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

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

Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry...

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

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

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

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most political novel tells the tragic story of General Simon Bolivar, the man who tried to unite a...

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

The story of young Nanda Brookenham's struggle to preserve her honesty in the brilliant but corrupt world of her parents is a...

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

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

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

The Custom of the Country is probably Edith Wharton's most savage satire on the manners of late nineteenth-century America. It is...

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

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

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

Dostoevsky's most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century...

An unjustly neglected classic, this sweeping 1904 novel is a Modernist masterpiece and arguably 'the great Danish novel' – but is...

Amis’s powers of comic invention are formidable in this dark tale of disaster, sex, love, murder - and darts.

Set in a...

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

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

The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other...

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

Published in 1913, Lawrence’s closely autobiographical first major novel is set in the coal-mining villages where he spent his...

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

Alone in the great social whirl of New York high society, with little but her wit and beauty to support her, Lily Bart pays the...

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

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...

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