'The eyes that glanced at me shone with a pale-green light'A crazed vivisectionist engineers a new super-breed of monstrous 'Beast Men' on a remote Pacific island, in H. G. Wells's Vict...
A coiffured con man travels across Russia's rural backwaters, buying the souls of dead serfs from their owners to make his fortune, in Gogol's exuberant, bravura masterwork: the greatest comedy in ...
'40,000 francs, which lay before him in a heap of gold and banknotes.'Written in twenty-six days to pay off Dostoyevsky's own roulette debts, The Gambler is a graphic psychological stud...
On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their ...
In Soviet Moscow, God is dead, but the devil - to say nothing of his retinue of demons, from a loudmouthed, gun-toting tomcat, to the fanged fallen angel Koroviev - is very much alive. As death and...
A gripping, intensely atmospheric story of love, espionage and betrayal in wartime Shanghai, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four more shimmering tales of Chinese life.
All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked.In 'the saddest story I have ever heard', a naive American abro...
'Now, ill-lit, almost in darkness, the windows of the houses shuttered, the water dank, the scene appeared altogether different, neglected, poor, and the long narrow boots moored to the slippery st...
In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminde...
Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set...Set in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars and drunken encounters...
'Out of the hideously scarred soil of Flanders rose black, splintered trunks of trees'In one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, an ordinary German soldier recalls the horror and ...
One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration of the criminal mind, as a murder is committed on the new railways of the Second Em...
The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family and their struggles with each other and themselves. Beautiful, strange and with a power all its own, The Rainbow redefined th...
Sparkling, darkly humorous tales of high society, playboys, courtesans, peasants, sex and savagery in nineteenth-century France, from the father of the short story.
Inspiring, brilliantly written, cantankerous and funny - Walden is both a very specific story about one man's attempt to live the simple life in the wilderness, and the great, founding text both fo...
One of the most moving accounts of being a boy ever written, My Childhood is a both wonderful and harrowing memoir - and one of the great works of Russian literature.
Set in a crumbling Spanish mansion, this gloriously comic and gothic novel follows the fortunes of an innocent young priest as he enters a world of moral decadence, sexual intrigue and corruption.<...
'The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear'Making its twenty-three-year-old author an overnight literary sensation, this story of isolated, lost lives intersecting in a small tow...
'It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain'The aviator and author of The Little Prince describes vast, otherworldly landscapes, crash...
From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happ...