"In the figure of the half-starved Oliver in the workhouse asking for 'more', Dickens created the nineteenth century's most famous image of protest against cruelty. Yet Oliver Twist develops from a topical satire on the inhumanity of the New Poor Law into something greater. What unfolds is a powerful and violent struggle between Good and Evil, as Oliver becomes ensnared in the labyrinth of London and the nightmare world of Fagin. With its macabre...

Recounts the travels and comic experiences of Samuel Pickwick his friends, and the members of his club.

An enduring tale of love, desire, and the universal longing both to leave one's home and to return to it, this novel is one of Hardy's greatest and most affecting works. Hardy's passionately drawn characters and his vivid rendering of their valiant but ultimately ineffective struggle in destiny's web result in a masterpiece of melancholy brilliance.

A blow on the head transports a Yankee to 528 A.D. where he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, constructing telephone lines, and inventing the printing press.

Charles Dickens's great satire on poverty, riches, and imprisonment, Little Dorrit is the story of Arthur Clennam, a man whose kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, assures him nothing but trouble. Her father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, has long been imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea.

Anna Karenina is a timeless masterpiece by Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Set in nineteenth-century Russia, it tells the story of Anna Karenina, a beautiful and charismatic socialite who risks everything for a passionate love affair. The novel explores themes of love, marriage, societal expectations, and the consequences of desire. Through vividly drawn characters and richly detailed settings, Tolstoy delves deep into the human condition, offering a...

Rudyard Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Born in India and growing into early manhood, Kim is the son of an Irish soldier born under British Imperial rule in 19th century India. Left in the care of a half-caste woman, Kim is free to explore the back allies and bazaars of Lahore. But when he meets with his father's old regiment he trades his native clothes for European suits and abandons his...

Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abounds with some of Dickens' most memorable characters. Among them are the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery, the mysterious convict Abel Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Haversham and her beautiful...

A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fanatical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab's passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul. Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel,...

"Alexandra, daughter of a Swedish immigrant farmer in Nebraska, inherits the family farm and finds love with an old friend." "The heroic battle for survival of simple pioneer folk in the Nebraska country of the 1880s. John Bergson, a Swedish farmer, struggles desperately with the soil but dies unsatisfied. His daughter Alexandra resolves to vindicate his faith, and her strong character carries her weak older brothers and her mother alng to a new zest...