In this sharply comic novel, Waugh fictionalizes his own life story in a richly fascinating manner. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold recounts a period of mental confusion and breakdown in the life of Gilbert Pinfold, an established, midd...

The House of Mirth depicts the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York with precision and wit, even as it movingly portrays the obstacles that impeded women's choices at the turn of the century.

Drawing on her own experiences, Anne Bronte wrote her first novel out of an urgent need to inform her contemporaries about the desperate position of unmarried educated women driven to take up the only 'respectable' career open to them...

Young Peony is sold into a rich Chinese household as a bondmaid - an awkward role in which she is more a servant, but less a daughter. As she grows into a lovely, provocative young woman, Peony falls in love with the family's only son...

Balthazar, is the second volume of Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet, set in Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1940s. The events of each lush and sensuous novel are seen through the eyes of the central character L.G. Darley, who observes t...

A collection contains the title novella, a minutely-observed look at life in a village through the eyes of one family, as well as eleven short stories, including a wry look at morals and manners in The Chorus Girl, and a melancholic t...

Abandoned at birth by a mother who faces transportation to Virginia, the young Moll Flanders sets out to make her way in the world. Threatened with a life in service, our rebellious heroine sets her heart on a life of independence. On...

This masterpiece of love, rejection, and reconciliation is the story of Maggie Tulliver and her resourceful but insensitive brother Tom, as they grow up in the narrowly puritanical atmosphere of rural Victorian society. Too intelligen...

When smalltime insurance salesman Walter Huff meets seductive Phyllis Nirdlinger, the wife of one of his wealthy clients, it takes him only minutes to determine that she wants to get rid of her husband--and not much longer to decide t...

Dickens’s second novel was a far cry from THE PICKWICK PAPERS, his first. The story of an orphan who flees the workhouse only to fall in with a gang of thieves and prostitutes in London’s sleazy underworld, it was a trench...

Joyce’s bildungsroman--his first novel--traces the development of Stephen Daedalus, Joyce’s alter ego. In order to pursue his artistic calling, Stephen, like Joyce, must reject his family, religion, and native land. At the...

'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place'. George and his large, simple-minded friend Lennie are drifters, following wherever work leads them. Arriving in...

Listeners can follow the fortunes of the dashing young swordsman D'Artagnan and his daredevil companions, Athos, Aramis and Porthos. The reading is supplemented by music from Raff, Bruch and Nielsen.

Sons and Lovers, Lawrences third published novel, was written by the author at the height of his literary powers. The story of class differences (the relationship between a middle-class woman and a miner) in the tough world of coal mi...

Orwell depicts a gray, totalitarian world in which privacy does not exist, news is manufactured according to the authorities' will, and those with unorthodox ideas are brainwashed or put to death. Orwell's 1949 nightmare vision of the...

With her 1847 novel, 'Jane Eyre', Charlotte Bronte created one of the most unforgettable heroines of all time. Not only is this the classic story of unforgettable love, but it is also the memorable tale of one woman's fight to claim h...

Rebellious and affectionate, Maggie Tulliver is always in trouble. Recalling her own experiences as a girl, George Eliot describes Maggie’s turbulent childhood with a sympathetic engagement that makes the early chapters of The M...

Galsworthy's trilogy The Forsyte Saga broke ground twice: first as a stunning portrait of a bourgeois British family circa 1906-1921, and again as the seminal mini-series of the 1960s. Readers and viewers were equally captivated by th...

The 20 diverse stories collected here show why the short story continues to be one of the most popular of literary genres. Included are works by masters of the field, including one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best Pat Hobby stories, &quo...

A tale of vanity, lust, and betrayal, the third of Shakespeare's great tragedies is dramatized with a full cast. Starring Paul Scofield in the title role, along with Kenneth Branagh, Harriet Walter, Alec McCowen, and Michael Maloney.

Dickens's huge, rambling novel tells the story of the Nickleby family after the death of the father, when the family is tyrannized by their nefarious Uncle Ralph. Nicholas becomes a schoolmaster at a brutal Yorkshire school run by the...

From a cemetery in a mythical small town in Illinois, the dead rise and speak about their lives. Each free-verse monologue stands as an epitaph for the person speaking, yet the play is ultimately about life, not death. Featuring 50 pe...

Sir Oliver Tessilian, a Cornish nobleman, is abandoned or betrayed by everyone he ever loved. He is framed for murder, affronted and shunned by his fiancA(c) and sold into slavery by his half brother.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE has not the formal perfection, the cohesiveness, the intense vividness of characterization that belong to MRS. DALLOWAY. It has particles of failure in it. It is inferior to MRS. DALLOWAY in the degree to which its a...

Set in late eighteenth-century England, this wonderful love story contains dialogue that sparkles with wit and irony. Its ingenious and compelling plot, along with some of the most unforgettable characters ever created, have made Prid...

4-CD Set! SERIES SYNOPSIS: After 12,000 years, the once-supreme Galactic Empire was plunging into a future of barbarism and warfare. All knowledge previously created by mankind faced destruction. Only Hari Sheldon, creator of the revo...

The talented Alex Jennings creates an atmosphere of gripping psychological tension and brings a variety of characters to life in this new audio edition of a crime classic. When the student Raskolnikov puts his philosophical theory to ...

The tale of an Irish boy raised as an Indian in imperial India. It is the story of his coming of age in a world of high adventure, mystic quests, and the "great game" between the British and the Russians for control of Centr...

Unburdened by the material necessities of the more fortunate, the denizens of Cannery Row discover rewards unknown in more traditional society. Henry the painter sorts through junk lots for pieces of wood to incorporate into the boa...

Four very diverse women, all seeking revitalization from the dreary February rains of 1920s London, rent the small medieval castle of San Salvatore, nestled high above the bay of Portofino, Italy. Arriving at San Salvatore, they find ...