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...

Breakfast of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

IN 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparantly simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman called Peter Gregory, who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France an...

In the gentle world of one of England's beautiful old cathedral towns, crisis looms: funds are short, and the cathedral is in need of major repair. One faction of the community argues that the obvious solution is to abolish the expensive, and nowadays rather irrelevant, boys' choir. But of course, there are those who disagree: the choir school's he...

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...

The explosive finale to the Ringworld and the Fleet of Worlds series. For decades, the spacefaring species of known space have battled over the largest artifact-and grandest prize-in the galaxy: the all-but-limitless resources and technology of the Ringworld. Now, without warning, the Ringworld has vanished, leaving behind three rival war fleets. S...

The Firstborn-the mysterious race of aliens who first became known to science fiction fans as the builders of the iconic black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey-have inhabited legendary science fiction master Sir Arthur C. Clarke's writing for decades. Now, twenty-seven years later, the Firstborn are back. This time, they are pulling no punches. Th...

The events of Pietro Russell's life are told in 26 chapters. From A-Z each chapter is set in a different place and reveals a fragment of his story. As his memories flicker back and forth through time in his search for a resolution to the conflicts of his life, his tory gradually unfolds. . .

On a June day, a young woman in a summer dress steps off a Chicago-bound bus into a small midwestern town. She doesn't intend to stay. She is just passing through. Yet her stopping here has a reason and it is part of a story that you will never forget. The time is the 1950s, when life was simpler, people still believed in dreams, and family was, ve...

A beautifully controlled and powerful story of love and conscience, will and desire which begins when a mysterious young girl arrives to take up a post at the seedy H-tel du Lion d'Or in a small French town in the mid-1930s. The Girl at the Lion d'Or is the first book in Sebastian Faulks' French trilogy of novels followed by Birdsong (5373) and Cha...

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...

The restoration of a majestic old home provides the exhilarating backdrop for Danielle Steel's 66th bestselling novel, the story of a young woman's dream, an old man's gift, and the surprises that await us behind every closed door.... Perched on a hill overlooking San Francisco, the house was magnificent, built in 1923 by a wealthy man for the woma...

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...

When Jilly Cooper, then a young Sunday Times journalist, was asked to write a book on marriage, she had been married to Leo Cooper for a mere seven years. Now they are celebrating their Golden Wedding, and although the institution of marriage has changed a great deal since this book was first written, much of Jilly's advice - frank, fearless, often...

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?

After meeting Lord Henry Wotton, who remarks that 'youth is the only thing worth having', Dorian Gray becomes obsessed with preserving his looks. He wants to remain as youthful and fresh as he appears in his recently completed portrait by Basil Hallward. When Dorian states that he would give his soul to stay young, he has no idea of the horrors he'...

The Portrait of a Lady tells the compelling and ultimately tragic tale of a beautiful young American woman's encounter with European sophistication. Set principally in England and Italy, we follow Isabel Archer's fortunes as a variety of admirers vie for her hand. Her choice will be crucial, and she is not wanting for advice, whether from the gener...

Elizabeth Bennet is a spirited young woman with four sisters and a mother obsessed with getting them all married off. When she first meets Fitzwilliam Darcy she thinks he's arrogant and conceited, and he is completely indifferent to her charms. Will they ever see past the prejudices of their first impressions?

For twenty years, Anna Bouverie, as a priest's wife, has served God and the parish in a variety of ways. She has baked for the Brownies, delivered parish magazines, washed and ironed her husband's surplices and clothed herself and her children in jumble-sale items. When her husband fails to gain promotion to archdeacon and retreats into isolated bi...