Tom Sawyer, a mischievous young boy, lives in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri with his Aunt Polly and half-brother Sid. Together with his friend Huckleberry Finn, the son of a drunk, ruthless father, he accidentally witnesses a murder. What unfolds in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (187..
Set in the deep American South between the wars, The Color Purple is the classic tale of Celie, a young black girl born into poverty and segregation. Raped repeatedly by the man she calls 'father', she has two children taken away from her, is separated from her beloved sister Nettie and is..
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'The Hound of the Baskervilles gripped readers when it was first serialised and remains one of Sherlock Holmes's greatest and most popular adventures. Could the sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville have been caused by the gigantic ghostly hound th..
In order to reach perfection, one must begin by being ignorant of a great deal.A descendant of one of Russian nobility’s oldest families, the gentle, good natured and epileptic Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returns to St. Petersburg after spending four years in a Swiss sanatorium. Taken to be an ‘..
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Two women fall in love with men of the same name. This mythical suitor is called ‘Ernest’, a name that has been adopted by both Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff to win the hearts of their beloved, Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, respectively. As Pa..
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, w..
At the end of the nineteenth century a stranger arrives in the Sussex countryside and mayhem ensues; in the sleepy county of Kent a miracle food brings biological chaos that engulfs and threatens the entire planet. H. G. Wells's fertile and mercurial imagination never brought us more bizarre and uns..
Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. This book contains vivid incident - pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes - but reflects also on the interaction between colonists and native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, it questions practises o..