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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the shy Maggie Verver marries an Italian Prince and her widowed father becomes the husband of the Prince's former mistress,...

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...

Conrad’s foresight and his ability to pluck the human adventure from complex historical circumstances were such that his greatest...

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

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

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

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

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

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 –...

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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