At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace (1868-9), Tolstoy entwines grand...

Written in the middle of the 14th century as the Bubonic Plague decimated the population of Europe, "The Decameron" is a satirical and allegorical collection of stories by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio. Constructed as a series of "frame stories," or stories within a story, the narrative follows seven young women and three young men who take refuge in a secluded villa outside Florence in order to escape the Black Death. During ten evenings of their...

Beautiful, clever, rich--and single--Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee, Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its...

Tells the story of Paul Morel, a young artist growing into manhood in a British working-class community near the Nottingham coalfields. His mother Gertrude, unhappily married to Paul's hard-drinking father, devotes all her energies to her son. They develop a powerful and passionate relationship, but eventually tensions arise when Paul falls in love with a girl and seeks to escape his family ties. Torn between his desire for independence and his abiding...

"Lively, absorbing, often outrageously funny, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a work of genius, an undisputed classic that has held a special appeal for each generation of readers. The Tales gathers twenty-nine of literature’s most enduring (and endearing) characters in a vivid group portrait that captures the full spectrum of medieval society, from the exalted Knight to the humble Plowman."--

This is a study of three families - the Bertrams, the Crawfords and the Prices - in which Jane Austen uses the unlikely heroine, Fanny Price, to explore the social and moral values by which these families' lives are ordered.

"Nostromo, A Tale of the Seaboard" is set in the South American country of Costaguana, and more specifically in that country's Occidental Province and its port city of Sulaco. Though Costaguana is a fictional nation, its geography as described in the book resembles real-life Colombia. Costaguana has a long history of tyranny, revolution and warfare, but has recently experienced a period of stability under the dictator Ribiera. Charles Gould is a native...

D. H. Lawrence's 1915 novel "The Rainbow" is the story of three generations of the Brangwens family. While tame by today's standards, "The Rainbow", for its frank treatment of human sexuality, caused Lawence to be prosecuted on an obscenity charge in England when it was first published. Through richly personal characterizations, "The Rainbow" deals profoundly with the very nature of human relations as it explores the sexuality of Ursula Brangwen and...

"SIGNATURE SHAKESPEARE SERIES Featuring remarkable laser-cut paper designs throughout, this new series offers stunning presentations of Shakespeare's plays, complete with scholarship, commentary, notes, and illustrated essays about Shakespeare's language and performances of the play. It's a keepsake package worthy of the greatest, and most loved, playwright in the English language. Each volume in the Signature Shakespeare series includes: - Illustration:...

A young man just beginning a new job in London meets with a strange woman on a moonlit road, offers her assistance getting into the city and then finds she may have just escaped an asylum. Hidden connections are unveiled between the family that employs the young man and the mysterious woman, pulling the reader into a suspenseful web of plots within plots, theft, betrayal, mistaken identities and attempted murder. Punctuating his dramatic narrative...