At the end of a dinner party, the remaining guests drink wine and tell stories of their first love. For one of them, it will be a dark journey into his past, reawakening unbearable memories of his...

Ambrose Ashley, Philip's cousin, guardian and god, married Rachel in Italy, and died there. Jealous of his marriage and grief-stricken by his death, Philip prepares to meet his cousin's widow with...

Emma Woodhouse, motherless and mistress of her father’s home from an early age, is used to getting her own way. ‘Handsome, clever and rich’, she has every advantage. Employing her extensive...

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime is a masterpiece of polished cynicism in which poison, explosive clocks, and finally murder forerun married bliss. Also included are: The Canterville Ghost, The Model...

As the Pargiters, a middle-class London family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, capitalism and...

As far as his father, an accomplished poet, is concerned, Richard will never amount to anything, and so he decides to take his fate into his own hands. But at the last moment, he is saved by Jake,...

Chuckle along with the best 19th-century humorists, who provide you with tall tales, puns, and witty ripostes. Seven of these 27 gems are from Twain himself. No guarantees of political...

An unabridged reading of the classic novel by Jane Austen.

When the personable Captain Wentworth reappears in Anne Elliot’s life several years after she had been persuaded to break...

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....

'An Old Man’s Love', Trollope’s last complete novel, was finished seven months before his death, when he was suffering from ill health and was in constant pain. The old man of the title,...

It is over 500 years since Duke Claudio the Falcon lived his brutal, twisted life in Ruffano, Italy. Now, the modern–day town has forgotten its violent history. Its university has a shiny new...

In the second volume ,'Within a Budding Grove', of Proust’s great novel 'The Remembrance of Things Past', the narrator emerges as an actor in the drama of his own life.

Swann has now...

Shakespeare's history of the most famous ruler of ancient Rome, his murder by Brutus and a group of conspirators, and the ensuing chaos and civil war is searingly retold by award-winning author...

When Adela and her elderly companion, Mrs Moore, arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the...

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a...