'Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him...' So begins 'Brighton Rock', in which a gang war rages through the dark underworld of 1930s Brighton.

When Helen Schlegel falls suddenly in love with Paul Wilcox she breaks off the engagement almost at once, perceiving the spiritual gulf between their two families. But when her sister, Margaret,...

Julius Lévy grows up in a peasant family in a village on the banks of the Seine. A quick-witted urchin caught up in the Franco-Prussian War, he is soon forced by tragedy to escape to Algeria....

Set in the fictional country of Illyria, Twelfth Night is Shakespeare's comic tale of identical twins, girls disguised as boys, practical joking and love at first sight. Retold by distinguished...

In ‘Phineas Finn’, the second of the ‘Palliser’ novels, Trollope balances the rival demands of public and private life, entangling political ambitions with the experiences of love.

An unabridged reading of the classic novel by Edith Wharton.In the exclusive world of upper-class New York, in which attendance at balls and dinner passes for occupation, Newland Archer...

Molly Gibson lost her mother when she was a child. She is very close to her father and imagines that he will stay a widower all his days, but he marries again.

A stepmother – any...

Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor of growing fame, is determined to find his ideal in womanhood, a quest that has led to many fruitless encounters. For just as it seems that he has found his heart’s...

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher’s shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this powerful novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband,...

Philip Pirrip –or ‘Pip’ – has ‘great expectations’. An orphan, brought up in a small village on the Essex marshes by his sharp-tongued sister and her husband Joe Gargery, the gentle...

Virginia Woolf started to write a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel after finishing 'The Waves', tracing the life of the spaniel from his country origins, his puppyhood spent...

Flaubert's novel scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857, and it remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society.

Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, their two daughters and two sons, are the fortunate residents of Mansfield Park, and they bring Fanny Price, the timid and delicate niece of Lady Bertram to share in...

Set in old Verona, this is Shakespeare's famous tragedy of two star-crossed lovers, their doomed romance and the bitter enmity between their respective families, the Capulets and the Montagues....

Can it be right to persist in a bigamous marriage?

Mr Peacocke, a Classical scholar, has come to Broughtonshire with his beautiful American wife to live as a schoolmaster. But when the...