A classic love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. At 19, Anne Eliot is persuaded to jilt her suitor-Captain Frederick Wentworth-because he has neither rank nor fortune. When they encounter one another eight years later will she make the same mistake again?

Set among the elegant brownstones and opulent country houses of turn-of-the-century upper-class New York, Edith Wharton's first great novel is a precise, satiric portrayal of what the author herself called "a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers." Her brilliantly complex characterization of the doomed Lily Bart, whose stunning beauty and depen...

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...

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...

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...

As soon as the orphaned Pollyanna arrives in Beldingsville to live with her strict and dutiful maiden aunt, she begins to brighten up everybody's life. The sick, the lonely, and the just plain miserable all fall under her spell and are transformed-until one day something so terrible happens that even Pollyanna doesn't know how to feel glad any more...

Emma Bovary is a sensuous, sentimental young woman whose romantic ideals make her dissatisfied with her humdrum married life. Attempting to escape into an exciting world of passion and dreams, she drifts into sordid affairs with Rodolphe Boulanger and L‚on Dupuis. The first of these lovers, an older man, dominates the affair, while the second, inex...

On they went singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing-Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles with the new order and confront...

One of the most popular American novels of all time, Ben-Hur vividly re-imagines the oppressive Roman occupation of ancient Palestine and the rise of Christianity. The saga of Judah Ben-Hur's spiritual journey from slavery to vengeance to redemption is both a vivid historical adventure and a powerful story of one man's religious awakening. Born the...

Dean Jocelin has a vision: that God has chosen him to erect a great spire on his cathedral. His mason anxiously advises against it, for the old cathedral was built without foundations. Nevertheless, the spire rises octagon upon octagon, pinnacle by pinnacle, until the stone pillars shriek and the ground beneath it swims. Its shadow falls ever darke...

At the heart of Joseph Heller's bestselling novel, first published in 1961, is a satirical indicement of military madness and stupidity, and the desire of the ordinary man to survive it. It is a tale of the dangerously sane Captain Yossarian, who spends his time in Italy plotting to survive.

Set in England during Richard I's reign, Sir Walter Scott's fanciful, vivid reinterpretation of medieval life is a successful blend of fact, myth, and romance. Wilfred of Ivanhoe earns his father's disapproval by falling in love with Rowena, his father's ward. Then he serves with Richard I during the Crusades, while the King's brother attempts to t...

When Edgar plans to acquire his family's ancient estate from the corrupt lord keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland, he is met with the complexities of the legal and political situations following the 1707 Act of Union. To complicate matters further, Edgar is falling in love with his enemy's beautiful daughter Lucy.First published in 1819, this endu...

Tom Hiddleston (The Night Manager) stars as Jonathan Harker with David Suchet (Poirot) as Dracula in Liz Lochhead and John Foley's powerful BBC radio adaptation of the classic novel by Bram Stoker. When solicitor Jonathan Harker sets off for Transylvania to sell the mysterious Count Dracula a Gothic mansion, his bride-to-be Mina begs him to stay...

Tevye the Milkman, a uniquely charming Jewish novel from Tsarist rural Russia, provided the principal character for Fiddler on the Roof. Here we have the full story, with all its Jewish humour, wisdom and despair. The central character, Tevye the Milkman, goes around the community in the Russian countryside delivering milk and cheese, but also disp...

Rob Roy is a captivating novel of chivalry and romance set in the Scottish highlands of the 18th century. After rejecting the life his father has laid out for him, Frank Osbaldistone is sent to the North of England to live with his Uncle, where he is to repent his sins. However, when his father's wealth and reputation are threatened, he is drawn to...

Stevenson's tragic masterpiece unfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, where the 1745 Jacobite rising is dividing the country against itself. Amidst this outer conflict, one family finds itself devastatingly divided from within, as two brothers discover their opposing loyalties. Their rivalry soon spreads from war to love, as bot...

Set in the days of the British Raj, Kipling's finest novel is the exciting and touching tale of an Irish orphan-boy who has lived free in the streets of Lahore before setting out, with a Tibetan Lama, on a spiritual quest. Kim later enrols in the Indian Service and simultaneously embarks on an espionage mission of supreme importance. A thrilling cl...

A masterpiece of gothic fiction, The Monk is a cautionary tale of madness, horror, lust and despair. Father Ambrosio, the most pious and venerated monk in all of Madrid, is held as a paragon of virtue. But after thirty years of study and prayer, evil thoughts begin to permeate his mind. As two plots cleverly converge, torture, murder, incest, rape,...

Les Mis‚rables is set in Paris after the French Revolution. In the sewers and backstreets we encounter 'the wolf-like tread of crime', and assassination for a few sous is all in a day's work. We weep with the unlucky and heart-broken Fantine, and we exult with the heroic revolutionaries of the barricades; but above all we thrill to the steadfast co...

Lord Byron's satirical take on the legend of Don Juan is a moving and witty poem that sees the young hero in a reversal of roles. Juan sheds his image as a womanizer and instead becomes the victim of circumstance as he is relentlessly pursued by every woman he meets. Comprising seventeen cantos of rhyming iambic pentameter, the poem is a crisp and...