Against the backdrop of growing discontent in Paris, Doctor Manette is released from the Bastille after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment and b...

In the Burmese provincial town of Kyauktada, the world-weary John Flory - a thirty-something English teak dealer - leads a life of quiet disillusio...

Candide is an innocent young nobleman who leads an idyllic, sheltered life and has adopted the optimistic mindset promoted by his tutor Dr Pangloss...

George Bowling, a forty-five-year-old insurance salesman with a wife and two children, is overweight, depressed and haunted by ever-present portent...

Poverty-stricken and cut off from society, former law student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov leads a desolate life in a dreary little room in St Pet...

A mysterious murder near Esher, a gruesome delivery of two human ears packed in coarse salt, the disappearance of secret submarine plans, the s...

After travelling to Spain at the end of 1936 with the intention of working as a correspondent for a British socialist newspaper, thirty-three-year-...

When the immoral libertine Monsieur de Franval marries and fathers a daughter, he decides to inculcate in her a sense of absolute freedom, an uncon...

As Katharine Hilbery, the granddaughter of a famous man of letters buried in Poets' Corner, is helping her mother write the biography of their illu...

Proust's only other work of fiction published in his lifetime apart from the monumental novel cycle 'In Search of Lost Time, Pleasures and Days' ta...

Universally acclaimed as the master of the short-story form, Anton Chekhov begun his literary career as the author of brief tales and vignettes of ...

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a battleground. Gertrude turns...

Once again the eminent detective is presented with a series of seemingly impenetrable cases: an illustrious client begs him to unmask the nefar...

When Conrad, son of Prince Manfred of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances on his wedding day, his father, fearing his line is at an end,...

After spending several years in a sanatorium recovering from an illness that caused him to lose his memory and ability to reason, Prince Myshkin ar...

Sara, the American wife of a French aristocrat, has had two encounters with her compatriot Cedric Killian, one a youthful idyll in North Carolina a...

It is New Year's Eve, and Nellie, the pretty daughter of a landowning general, is sitting in her room looking in the mirror. Although she is tired ...

During a conversation about literary forgeries, Erskine tells his young guest that he has received - as a legacy from a friend, the Cambridge schol...

When Lord Petre had the effrontery of cutting off a lock of Lady Arabella Fermor's hair, a veritable war erupted between the two noble families. A ...

The undisputed pioneer of the horror, detective and science-fiction genres, Edgar Allan Poe was just as influential as a poet as he is now a ce...

On a cold morning, at daybreak, the 304th New York Regiment is waiting to engage with the Confederate army. Among the soldiers is young Henry Flemi...

When Sherlock Holmes receives a bungled tip-off from one of the agents of his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, the great detective hopes to avoid a...

"She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steeled his heart against her." In love with the b...