Foreshadowing his later detailed accounts of the Soviet prison-camp system, Solzhenitsyn's classic portrayal of life in the gulag...

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

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

The Sound and the Fury is a brilliant and lyrical virtuoso narrative in which Faulkner chronicles the decline of the American...

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

The fictional autobiography of a rumbustious adventurer and poker-player who sets off his native Chicago in the spirit of a...

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

Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and...

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

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

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

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

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

"Tolstoy's lavish and always graphic use of detail," wrote John Bayley, "together of course with its romance and exotic setting ....

Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of...

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

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

A gripping vision of American society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has...

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...

Humboldt (1769–1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. His life was packed with adventure and...

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

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

This complex tale of self-discovery - considered by the author to be his best work - traces the path of an aging idealist,...

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

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

Written over two thousand years ago, The Art of War contains penetrating insights into the nature of power, inter-state rivalry,...

Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent,...

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

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