A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas, "Cold Comfort Farm" (1932) is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time. Learn More

Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote. Learn More

Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance. Learn More

Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Learn More

A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor these form a series of events that change the orphaned Pip s life forever... Learn More

A plane crashes on an uninhabited island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast. Learn More

Middlemarch contains all of life: the rich and the poor, the conventional and the radical, literature and science, politics and romance. Eliot s novel is a stunningly compelling insight into the human struggle to find contentment. Learn More

The underground man has always felt like an outsider. He doesn t want to be like other people, working in the ant-hill of society. So he decides to withdraw from the world, scrawling a series of darkly sarcastic notes about the torments he is suffering. Is he going mad? Or is it the world around him that is insane? Learn More

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published... Learn More