...

In The Return of the Native Hardy once more treats his favourite theme of the mismatched couple with masterly pathos and...

Hardy’s last novel is the story of a young working man destroyed by the partial fulfilment of his dreams. Torn between his...

In The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot recreates her own childhood through the story of the wild, gifted Maggie Tulliver and her...

The most swiftly-moving and unified of Dickens’s great novels, Oliver Twist is famous for its re-creation of the London...

Conrad’s foresight and his ability to pluck the human adventure from complex historical circumstances were such that his greatest...

Written in the author’s exile from Nazi Germany, Doctor Faustus explores the history which brought about the evil of that time...

By 1854, when Hard Times was published, Charles Dickens's magisterial progress as a writer had come to incorporate a many-sided,...