After her parents' bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself shuttled between her selfish mother and vain father, who value her only as a means for provoking each other. And when both take lovers and remarry, Maisie - solitary, observant and wise beyond her years - is drawn into an increasingly entangled adult world of intrigue and sexual...

Now considered by many to be Charlotte Brontë's best novel, though unlikely to eclipse Jane Eyre in fame and popularity, Villette is largely concerned with the experiences of Lucy Snowe in a girl's boarding school in a fictionalised Belgium. Lucy flees unhappiness in England only to find more abroad. Her love for Dr John unrequited, she slowly...

G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown is perhaps the most lovable amateur detective ever created. This short, shabby priest with his cherubic, round face attracts situations that baffle everyone—except Father Brown and his rather naïve wisdom. The twelve enthralling stories in this book take Father Brown from London to Cornwall, from Italy to...

In 1914 Rilla Blythe, youngest daughter of Anne, is almost 15. Life with her many brothers and sisters has been delightful and Rilla dazzles everyone she meets with her charm and beauty. Her biggest worries are the upcoming dance at the Four Winds Lighthouse and whether Kenneth Ford will ask her to dance. Her special night is shattered with the ann...

The winsome Anne Shirley is grown, has been married to her beloved Gilbert Blythe for fifteen years, and is the mother of six spirited children. When a strange family moves into a nearby mansion,Anne and her family are drawn into a host of trials, schemes and triumphs. The Meredith family is comprised of two boys and two girls, a minister father bu...

It takes a lot of effort for Jimmy Crocker to become Piccadilly Jim—nights on the town roistering, headlines in the gossip columns, a string of broken hearts, and breaches of promise. Eventually he becomes rather good at it and manages to go to pieces with his eyes open. But no sooner has Jimmy cut a wild swathe through fashionable London tha...

My Man Jeeves, first published in 1919, introduced the world to affable, indolent Bertie Wooster and his precise, capable valet, Jeeves. Some of the finest examples of humorous writing found in English literature are woven around the relationship between these two men of very different classes and temperaments. Where Bertie is impetuous and feeble,...

Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge has hit upon a foolproof plan to get rich quick: he's starting a chicken farm. Dragging his adoring wife Millie and his long-suffering friend and novelist Jeremy Garnet with him to Dorset, he begins his enterprise. Complications ensue, involving the taciturn Hired Man and his bumptious dog, supercilious chickens, i...

Detective fans of all races and creeds, of all tastes and fancies will delight in the exploits of this wise and whimsical padre. Father Brown's powers of detection allow him to sit beside the immortal Holmes, but he is also "in all senses a most pleasantly fascinating human being," according to American crime novelist Rufus King. You will be enchan...

Among Jane Austen's favorite novels, and a key work in the rise of Romanticism, "Camilla" follows the story of three young women, from childhood to young adulthood, and their pursuit of matrimony. Kind but naive Camilla is in love with Edgar Mandlebert, a handsome and noble young man, but must suffer a series of frequent misunderstandings that thre...

Maria is always getting lost in the secret world of her imagination...A ghostly mystery and winner of the Whitbread Award,republished in the Collins Modern Classics range.Maria likes to be alone with her thoughts. She talks to animals and objects, and generally prefers them to people. But whilst on holiday she begins to hear things that aren't ther...

Unscrupulous financial speculator Ferdinand Lopez, aspiring to marry into respectability and wealth, has society at his feet: well-connected ladies vying with each other to exert influence on his behalf. Even Lady Glencora, the wife of Plantagenet Palliser, prime minister of England, supports the exotic imposter. Palliser, respectable man of power...

His beloved wife having died in childbirth Phineas Finn finds Irish society and his job as a poorhouse inspector dull and unsatisfying particularly after the excitement of his former career as a Member of Parliament Back in England the Whigs are determined to overturn the Tory majority in the Parliament of the United Kingdom Since Finn had once bee...

Phineas Finn is an Irish MPA who is climbing the political ladder, largely through the assistance of his string of lovers. The questions he is forced to ask himself about honesty, independence, and parliamentary democracy are questions still asked today. Phineas Finn is the second of Anthony Trollope's six Palliser novels, which together comprise...

The third and least political novel of the Palliser series, The Eustace Diamonds concerns the beautiful pathological liar Lizzie Greystock. Determined to marry into wealth, Lizzie snares the ailing Sir Florian Eustace and quickly becomes a widow. Despite the brevity of their marriage, Lizzie still inherits according to the generous terms of Sir Flo...

The brilliant conclusion to the Palliser novels, this touching story follows the elderly Duke of Omnium, the former prime minister of England, as he struggles to overcome his grief at the loss of his beloved wife, Lady Glencora. To complicate matters, he must also deal with the willfulness of his three adult children as he tries to guide and suppor...

Can You Forgive Her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe. Alice Vavasor cannot decide whether to marry her ambitious but violent cousin George or the...

Welcome to Blandings Castle, a place that is never itself without an imposter. Wodehouse himself once noted that "Blandings has impostors like other houses have mice." On this particular occasion there are two, both intent on a dangerous enterprise. Lord Emsworth's secretary, the Efficient Baxter, is on the alert and determined to discover what is...

This story of a proud rural beauty and the three men who court her is the novel that first made Thomas Hardy famous.Despite the violent ends of several of its major characters, Far from the Madding Crowd is the sunniest and least brooding of Hardy’s great novels. The strong-minded Bathsheba Everdene—and the devoted shepherd, obsessed fa...

Since its publication in 1940, Native Son has become a classic of African-American literature and one of the most important books of this century. A stark and troubling account of murder, guilt, and racial hatred, it was among the first works to sound the alarm for the impending social violence that would explode during the 1960s. Bigger Thomas, a...

One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences' rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston'...