(Hardback)

In Journey to the Centre of the Earth, an obsessive German professor and his nephew travel towards the earths core in the steps of a medieval explorer beneath an Icelandic volcano where they discover a lost world.

(Hardback)

Hardy's last novel is the story of a young working man destroyed by the partial fulfilment of his dreams. He is torn between his desires for the life of the body and the life of the mind, as represented by two women - the vulgar but lustrous Arabella and the refined and frigid Sue.

(Hardback)

The story of a half-caste boy, part Indian part Irish who journeys throughout the subcontinent with an aged lama in search of religious enlightenment, the nominal plot revolves around the Great Game: the struggle between Britian and Russia for control of Afghanistan.

(Hardback)

One of the most 'modern' of eighteenth-century novels, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is the brilliantly observed and vividly rendered story of two libertines and the innocent characters they plot to destroy.

(Hardback)

Out of extreme poverty Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread and then spends many years trying to escape his reputation as a criminal. In later years he rises socially and is a respectable member of society; but policeman Javert will not allow him to forget his past and is determined to expose him.

(Hardback)

Letters by the 18th century blue-stocking grande dame, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She was a duke's daughter, who married the English ambassador in Constantinople, and the friend of Swift and Pope, whom she numbered among her correspondents.

(Hardback)

Available as two separate volumes or as a boxed set, this 16th century work is a distinctive blend of biography and criticism which effectively founded the study of art history and remains one of its greatest monuments.

(Hardback)

The painter and architect Giorgio Vasari was a pupil of Michelangelo's who worked mainly in Florence and Rome, but he is more famous for his "Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects". This is the second volume of his work, translated by Gaston de Vere.

(Hardback)

This is a classic story of one man's tragic failure and eventual redemption, told under the circumstances of high adventure at the margins of the known world.

(Hardback)

(Hardback)

Described by Henry James as 'one of the first of the classics' and so regarded ever since, MADAME BOVARY has touched generations of readers and moulded generations of writers.

(Hardback)

It explains clearly all the references in the book, and shows in detail with new maps the routes described from Venice to Beijing, from Beijing to Burma, and from Beijing to south-east China.

(Hardback)

The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after Dickens returned from America, the action moves between Britain and United States in ways which highligh the failing of both societies.

(Hardback)

A romantic story with descriptions of working people and their lives, as the author encountered them in northern mills. Despite this grim setting, the book has the power to involve the reader in the lives of Elizabeth Gaskell's characters.

(Hardback)

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (AD 121-180) embodied in his person that ideal figure of antiquity, the philosopher-king. His "Meditations" reveal a mind of exceptional clarity and originality and a spirit attuned to the particulars of human destiny.

(Hardback)

Together with Voltaire, Diderot was a remarkable figure of the French Enlightenment, as a philosopher, journalist and novelist. In this book, a young girl's enforced enclosure in a convent gives Diderot the chance to explore themes such as religious hypocrisy and sexual repression.

(Hardback)

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871-2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest preceding the 1832 Reform Bill. With its complex plot, broad canvas and huge cast of characters, it has long been recognized as one of the few truly classic English novels.

(Hardback)

A story of the war between man and mammal, in which the author explores his obsessions with good and evil, love and solitude, speech and silence, using his technical knowledge of sailing and the sea to tell a story which is at once minutely realistic and powerfully symbolic.

(Hardback)

Bursting with energy and populated by a whole world of inimitable and memorable characters - including especially the theatrical troupe with whom Nicholas performs - the book is both a griping story and a series of magnificent scenes.

(Hardback)

Portraying social life in fashionable Bath and centred around Catherine Morland, this novel ridicules the popular tales of romance and terror and contrasts with these the normal realities of life.

(Hardback)

Conrad's foresight and his ability to pluck the human adventure from complex historical circumstances were such that his greatest novel, Nostromo - though over one hundred years old - says as much about today's Latin America as any of the finest recent accounts of that region's turbulent political life.

(Hardback)

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. As a member of the nobility he had been despised by his fellow prisoners, most of whom were peasants - an experience shared in the book by Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman who has killed his wife.

(Hardback)

Goncharov's gentle satire on the failings of 19th-century Russian gentry and bureaucracy turns into something deeper and richer than satire, as he probes the character of a protagonist whose constitutional lethargy becomes a symbol for the malaise of the human spirit in an alienating world.

(Hardback)

In this novel of obsessive passion the author tells stories of Old Goriot and the ungrateful daughters he adores; young Rastignac, a country lad determined to make his way in Paris; and Vautrin, his satanic tempter. Their lives all cross in the Maison Vauquer, a boarding house in Paris.