It is the autobiography of Giorgio Bassani, told in a time span of around 15 years, a time where the ambiguous and mysterious...

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America's dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a...

We begin - at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country - in the childhood home of the woman who will be the...

There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a...

Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, written when the author was twenty-four, appeared in 1920 and immediately established him as a...

A dazzling collection of early stories and later fragments which throw an entirely new light on Jane Austen. In particular, they...

In the comic masterpiece which established him one of the greatest writers in the English language, Naipaul follows the fortunes...

When young Charles Dickens was commissioned to write the text for a series of sporting illustrations in 1836, no one could have...

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

The exhilaration that comes from reading Adam Bede owes its existence to the fact that on every page George Eliot seems absorbed...

Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and...

Hardy's account of a pure woman betrayed by love is his most powerful and moving novel. Set in the sometimes bleak but always...

An immaculate success on its publication in 1726, Gulliver's Travels has since had an odd double life as both a classic...

Regarded by many as Hardy's prose masterpiece, Far From the Madding Crowd is the tragi-comic story of a woman and three men....

Scott Fitzgerald was called the laureate of the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby (1926) is a cynical celebration of the post-Great War...

Wilkie Collins’ novel took the fashionable world by storm on its appearance in 1860 when everything from dances to dresses was...

Now a classic feminist text, Jane Eyre was the first of Charlotte Bronte’s novels to be published, in 1847. Like her sister...

In 1914 Paul Baumer and his classmates are marched to the local recruiting office by a sentimentally patriotic form-master. On a...

When Catherine Sloper falls for Maurice Townsend, her father, a wealthy New York doctor, believes that Townsend is a fortune...

In this remarkable trilogy, Richard Ford creates one of the most enduring and empathetic characters in contemporary American...

Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irene Nemirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite...