In contrast with the epic scope of the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola’s short stories are concerned with the everyday aspects of...

One of Stevenson’s most famous and enduringly popular works, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde describes the mysterious...

Purporting to be an autobiography of the antihero Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne’s novel is a comic masterpiece of digression,...

When it is discovered that the reigning world chess champion, Mirko Czentovic, is on board a cruiser heading for Buenos Aires, a...

Most famous for his twenty-volume dissection of nineteenth-century French mores and society, the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola was...

Ichabod Crane is a young schoolmaster from Connecticut now living in Sleepy Hollow, a settlement in New York State notorious for...

Having been accused of theft and hounded out of a religious community many years previously, the weaver Silas Marner now lives...

When strange things are reported to be floating in rivers in rural Vermont after a flood, old myths about hill-dwelling monsters...

Presented through an ingeniously overlapping and intertwining series of letters written by six very different characters, The...

In an examination of his laudanum addiction and the dreams and visions the drug engendered, Thomas De Quincey lays bare the...

Presented as a collection of confessional letters written by the eponymous protagonist, The Sorrows of Young Werther charts the...

During a conversation about literary forgeries, Erskine tells his young guest that he has received - as a legacy from a friend,...

Raised in the idyllic setting of Dorlcote Mill, the wild and wilful Maggie Tulliver adores her elder brother Tom and is forever...

When the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, his shock and incomprehension are...

When the young naturalist Darwin set sail on a round-the-world expedition at the end of 1831, it was only with a vague notion...

An unnamed young governess is sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Yet she is soon oppressed...

While he is now mostly associated with his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle was also celebrated for the many masterful...

Contains the Preface to the 1908 Edition

Having travelled from her native New York to London to meet her relatives, Isabel...

As a group of Western tourists travel down the Nile on the steamer Korosko towards the historical sites near Egypt's southern...

Mark Twain’s gloriously funny ‘Diary of Adam and Eve’, which John Updike described as a paradigm of the relations between sexes,...

Bathsheba Everdene is a headstrong young woman who attracts the attentions of a succession of ill-matched suitors: a quiet sheep...

Against the backdrop of growing discontent in Paris, Doctor Manette is released from the Bastille after eighteen years of unjust...

When Conrad, son of Prince Manfred of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances on his wedding day, his father, fearing his...

In love with the beautiful heiress Laura Fairlie, the impoverished art teacher Walter Hartright finds his romantic desires...

After the Lady Vain is shipwrecked, Edward Prendick is plucked from the waves by a passing ship and deposited on a remote island....

The intelligent and charming Newland Archer – a member of one of New York’s most prominent families – is living the life that has...

Coming back into town after a hunting expedition, Alexandre Dumas witnesses an incredible scene: a man has come to hand himself...

Judicially condemned in 1857 as offensive to public morality, The Flowers of Evil is now regarded as the most influential volume...

After an accident, Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of impoverished peasants, decides to call on the aristocratic d’Urbervilles, as...

Alma Classics edition of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer contains 3,000 notes and 30 pages extra material.
"And...