Katy, a twelve-year-old gangly tomboy, dreams of blossoming into a sophisticated young woman, capable of grand deeds and...

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of one of the most poignant and enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century, left...

Comprising one finished novel, Lady Susan, which was published posthumously, and two unfinished fragments, Sanditon and The...

In the somnolent Flemish town of Quiquendone disagreements are unheard of, courtships might last a decade and not a ripple of...

In A Voyage to the Moon, the narrator, after an attempt to reach the moon using vials of dewdrops, finally finds himself in what...

As a group of Western tourists travel down the Nile on the steamer Korosko towards the historical sites near Egypt's southern...

A Village Romeo and Juliet is a bitter-sweet tragedy telling the tale of two young lovers kept apart by a family feud. Inspired...

Bathsheba Everdene is a headstrong young woman who attracts the attentions of a succession of ill-matched suitors: a quiet sheep...

Inspired by Fitzgerald’s own courtship of his future wife Zelda, ‘The Last of the Belles’ centres on the Southern beauty Ailie...

The local landowner Van Cheele experiences an unnerving encounter with a youth sunning himself near a pond, and starts to wonder...

‘Tobermory’ – the title story of this collection – is widely considered one of Saki’s finest pieces, in which a short-sighted...

When Sherlock Holmes receives a bungled tip-off from one of the agents of his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, the great detective...

Pipi isn’t like his four brothers or the other young monkeys living in the forest of Hullabaloo: he has bright-pink fur, a...

A glorious exercise in cheeky punmanship, The Wonderful Wonder of Wonders sees Jonathan Swift in fine scatological form. Flying...

A Hollywood hack who has fallen on hard times since the end of the Silent Era, Pat Hobby spends his time hanging out in the...

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

Famed for having killed his cousin Alessandro, the Duke of Florence, in 1537, but also for writing accomplished literary works,...

After the Lady Vain is shipwrecked, Edward Prendick is plucked from the waves by a passing ship and deposited on a remote island....

A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, the Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his...

Eichendorff's prose masterpiece - a picaresque account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his...

Few writers have known Italy better than Stendhal: he was only seventeen when he first rode south across the Alps in the wake of...

What is the nature, essence and definition of a fart? What are the consequences and disadvantages of suppressing one? Why is...

After an accident, Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of impoverished peasants, decides to call on the aristocratic d’Urbervilles, as...

Published in 1880, one year before Verga’s influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic...

Inspired by Boileau's Lutrin and illustrating the debate within European intellectual circles between the "Ancients", who argued...

Although he is best known to the public as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and other pioneering works of detective...

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude Morel begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a...

Meet Miss Charlotte… a modern Mary Poppins who wears a large hat and a crumpled dress that maker her look like a scarecrow, and...

After her parents die of cholera in India, Mary Lennox is sent to live with her uncle in his gloomy house in Yorkshire, where she...

Have you ever looked up into the sky and wondered about space, astronomy and the universe? Perhaps you have. But you've probably...