Paul Manning is working away from home as the assistant to Mr Holdsworth, a managing railroad engineer. He makes contact with his distant relatives, the Holmans, who live nearby and welcome him...

'The Small House at Allington' introduces Trollope’s most charming heroine, the bewitching Lily Dale, to the Barsetshire scene. Lily is the niece of Squire Dale, a morose and rather...

Katherine Mansfield was compared by contemporary critics to Chekhov for her insights into ordinary events, and this recording contains four of her best stories.

In ‘The Daughters of...

Who owns the Eustace Diamonds? Lizzie Eustace claims that Sir Florian Eustace, her late husband, gave them to her. But Mr Camperdown, the family solicitor, insists that they are an heirloom, to be...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" The opening words of Charles Dickens' great French Revolution romance set the scene for a heart-stopping historical adventure that dashes back...

Buried treasure, treacherous buccaneers, a young hero and a one-legged villain, ‘Treasure Island' has all the ingredients of a classic adventure story.

From the outset at the Admiral...

Simon Russell Beale and Clare Higgins read some of Shakespeare's best-loved stories, skilfully abridged and adapted by Leon Garfield. The plays featured include: As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius...

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...

T.S. Eliot described ‘The Moonstone’ as ‘the first and the greatest English detective novel’.

The stone of the title is an enormous diamond plundered from an Indian shrine...

'Two on a Tower' is Hardy's ninth novel and contains perhaps his most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide, and also the fullest expression of his fascination...

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....

Rudolf Rassendyll bears the name of an English duke and a remarkable resemblance to the King of Ruritania, the result of a scandalous liaison between an earlier Rassendyll and the royal Elphbergs....

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.

Nicholas Nickleby' combines comedy and tragedy in a tale of triumph over adversity, where Nickleby succeeds despite social injustice, in a story that mirrors Dickens' own rise from poverty to...

'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.