When Mrs Dashwood is forced by an avaricious daughter-in-law to leave the family home in Sussex, she takes her three daughters to live in a modest cottage in Devon. For Elinor, the eldest daughter, the move means a painful separation from the man she loves, but her sister Marianne finds in Devon the romance and excitement which she longs for. The c...

Wharton's most erotic and lyrical novel, Summer explores a daring theme for 1917: a woman's awakening to her sexuality. Eighteen-year-old Charity Royall lives in the small town of North Dormer, ignorant of desire until the arrival of architect Lucius Harney. Independent yet kept from love until now by society's expectations, Charity finds herself w...

In one of the most famous openings of any novel, Dickens masterfully presents the turmoil of the French Revolution which is the backdrop for a novel of love, patience, hope and self-sacrifice. It is read by Anton Lesser whose award-winning Dickens recordings in their abridged form have now resulted in the opportunity to read the full unabridged tex...

Helen Huntingdon flees a disastrous marriage and retreats to the desolate, half-ruined moorland mansion, Wildfell Hall. With her small son, Arthur, she adopts an assumed name and makes her living as a painter. The inconvenience of the house is outweighed by the fact that she and Arthur are removed from her drunken, degenerate husband. Although the...

When the Time Traveller courageously stepped out of his machine for the first time, he found himself in the year 802,700-and everything has changed. In another, more utopian age, creatures seemed to dwell together in perfect harmony. The Time Traveller thought he could study these marvelous beings-unearth their secret and then retum to his own time...

Just before the First World War, the Ramsay family go to their holiday home in the Hebrides, bringing several guests with them. While they are there, one of the children wants to visit a lighthouse. After a ten year gap, during which the war wreaks its havoc on Europe, one of the guests returns to the house; and another trip to the lighthouse is pr...

Treasure Island must be the most enthralling adventure book ever written. As we listen to the voice of Jim Hawkins telling his extraordinary tale, and later that of his companion Dr Livesey, we are plunged into a world of pirates, buried treasure, mutiny and deceit. We meet Billy Bones, Blind Pew, Black Dog and, of course, the charming buccaneer Lo...

Henry James' classic morality tale tells of a triangle of friends and lovers doomed to treachery by overreaching desire. In early-twentieth-century London, Kate Croy is secretly engaged to Merton Denscher, a journalist possessed of all the qualities of an ideal husband except for money. By chance, Kate befriends American heiress Milly Theale, who i...

When her father remarries, the honest, innocent Molly Gibson suddenly finds herself with a new stepsister, Cynthia, who is beautiful, worldly and impetuous. This would be more than enough to deal with, but the new wife is the deeply snobbish (and darkly secretive) Hyacinth. Thwarted love, scheming ambition and small-town gossip underlie the warmth,...

When Mr Earnshaw brings a black-haired foundling child into his home on the Yorkshire moors, he little imagines the dramatic events which will follow. The passionate relationship between Cathy Earnshaw and the foundling, Heathcliff, is a story of love, hate, pity, and retribution: the effects of which reverberate throughout the succeeding generatio...

Lady Chatterley's husband returns from the War paralysed from the waist down. Frustrated by his attitudes as much as his disability, she begins a love-affair with the gamekeeper, Mellors. She realises that to be fully alive she must live the life of the body as well as the mind, but in doing so she angers the conventions of her day. Banned for over...

Emma Bovary is a sensuous, sentimental young woman whose romantic ideals make her dissatisfied with her humdrum married life. Attempting to escape into an exciting world of passion and dreams, she drifts into sordid affairs with Rodolphe Boulanger and L‚on Dupuis. The first of these lovers, an older man, dominates the affair, while the second, inex...

One of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century, W. Somerset Maugham's masterpiece Of Human Bondage gives a harrowing depiction of unrequited love. Philip Carey, a sensitive orphan born with a clubfoot, finds himself in desperate need of passion and inspiration. He abandons his studies to travel, first to Heidelberg and then to Paris, w...

"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory i...

As soon as the orphaned Pollyanna arrives in Beldingsville to live with her strict and dutiful maiden aunt, she begins to brighten up everybody's life. The sick, the lonely, and the just plain miserable all fall under her spell and are transformed-until one day something so terrible happens that even Pollyanna doesn't know how to feel glad any more...

On the eve of his marriage to the beautiful Mercedes, having that very day been made Captain of his ship, the young sailor Edmond DantŠs is arrested on a charge of treason, trumped up by jealous rivals. Incarcerated for many lonely years in the isolated and terrifying Chateau d'If near Marseille, he meticulously plans his brilliant escape an...

Perhaps the most brilliantly successful ghost story ever written, The Turn of the Screw creates a terrifyingly believable impression of innocent children so corrupted by evil that they remain deceptive pictures of innocent beauty. Their governess must struggle alone to confront and exorcise the demons which she believes possess their souls...

Recognised as one of the greatest works of English fiction, David Copperfield tells the story of a young man, from his painful childhood, through chance, tragedy and adventure, to self-knowledge and happiness. It includes some of Dickens's most vividly memorable characters. The cruelly saturnine Mr Murdstone; the redoubtable Betsey Trotwood; the ch...

Lady Susan was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed. An epistolary novel in 18th century style, it tells the story of the recently widowed Lady Susan Vernon, intelligent but highly manipulative, who is intent on gaining financially secure relationships for both herself and her wayward but shy teenage daughter Frederica. Less known than...

Augustus Melmotte is a fraudulent foreign financier who preys on dissolute nobility - using charm to tempt the weak into making foolish investments in his dubious schemes. Persuaded to put money into a notional plot to run a railroad from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, the capricious gambler Felix Carbury soon becomes one of his victims. But as Melmo...

On they went singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing-Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, physician and poet, wrestles with the new order and confront...