Since it was first published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s seminal novel has generated countless print, stage and screen adaptations,...

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

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

After doubts are raised concerning the trustworthiness of Magua, Cora and Alice Munro’s Native American guide, the warrior slips...

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...

When Richard Hannay finds the corpse of freelance spy Franklin P. Scudder in his London flat, he goes on the run, fearing that...

Jude Fawley, an intelligent and sensitive young Wessex schoolboy, dreams of studying at the famous university in Christminster,...

A Victorian scientist and inventor creates a machine for propelling himself through time, and voyages to the year AD 802701,...

The heir to his grandfather’s considerable fortune, Anthony Patch is led astray from the path to gainful employment by the...

Born in Newgate Prison to an incarcerated mother, Moll Flanders is compelled from earliest childhood to make her own way in the...

Dorian Gray is having his picture painted by Basil Hallward, who is charmed by his looks. But when Sir Henry Wotton visits and...

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

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

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

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

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

Contains the Preface to the 1908 Edition

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

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...

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...

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

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude Morel begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a...

The shop owner Adolf Verloc, member of an anarchist group and secret agent for a foreign government, is summoned to meet Mr...

A celebrated journalist in his lifetime, Ambrose Bierce was the author of sardonic, mischievous definitions of words that...

Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of...

The Good Soldier tells the stories of two outwardly happy couples who meet at a health spa in Germany just before the start of...

An impoverished member of the privileged high society of old New York, Lily Bart is beautiful and socially agreeable, but she is...