Dorothea Brooke is a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage with a pedantic scholar. Tertius Lydgate is a charming but tactless doctor. His marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and his pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career. Their interweaving tales reveal a complex...

Brought up at Dorlcote Mill, Maggie Tulliver worships her brother Tom and is desperate to win the approval of her parents, but her passionate, wayward nature and her fierce intelligence bring her into constant conflict with her family. As she reaches adulthood, she finds herself torn between her relationships with three very different men: her prou...

'Moby Dick' follows the fortunes of Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod, a 19th century whaling ship. The Pequod is on its last voyage in pursuit of Moby Dick, the great white whale which has been Ahab's bitter adversary for many years. This classic story of high adventure, manic obsession and metaphysical speculation is packed with drama, and...

Dear Reader, If you have not read anything about the Baudelaire orphans, then before you read even one more sentence, you should know this: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are kindhearted and quick-witted; but their lives, I am sorry to say, are filled with bad luck and misery. All of the stories about these three children are unhappy and wretched, and th...

Four children separated by vast distances all undergo the same ritual, watched by cloaked strangers. Four flashes of light erupt, and from them emerge the unmistakable shapes of incredible beasts - a wolf, a leopard, a panda, a falcon. Suddenly the paths of these children - and the world - have been changed for ever. Enter the world of Erdas, where...

From best-selling author Holly Webb comes a gorgeous wintery story of a very special friendship. Amelia is exploring the huge, old house where her family are spending Christmas when she finds a diary hidden in the attic. It was written by a boy struggling to look after an abandoned wolf pup. Before she knows it, Amelia is transported into the wintr...

Clarissa Dalloway is civilised - without the ostentation of a socialite, but with enough distinction to attract them to her parties. She finds excess offensive, but surrounds herself with the highest quality and has an abhorrence for anything ugly or awkward. We spend a day with Clarissa as she interacts with servants, her children, her husband, an...

This is one of the earliest novels of British industrial alienation, tellingly linked to the plight of 19th-century women. It tells of the relationship between Margaret Hale, a girl from the old rural south, and John Thornton, a mill owner from the new industrial north.

Little Nell cares for her grandfather in the gloomy surroundings of his curiosity shop. Reduced to poverty, the pair are forced to flee London and Nell finds herself uprooted from a secure and innocent childhood and cast into a world where evil takes the form of characters such as Swiveller, Nubbles and the grotesque and lecherous Quilp.

A workhouse orphan, Oliver escapes by running away to London. He gets drawn into the treacherous underworld of pickpockets and thieves headed by Fagin. His companions are ultimately destined for gruesome ends. Will Oliver emerge unscathed from the darkness of the underworld?

Alice's adventures, funny, inventive and disturbing, have fascinated children and adults alike since their publication. This is a new unabridged recording using many voices to take the parts of The White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts and the Cheshire Cat - and, of course, Alice herself. It makes for a roller-coaster ride of delightful...

It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard's assignmet-find them and then..."retire" them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found!

A complex plot of love and inheritance is set against the English legal system of the mid-nineteenth century, with all its tortuous avenues and disguised resolutions. Here is the firm, Jarndyce & Jarndyce, the young orphan and ward of court Ester Summerson (who tells much of the story). As always, it is the skilled pen of Dickens himself that c...

Breakfast of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

IN 1942, Charlotte Gray, a young scottish woman, goes to Occupied France on a dual mission: to run an apparantly simple errand for a British special operations group and to search for her lover, an English airman called Peter Gregory, who has gone missing in action. In the small town of Lavaurette, Sebastian Faulks presents a microcosm of France an...

In the gentle world of one of England's beautiful old cathedral towns, crisis looms: funds are short, and the cathedral is in need of major repair. One faction of the community argues that the obvious solution is to abolish the expensive, and nowadays rather irrelevant, boys' choir. But of course, there are those who disagree: the choir school's he...

Mr. Dombey is a successful businessman who looks forward to the day when his young son Paul will be old enough to join the family business. But Dombey also has a loving daughter, Florence, whom he ignores, lavishing all his attention on his precious son. Set in the 1840s, against a background of Britain's emerging industrial power, the world of com...

Arrogant, self-willed and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen's most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is `handsome, clever and rich' and has `a disposition to think too well of herself'. When she decides to introduce the humble Harriet Smith to the delights of genteel society and to f...

The explosive finale to the Ringworld and the Fleet of Worlds series. For decades, the spacefaring species of known space have battled over the largest artifact-and grandest prize-in the galaxy: the all-but-limitless resources and technology of the Ringworld. Now, without warning, the Ringworld has vanished, leaving behind three rival war fleets. S...

The Firstborn-the mysterious race of aliens who first became known to science fiction fans as the builders of the iconic black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey-have inhabited legendary science fiction master Sir Arthur C. Clarke's writing for decades. Now, twenty-seven years later, the Firstborn are back. This time, they are pulling no punches. Th...

The events of Pietro Russell's life are told in 26 chapters. From A-Z each chapter is set in a different place and reveals a fragment of his story. As his memories flicker back and forth through time in his search for a resolution to the conflicts of his life, his tory gradually unfolds. . .