Honore de Balzac, who is generally regarded as a founding father of realism in European fiction, first entered the mainstream with The Magic Skin, a fable-like tale delineating the excesses and vanities of contemporary life.

Bleak House opens in a London shrouded by fog a fog that swirls most densely about the Court of Chancery, where the obscure case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce lies lost in endless litigation, slowly devouring an inheritance in legal costs. ...

Full of suspense, humor, and tenderness, Hard Times is a brilliant defense of art in an age of mechanism and a blistering portrait of Victorian England as it struggles with the massive economic turmoil brought on by the Industrial Rev...

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby combines comedy and tragedy in a tale of triumph over adversity, where Nickleby succeeds despite social injustice---a story that mirrors Charles Dickens's own rise from poverty to great suc...

This third installment in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes series contains six unabridged stories, including "A Scandal in Bohemia," "Silver Blaze," "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," "The Adven...

On a zoology expedition up the Amazon, Professor Challenger has made an inexplicable discovery. Back in London, his claims are ridiculed throughout the professional community. Reluctantly, he recounts to Journalist Edward Malone, 'Cur...

A story of romantic love in Holland during the Renaissance, this historical novel describes the murder of John de Witte and his brother Cornelius at the hands of tyrants. And the black tulip? A symbol of justice and the end of oppress...

This classic novel takes place in Lantern Yard, a slum street in an unnamed city in Northern England, during the early 19th century. There, Silas Marner, a weaver and a member of a small Calvinist congregation, is falsely accused of s...

Flaubert's portrait of an adulteress who seeks freedom from a prosaic, disappointing life and ultimately is destroyed by her selfishness was considered scandalous when it was published. Flaubert chose his subject to illustrate his bel...

The second in John Galsworthy's celebrated series of novels The second part of the Forsyte Saga chronicles the downfall of an upper middle class family in the turbulent period of social change at the end of the 19th and start of the ...

To Let is book three of the Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy's monumental chronicle of the lives of the moneyed Forsytes, a family whose values are at war with its passions. In To Let, Jon and Fleur, now both nineteen years old, fall in ...

With a series of sketches, Cranford lovingly describes the "adventures" of middle-aged ladies in the quiet country village of Cranford in the 1830s. Despite their poverty, residents of the village are kind, decent, and thoro...

In a poor, remote section of southern Mexico, the Red Shirts have taken control. God has been outlawed, and the priests have been systematically hunted down and killed. Now, the last priest strives to overcome physical and moral cowar...

It is a curious thing that at my age-fifty-five last birthday-I should find myself taking up a pen to try to write a history. I wonder what sort of a history it will be when I have finished it, if ever I come to the end of the trip! I...

Allan Quatermain, the hero of Henry Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, tells a moving tale of his first wife, the Dutch-born Marie Marais, and the adventures that were linked to her beautiful, tragic history.

An outstanding example of psychologically driven modernist fiction, Knut Hamsun's Hunger portrays a struggling artist's descent into madness as his body and mind succumb to starvation.

Hardy's third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes , follows the story of Elfride Swancourt. The daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a sparse sea-swept parish in Cornwall, Elfride is caught between two suitors of very different backgrounds: St...

The innocent and naïve Jude Fawley is trapped into marriage by the seductive Arabella Donn. But their union is an unhappy one, and Arabella leaves him. Jude's welcome freedom allows him to pursue his obsession with his pretty cousin,...

Selected Short Stories: Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorchester in that part of England he called Wessex. With stories sometimes from his own imagination and sometimes from local tradition, Hardy's work, like Dickens and Trollop...

Jaroslav Haeks world-famous satirical farce The Good Soldier vejk has been translated into over sixty languages, and is one of the best-known Czech works ever published. A soldier in the First World War who never actually sees any com...

"Georgette Heyer is unbeatable!" —Sunday TelegraphFor her, he would do anything.…Plainspoken country gentleman Philip Jettan won't bother with a powdered wig, high heels, and fashionable lace cuffs, until he discovers th...

Resourceful, adventurous and utterly indefatigable, Sophy is hardly the mild-mannered girl that the Rivenhalls expect when they agree to take her in. Kind-hearted Aunt Lizzy is shocked; stern Cousin Charles and his humorless fiancee E...

This is a brand new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatization of Aldous Huxley's classic dystopian novel, set in the future and widely considered one of the greatest novels of all time. Abridged.

Dealing heavily with the then very timely political issue of feminism and the changing role of women in society, Henry James's The Bostonians is the story of Civil War veteran Basil Ransom's conflict with his cousin Olive Chancellor f...

The Turn of the Screw has been described by many critics as the most sophisticated and terrifying ghost story in the English language. It is considered one of the great intellectual "spook tales" of all time.In The Turn of t...

This collection includes a selection of H.P. Lovecrafts finest chilling tales. Lovecrafts most famous monster is Cthulhu, a gargantuan beast which has been lying dormant for millions of years but rises up and forces mankind to recogn...

In James Weldon Johnson's emotionally gripping and poignant look into race relations, a half-white half-black man of very light complexion must choose between his heritage and the art that he loves and the ability to escape the inhere...

Continuing the masterly reading of short stories, this volume contains the last five stories from the Dubliners collection: A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother Grace, and perhaps the most well known of all, The Dea...

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis climaxes in the very first line--the protagonist has indeed been transformed. The critical questions lie in the interpretation of the transformation. Kafka has been said to have offered everything from ...

First published in 1925, The Trial, one of Franz Kafka's best-known works, tells the story of a man arrested for an unknown crime by a remote, inaccessible authority and his struggle for control over the increasing absurdity of his li...