Dickens' most autobiographical novel. It paints a powerful picture of social conditions in Victorian England. One of six Dickens' titles read by the great Martin Jarvis. His interpretation of Uriah Heep for BBC Television is a classic.

"Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life." So says Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens' immortal story set in the North of England in the 19th Century. Gradgrind, a local industrialist, gave this advice to his children set against a backdrop of huge wealth and even huger poverty where the rich...

Jane, an orphan, has her fair share of hardship before becoming a governess in the house of Mr Rochester and falling for her employer. But what are the strange noises coming from the attic, and may they thwart her romantic intentions? Jane Eyre, an orphan, has to suffer appalling conditions when she is sent away to a correctional school, then lands...

This is a story about two half-brothers. Though raised by the same man, the brothers' formative experiences are far from similar. Gregory, the child born of his mother's first marriage, was treated unfairly by his stepfather who was jealous and envious of the love his wife showed towards the child. His step-ather wanted this love for himself but he...

Conventional and circumstance bind the young Ethan Frome to a wife he cannot love. Grimly resigned to his fate, he sees for himself a life as bleak and constricted as the New England farm on which he lives. Then the appearance in his bleak personal landscape of his ailing wife's orphaned young cousin, Mattie Silver, rouses in Ethan a fierce passion...

Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach. Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing, and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby---young, handsome, and fabulously rich---always seems alone in...

Many of the original cast from Alan Bennett's acclaimed National Theatre production appear in this special dramatisation for BBC Radio 4 including Richard Briers as Rat, Adrian Scarborough as Mole and Terence Rigby as Albert with Alan Bennett as the narrator. A wonderful, highly-acclaimed dramatic performance of a classic novel.

Henry Fleming, a new recruit in the American Civil War, is desperate to prove his courage but is unprepared for the horror he must witness. A powerful story of fear and duty.

When father mysteriously has to go away for a time, three children and their mother leave their comfortable home in London for the country. The children seek solace in the nearby railway station, making friends with Perks the porter and with the station master himself. But will their father ever return?

Jay Gatsby causes quite a stir when he buys a mansion on the east coast of America and sets about hosting the most lavish parties. Anyone who is anyone wants to be seen at his glittering parties, but Gatsby himself always seems to be watching and waiting. Who or what is he waiting for?

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?

The story of a handsome and ambitious carpenter's son, Julian Sorel, and of his life torn between the military (the scarlet) and the church (the black). Sorel is determined to rise above his humble peasant origins and make something of his life. To do this, he realises he must adopt the code of hypocrisy by which early 19th-century French Resoratio...

The story of a family overshadowed by the Marshalsea, London's debtors' Prison. The Father of the Marshalsea is William Dorrit. He is tended by his daughter Amy, Little Dorrit, to whom the prison is home. She becomes the novel's liberator in her selfless devotion to her father and her redeeming love for Arthur Clennam.

The aristocratic Anna Karenina is a sophisticated woman who seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. Yet she becomes increasingly aware of the emptiness of her life and exchanges her privilaged existence as the wife of Karenin for a passionate affair with the impetuous Count Vronsky - with tragic consequences.

After the death of her parents, Mary Lennox is brought back from India as a forlorn and unwanted child to live in her uncle's great lonely house on the moors. Then one day, she discovers the key to a secret garden and, as if by magic, her life begins to change.

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.

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.

In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont Neuf in Paris, Therese Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin Camille. The tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on an affair with her husband's friend Laurent, and their passion for each other soon causes the lovers to commit a shocking crime that will haunt the...

Set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village pageant at Pointz Hall, the novel weaves together the musings of several disparate characters and their reactions to the imminence of the Second World War, which provides the novel with its dark undercurrent. Before the book was published in the spring of 1941, Virginia Woolf had taken her...

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob Flanders first appears as a child playing by the seaside. The novel follows his progress to school, Cambridge, London, Paris, Italy, Greece and to hi...

A retelling of John Bunyan's classic story that is filled with drama, excitement and adventure. On his journey of a life-time to the City of Gold, Christian meets an extraordinary cast of characters, such as the terrible Giant Despair and the monster Apollyon. Together with Hopeful, his steadfast companion, he survives the snipers and mantraps, the...