One of Hemingway’s finest novels, A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929 when the author was at the height of his powers. It...

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

A Passage to India, published in 1924 and set in British India in the years immediately preceding, is a powerful critique of both...

Turgenev's first literary masterpiece was an eloquent evocation of rural Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. A hunter wanders...

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

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

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte's second and most celebrated novel. Set in the dramatic northern landscape made...

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

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

A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery...

Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers –...

Considered by many readers, including Shaw, Chesterton, Conrad and Trilling, as one of Dickens’s finest achievements, Bleak House...

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his...

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

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

David Copperfield – Dickens’s most celebrated novel, and the author’s own favourite – is the classic account of one boy growing...

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

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as...

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

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

The doppelganger, the ghostly double infecting the soul, was a popular fictional subject for late nineteenth-century writers, and...

Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri...

Emma Woodhouse ‘had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her’, but during the course of...

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

Turgenev’s most celebrated story examines the conflict of generations and attitudes in mid-nineteenth-century Russia, as distant...

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

Despite the grimness of his subject and the accuracy of his description, Zola tells an irresistible tale of life above and below...

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

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

Set in the early twentieth century, Independent People, by Nobel Prize-winning author Halldor Laxness, recalls both Iceland's...