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

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

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and...

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

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

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the novels of R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), the forefather of modern Indian fiction, we witness the birth of a nation as it...

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

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

Published in 1847, the year before Emily Bronte’s death at the age of thirty, Wuthering Heights has proved to be one of the...

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

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

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