A gripping tale of violent jealousy, sexual passion and treachery, Honore de Balzac's Cousin Bette is translated from the French...

This unique anthology offers a more comprehensive look at the poems of Christopher Marlowe, England's first great poet and...

In Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the philosophical views of the Enlightenment to create one of the most...

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate...

Perhaps no fairy tale is as widely known as 'Beauty and the Beast' - and perhaps no fairy tale exists in as many variations....

Twenty-one, passionate and headstrong, Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to live her own life. When her father forbids her from...

Asser's Life of King Alfred, written in 893, is a revealing account of one of the greatest of medieval kings. Composed by a monk...

The Agricola is both a portrait of Julius Agricola - the most famous governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus' well-loved and...

Britain in the early eighteenth century: an introduction that is both informative and imaginative, reliable and entertaining. To...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet is the literary debut of the world's most famous fictional detective, Sherlock...

Spanning the origins of the Earth to the outcome of the First World War, this is a brilliantly compelling account of the...

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a...

A black comedy of manners about vast wealth and a woman who can define herself only through the perceptions of others.

The...

Seducer, gambler, necromancer, swindler, swashbuckler, poet, self-made gentleman, bon vivant, Giacomo Casanova was not only the...

Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this...

This exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the...

'The Boy-scouts mistook my signal, and have killed the postman. I've had very little practice in this sort of thing, you...

Axel Heyst, a dreamer and a restless drifter, believes he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from others. Then he becomes...

This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An...

A pioneering work of dystopian fiction from one of Sweden's most acclaimed writers
Written midway between Brave New World and...

Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped is at once a rollicking adventure story and an earnest political allegory. This Penguin...

Presented as a miraculous cure-all, Tono-Bungay is in fact nothing other than a pleasant-tasting liquid with no positive effects....

A new translation of George Simenon's taut, devastating psychological novel set in American suburbia. The inspiration for the new...

Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour saving machinery to his Yorkshire mill, arousing a ferment of...

Jane Austen's profound, ambiguous third novel is the story of Fanny Price, who is accustomed to being the poor relation at...

Jane Austen's moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few...

Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honore de Balzac's Eugenie Grandet...

A tragicomedy, a satire on materialism and a scream of pain and injustice, Timon of Athens depicts Shakespeare's greatest...

Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons explores the ageless conflict between generations through a period in Russian history when a new...

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers with its...