Written during his time in Reading Gaol, De Profundis is Oscar Wilde's moving letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, whose relationship with Wilde led to the poet's imprisonment. Here Wilde repudiates Lord Alfred and reflects on his ordeal, acknowledging how the depths of his sorrow have helped liberate him towards a fuller, freer wisdom. Brimming with bea...

D.H. Lawrence's controversial classic, The Rainbow, follows the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family, between 1840 and 1905. Their tempestuous relationships are played out against a backdrop of change as they witness the arrival of industrialization-the only constant being their unending attempts to grasp a higher form of exi...

The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's haunting tale about a naive young woman's sea voyage from London to a small resort on the South American coast. Told in symbolic, lyrical and intoxicating prose, her outward journey begins to mirror her internal voyage into adulthood as she searches for her personal identity, grapples with love, and learns how to...

Born in the wild, the wolf-dog White Fang quickly learns the law of nature: eat or be eaten. Captured by Indians, bullied by another dog, and then turned into a killer, he becomes vicious and fiercely independent. Rarely has the raw realism of life on the edge of civilisation been so vividly captured. But in this classic animal novel, Jack London a...

'We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.' Huck Finn escapes from his alcoholic father by faking his own death and so begins his journey through the Deep South, seeking independence and freedom. On his travels, Huc...

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year.

Treated badly as a child by both her aunt and school, Jane leaves to become a governess to the daughter of the mysterious Mr Rochester. Gradually she falls in love with him, but things are not what they seem and life is not straightforward for the rebellious heroine.

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurks the shameful secret of his past and a personality pr...

Dorothea Brooke is a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage with a pedantic scholar. Tertius Lydgate is a charming but tactless doctor. His marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and his pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career. Their interweaving tales reveal a complex...

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her prou...

'Moby Dick' follows the fortunes of Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod, a 19th century whaling ship. The Pequod is on its last voyage in pursuit of Moby Dick, the great white whale which has been Ahab's bitter adversary for many years. This classic story of high adventure, manic obsession and metaphysical speculation is packed with drama, and...

Clarissa Dalloway is civilised - without the ostentation of a socialite, but with enough distinction to attract them to her parties. She finds excess offensive, but surrounds herself with the highest quality and has an abhorrence for anything ugly or awkward. We spend a day with Clarissa as she interacts with servants, her children, her husband, an...

This is one of the earliest novels of British industrial alienation, tellingly linked to the plight of 19th-century women. It tells of the relationship between Margaret Hale, a girl from the old rural south, and John Thornton, a mill owner from the new industrial north.

Little Nell cares for her grandfather in the gloomy surroundings of his curiosity shop. Reduced to poverty, the pair are forced to flee London and Nell finds herself uprooted from a secure and innocent childhood and cast into a world where evil takes the form of characters such as Swiveller, Nubbles and the grotesque and lecherous Quilp.

A workhouse orphan, Oliver escapes by running away to London. He gets drawn into the treacherous underworld of pickpockets and thieves headed by Fagin. His companions are ultimately destined for gruesome ends. Will Oliver emerge unscathed from the darkness of the underworld?

Alice's adventures, funny, inventive and disturbing, have fascinated children and adults alike since their publication. This is a new unabridged recording using many voices to take the parts of The White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts and the Cheshire Cat - and, of course, Alice herself. It makes for a roller-coaster ride of delightful...

A complex plot of love and inheritance is set against the English legal system of the mid-nineteenth century, with all its tortuous avenues and disguised resolutions. Here is the firm, Jarndyce & Jarndyce, the young orphan and ward of court Ester Summerson (who tells much of the story). As always, it is the skilled pen of Dickens himself that c...

Mr. Dombey is a successful businessman who looks forward to the day when his young son Paul will be old enough to join the family business. But Dombey also has a loving daughter, Florence, whom he ignores, lavishing all his attention on his precious son. Set in the 1840s, against a background of Britain's emerging industrial power, the world of com...

Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen's most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is `handsome, clever and rich' and has `a disposition to think too well of herself'. When she decides to introduce the humble Harriet Smith to the delights of genteel society and to f...

Narrated in the first person, Great Expectations tells the story of Philip Pirrip (known as Pip) from his disadvantaged start as an orphan in the Kent marshes to the improvement in his position following an anonymous allowance. Pip moves to London where, only after many trials, does he learn humility and the value of loyalty. Key Dickens characters...

Hard Times is Dickens's most political novel. Set in the industrial north of England, in the fictional Coketown, he examines the lives of working people, who are taught by the capitalists Gradgrind and Bounderby to think only of the facts of life and not to indulge in imagination. Gradgrind's own children have been educated thus, and as a result ar...