Why should one half be free to live, while the other is doomed to watch silently from the sidelines? In this visionary collection, Virginia Woolf leads us on a transformative journey through the li...
Salman Rushdie, a self-described ‘emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two’, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means ...
'Among the six indispensable books in world literature' George OrwellIn the course of his famous travels, Gulliver is captured by miniature people who wage war on each other because of ...
The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.How do we carry on when someone close to us dies? Is it simply a c...
How do you remember the summers of your childhood? For Laurie Lee they were flower-crested, heady, endless days. Here is an evocation of summer like no other - a remote valley filled with the scent...
What’s the worst another drink could do? John Cheever pours out our most sociable of vices, and hands it to us in a highball. From the calculating teenager who raids her parents’ liquor...
How to be a good father? Children’s birthday parties, unsuccessful family holidays, humiliating antenatal music classes: the trials of parenthood are all found in Knausgaard’s compellin...
Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. Bu...
Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean, miserable, bitter old man with no friends. One cold Christmas Eve, three ghosts take him on a scary journey to show him the error of his nasty ways. By visiting his past...
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on pare...
It is the French Riviera in the 1920s. Nicole and Dick Diver are a wealthy, elegant, magnetic couple. A coterie of admirers are drawn to them, none more so than the blooming young starlet Rosemary ...
Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May's cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their...
The Darling children are tucked up in bed when Peter Pan bursts in to their nursery. Peter and his mischievous fairy Tinker Bell entice Wendy and her brothers to fly away with them to a magical wor...
‘Because ‘God’ is infinite, nobody can have the last word.’What is this thing, religion, which has supposedly been the cause of bloodshed and warring for centuri...
How do we choose between what is fair and just, and what our debtors demand of us? Yanis Varoufakis was put in such a dilemma in 2015 when he became the finance minister of Greece. In this rousing ...
Tess is an innocent young girl until the day she goes to visit her rich 'relatives', the D'Urbervilles, in hope that they might help her alleviate her own family's poverty. Her encounter with her m...
M. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisa...
Catherine Morland is a young girl with a very active imagination. Her naivety and love of sensational novels lead her to approach the fashionable social scene in Bath and her stay at nearby Northan...
'Facts alone are wanted in life': the children at Mr Gradgrind's school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. They live in a smoky, troubled...
It is said that Charles Dickens invented Christmas, and within these pages you'll certainly find all the elements of a quintessential traditional Christmas brought to vivid life: snowy rooftops, gl...