After he is wrongly accused of a crime and expelled from his community, weaver Silas Marner becomes a miser and a recluse. A strange sequence of events, and the appearance of a small child, transforms his life and awakens him to the redemptive power of love.

Elizabeth Bennett is an intelligent unmarried woman in a patriarchal and aspirational society. She has numerous proud and prejudiced run-ins with the seemingly surly and aloof Mr. Darcy, who she initially feels is a man whom she would not desire to spend more time than she might have to. However, can they start to understand each other a little bet...

When the Water Rat invites the unassuming Mole to spend his first day ever in a boat on the river, and wise Badger comes along for the ride as well, so begins a marvellous season of adventure for the three friends. Mr Toad (he of Toad Hall) completes a happy foursome, but his tendency to get into hot water leads him into some rather hair-raising sc...

More than just a simple tale of the supernatural, James poses questions about childhood innocence, corruption and hysteria. The story focuses on a na‹ve governess who takes charge of two children at the lonely house of Bly. When she begins to see ghosts, she believes that the children do too, with devastating consequences.

The most gorgeously theatrical of all Dickens's novels, Nicholas Nickleby follows the delightful adventures of a hearty young hero in nineteenth-century England. Nicholas, a gentleman's son fallen upon hard times, must set out to make his way in the world. His journey is accompanied by some of the most swaggering scoundrels and unforgettable eccent...

Lemuel Gulliver, a slightly staid ship's doctor, relates the tales of his astonishing travels. He encounters the tiny, warring Lilliputians; the giant, sceptical Brobdingnagians; the ludicrously intellectual Laputans; and the idealistic - if rather stolid - Houyhnhnms and their bestial servants, the Yahoos. An immediate best-seller when it was firs...

A Study in Scarlet was the very first Sherlock Holmes novel. Here. In the most remarkably precise manner, Doyle produced two of the most well-known characters in English fiction. Their individual traits and their relationships, their ambitions and foibles are introduced against the backdrop of an exciting story of revenge and persistence, which sta...

Late one night on his way to Limmeridge House in Cumberland, drawing teacher Walter Hartright meets a mysterious woman dressed in white. Who is she, and what is her connection to the teacher's new pupil, a beautiful heiress?

Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) wrote only one major work as a gift for his ruling Prince, Lorenzo de Medici. When the senior civil servant role he had held for fourteen years came to an end due to the downfall of the Republic in 1512, he poured out his ideas and resentment in his writings. 'The Prince' has remained a classic ever since; valued for...

A tale of comical misadventure with Mister Pickwick and his companions - the amorous Tupman, the 'poetic' Snodgrass and the `sporty' Winkle - all battling to extricate themselves from a seemingly endless succession of comic trials and tribulations.

Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled exist...

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde is one of the classic horror stories of all time with Sir Ian Holm giving us a rare and defininitive reading.

Lady Audley is universally adored: beautiful, kind and charming, she enamors all whom she meets. It is not until the strange disappearance of widower George Talboys that her behavior takes an odd turn. George's friend Robert Audley, Lady Audley's nephew-in-law, is on the case; upper-class layabout-turned-detective, he is determined to get to the bo...

Virginia Woolf's pioneering work on women in literature. An accessible yet fiercely astute essay, it is a crystallisation of the intelligent analysis behind her novels, and confirms her as a writer not only of style, but of undeniable substance. Ranging from discussing Austen's pandering to a male writing style, to imagining the dreadful fate of Sh...

From the cruel irony of A Member of the Family to the fateful echoes of The Go-Away Bird and the unexpectedly sinister The Girl I Left Behind Me, in settings that range from South Africa to the Portobello Road, Muriel Spark coolly probes the idiosyncrasies that lurk beneath the veneer of human respectability, displaying the acerbic wit and wisdom t...

The Chuzzlewits are a family divided by money and selfishness; even young Martin, the eponymous hero, is arrogant and self-centred. He offends his grandfather by falling in love with the latter's ward, Mary, and sets out to make his own fortune in life, travelling as far as America - which produces from Dickens a savage satire on a new world tainte...

Portraying each character in his own inimitable fashion, Alan Bennett reads the original story of Ratty, Mole, Badger and, of course, Toad.

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...

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...

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast Unabridged by Martyn Wade of Anthony Trollope's classic novel, Orley Farm. This novel, described as a "... brilliantly choreographed legal thriller" (Mail on Sunday), centres on the pathos of the main character, Lady Mason. Youthful marriage choices, middle-aged marital crisis, love and loss revolve around the legal action a...

Alan Bennett's distinctive readings of children's stories have become classics in their own right. His interpretations of the wonderful characters that people Lewis Carroll's extraordinary novels are, as ever, exactly right.