At the end of an industrious political career in conflic-triven Italy, the Florentine diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli composed his...

Between 1892 and 1895, Oscar Wilde’s drawing-room comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and...

Seduced by the chimerical world of the theatre and taking upon himself the grand ambition of becoming a successful performer and...

Dickens... , Halliday...

Published in the Christmas edition of Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round, Mugby Junction is the spellbinding result of...

The interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has gone on for so long that it has become a subject of mirth in legal circles and...

The story of young Henry, who struggles to fulfil his ambitions to become a successful painter and is torn between the gentle...

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

In this open letter to his father – a letter which was never sent – Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply...

One of the most famous and celebrated Victorian coming-of-age novels, David Copperfield charts the adventures and vicissitudes of...

Beautiful Emma Rouault yearns for the life of wealth, passion and romance she has encountered in popular sentimental fiction, and...

While spending the summer in the resort of Grand Isle with her husband and children, Edna Pontellier begins a process of...

Baron Eduard and his second wife Charlotte enjoy a quiet, humdrum existence in their opulent castle, but when he invites his...

Nellie March and Jill Banford manage an ailing Berkshire farm at the time of the First World War, a task which is made all the...

In the summer of 1348, the plague ravages Florence, and ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside, where they...

First published in 1797, The Italian, with its archetypal villain Schedoni, its intense romance and its sublime depiction of...

Fully annotated edition with over 300 notes.

In the Midwestern city of Zenith, the middle-aged real-estate agent George F....

Candide is an innocent young nobleman who leads an idyllic, sheltered life and has adopted the optimistic mindset promoted by his...

In Thomas More’s hugely influential Utopia, a traveller recounts his discovery of an island nation in which the inhabitants enjoy...

On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told...

Originally published in Italy in 1928, and unavailable in Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an infamous obscenity...

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

Widely considered one of the greatest American novels, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells the story of Huck Finn and his...

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

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer charts the escapades of a thirteen-year-old boy growing up on the banks of the Mississippi. Testing...

Charles Dickens's second novel is the tale of a young orphan who faces the gruelling conditions of a Victorian workhouse before...

When the reporter Edward Malone is sent to interview the formidable Professor Challenger about his accounts of strange...

When the world-weary dandy Eugene Onegin moves from St Petersburg to take up residence in the country estate he has inherited, he...

Written in the 1830s and early 1840s, these comic stories tackle life behind the cold and elegant faade of the imperial capital...