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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now a classic feminist text, Jane Eyre was the first of Charlotte Bronte’s novels to be published, in 1847. Like her sister...

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

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

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871–2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest...

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

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

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

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

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

Lord Silverbridge has just been sent down from Oxford, his brother Gerald is an idler, both are constantly in debt and in...

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

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

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

Set in a...

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...

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

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

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

The Ottoman Sultan has commissioned the best artists in the land to create a book celebrating the glories of his realm: but he...

In this remarkable trilogy, Richard Ford creates one of the most enduring and empathetic characters in contemporary American...

In the five novels by Ireland's greatest comic writer we can explore the full range of his invention, from the multi-layered...

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

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