Published in 1847, the year before Emily Bronte’s death at the age of thirty, Wuthering Heights has proved to be one of the...

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

A towering classic of Australian literature - by the only writer from that continent to win the Nobel Prize - Voss recounts an...

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

First published in 1516, during a period of astonishing political and technological change, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia depicts an...

This ribald, high-spirited novel, whose author was described by Diderot as 'the Rabelais of the English', provoked literary...

One of the most popular twentieth-century novels, To the Lighthouse is the story of a woman and her family experiencing the...

From Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, the three magnificent novels – published in an omnibus edition for the first time – that form...

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

Hardy described the theme of The Woodlanders as 'the immortal puzzle -given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their...

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

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

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

Anton Chekhov widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story also wrote five works long enough to be called short...

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

Two novels demonstrating how this grande dameof English literature produced sophisticated philosophical fiction without...

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

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

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

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

The brevity of Muriel Spark's novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece,...

Described by F. R. Leavis as one of the two most brilliant novels in the language, The Portrait of a Lady marks the evolution of...

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

An extraordinary kind of autobiography in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and its starting-point from one of the...

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

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

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

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel...

This study of natural goodness is Dostoevsky's most touching novel. Prince Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once...

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...