Mr Dombey is a man obsessed with his firm. His son is groomed from birth to take his place within it, despite his visionary eccentricity and declining health. But Dombey also has a daughter, whose ...
Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddle the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. These stories reveal a nost...
A selection of 'greatest hits' essays from the bestselling non-fiction writer. From criminology to ketchup, job interviews to dog training, Gladwell takes everyday subjects and shows us surprising ...
Charles Dickens describes in Night Walks his time as an insomniac, when he decided to cure himself by walking through London in the small hours, and discovered homelessness, drunkenness and vice on...
In one of the most influential philosophical works ever writen, John Stuart Mill explores the risks and responsibilities of liberty. Examining the tyranny that can come both from government and fro...
These three wonderful comic novels drolly record the battle between Lucia and Elisabeth Mapp for social and cultural supremacy in the village of Tilling (based on Rye). Their constant skirmishes en...
The sheer variety and accomplishment of Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction is amazing. This new volume contains six of her finest stories that have been selected specifically to demonstrate this, ...
Gabriel García Márquez has been one of the literary giants of the past century; his body of work is an undisputed cultural landmark and a touchstone for countless readers and writers ...
It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it. A bitter divorce a...
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is celebrated as a novelist and man of action. He is perhaps most famous for WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and A FAREWELL TO ARMS. But he was equally prolific as a writer of shor...
Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Rave...
When a witch doctor prophesizes a plague of rabies, Marquis de Casalduero dismisses her claims - until he hears his daughter was bitten by a rabid dog, and the only one to survive. She...
Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted envir...
Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives – interesting, n...
Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits several targets with fierce and comic satire: organised religion, t...
Adaring critique of communism and how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain, Camus' essay examines the revolutions in France and Russia, and argues that since they were both guilty of producing...
One of the most important works of cultural theory ever written, Walter Benjamin's groundbreaking essay explores how the age of mass media means audiences can listen to or see a work of art repeate...
'It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.'Fifty-one years have passed since Fermina rebuffed Florentino and married Juvenal Urb...
Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. It describes his search for 'a practical religi...
Adam Smith’s landmark treatise on the free market paved the way for modern capitalism, arguing that competition is the engine of a productive society, and that self-interest will eventually c...