The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their
'All the world was mad around her and she herself, agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman; of a woman very wicked.' In 'the saddest story I have ever heard', a naïve American abroad unfolds a
'Hey, you with the beard!' A coiffured con man travels across Russia's rural backwaters, buying the souls of dead serfs from their owners to make his fortune, in Gogol's exuberant, bravura masterwork:
''Me have that golden gown!'' A blameless girl and her monstrous relatives clash over love and money in Balzac's matchless portrayal of greed in a French provincial town.
'He scampered over rooftops, swam in deep water, leapt from balconies.' Set in the vanished world of the shtetl of nineteenth-century eastern Europe, this spellbinding fable tells the story of Yasha:
'Dead, she was his ghost' A gripping, intensely atmospheric story of love, espionage and betrayal in wartime Shanghai, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four more shimmering tales of Chinese life.
'"After all," he said, "you're only a monkey spirit. How can you delude yourself into supposing that you can seize the Jade Emperor's throne?"' Featuring the adventures of the irrepressible, cloud-rid
"'How are you?' said Mathieu. 'I thought you were dead.'" Following a Parisian philosophy teacher through the cafés and bars of Montparnasse over two days in the sweltering summer of 1938, Sartre's se
'The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air-raid sirens sang out over London.' Upper-class rogues, bohemians, dowagers, socialites, bureaucrats and delinquent evacuees prepare for England to chang
'It flashed upon me suddenly: they were going to shoot me!' This electrifying eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, written by an American journalist in St Petersburg as the Bolsheviks seized
'Berlin-west, a morning in May.' An aspiring young Berlin actress turns the tables on her lustful middle-aged admirer, in Nabokov's deadpan, deliciously cruel story of hopeless infatuation and horribl
'The eyes that glanced at me shone with a pale-green light' A crazed vivisectionist engineers a new super-breed of monstrous 'Beast Men' on a remote Pacific island, in H. G. Wells's Victorian scientif
'Out of the hideously scarred soil of Flanders rose black, splintered trunks of trees' In one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, an ordinary German soldier recalls the horror and bloodlust of c
'Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself - not to Japan, not to anything' A shy, unworldly young student has his eyes opened to Tokyo's bustling metropolis, in
'Her fragrant body and burning red lips' A married couple reveal their darkest sexual fantasies to each other, in this erotic psychodrama of infidelity, transgression and decadence in early twentieth-
Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set... Set in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars and drunken encounters, Jean Rhys's
'It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain' The aviator and author of The Little Prince describes vast, otherworldly landscapes, crash landings and
'40,000 francs, which lay before him in a heap of gold and banknotes.' Written in twenty-six days to pay off Dostoyevsky's own roulette debts, The Gambler is a graphic psychological study of addiction
'Now, ill-lit, almost in darkness, the windows of the houses shuttered, the water dank, the scene appeared altogether different, neglected, poor, and the long narrow boots moored to the slippery steps
'The way I need you is a loneliness I cannot bear' Making its twenty-three-year-old author an overnight literary sensation, this story of isolated, lost lives intersecting in a small town in the Ameri
'Twenty-three dagger thrusts went home as he stood there. Caesar did not utter a sound...' This vivid, racy account of the men who wielded absolute power over ancient Rome - including maniacs, tyrants
'The train ran on without a driver, on and on, like some mindless, unseeing beast...' One of Zola's darkest and most violent works - a tense thriller of political corruption and a graphic exploration
'I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoke-dried human skulls suspended over my head' Alfred Russel Wallace left to explore the islands of southeast Asia an obscure naturalist; he returned eigh
'He said that Shamil had ordered Hadji Murat to be taken dead or alive....' In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four year
'What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise...' Mad, macabre tales of demonic spirits, hideous rites, ancient curses and alien entities lurking beneath the surface of rural New England, from
'There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.' While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with l
'When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find that it is the same in all her music.' From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to A
'I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.' This collection of new translations brings together the small proportio
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I h
'So Ursula became the child of her father's heart.' The Rainbow tells the story of three generations of the Brangwen family and their struggles with each other and themselves. Beautiful, strange and
'Nowhere could she discover the dens of iniquity about which she had dreamed...' Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normand
'I could hear the frost crackling outside. Greenish moonbeams shone through windows covered with patterns of ice...' One of the most moving accounts of being a boy ever written, My Childhood is a bot
Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles...useless words! A Russian doesn't need them' Returning home after years away at university, Arkady is proud to introduce his clever friend Bazarov to his
'He too began to chase the great pierrot through the corridors of the château...' A novel of desperate yearning and vanished adolescence, the story of Meaulnes and his restless search for a lost, ench
'I pity this house; the curse of God is hanging over it' Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented
'Then he saw the barrel of a gun aimed dead on target - not at him, as he might have expected, but at the clergyman's back.' Set in a crumbling Spanish mansion, The House of Ulloa follows innocent and
'Manuscripts don't burn' In Soviet Moscow, God is dead, but the devil - to say nothing of his retinue of demons, from a loudmouthed, gun-toting tomcat, to the fanged fallen angel Koroviev - is very mu
'The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.' In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven ar
'Listen, Švejk, are you really God's prize oaf?' 'Humbly report, sir,' Švejk answered solemnly. 'I am!' The chaotic, hilarious adventures of an ordinary soldier, who is either genuinely a total idiot
'She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun...' A rapturous work of savage beauty, W
