Dracula, Bram Stoker

Ten-year-old Jas has a unique way of experiencing her universe: the feeling of udder ointment on her skin as protection against harsh winters; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads; the sound of 'blush words' that aren't in the Bible.

Dazzling modern lyrical poems from Catullus - by turns smutty, abusive, romantic and deeply moving.

Though they grow up and marry other people, theirs is a fierce love that cannot be tamed by the laws of society or cooled by the passage of time. Bronte's gothic tale explores the irresistible and dangerous nature of a love that knows no limits as it consumes the two people at its core.

Leviathan begins from some shockingly naturalistic starting-points: an analysis of human nature as being motivated by vain-glory and pride, and a vision of religion as simply the fear of invisible powers made up by the mind. Yet from these deliberately unpromising elements, Hobbes constructs with unparalleled forcefulness an elaborate, systematic, and...

Featuring Rosalind, one of Shakespeare’s most likeable and strong female protagonists, As You Like It is a comedic play centred around concealed identity, love, exile and artifice. Banished from the court by her uncle, Rosalind flees to the forest with her cousin Celia and her jester, joining her already exiled father, and disguising herself as a boy.

She meets and befriends a local boy, the talented Dickon, and comes across her sickly cousin Colin who had been kept hidden from her. Between them, the three children work astonishing magic in themselves and those around them.

Jules Verne, exited by the scientific progress of his age, makes us belive, in Journey to the Center of the Earth, that is possible to descend into the depths of the planet. The author did research into geology, mineralogy and paleontology, and astounded experts with his descriptions of prehistoric animals.

Is Howard guilty? Can a black or white verdict ever be reached in a world that’s a gazillion shades of grey?

In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. 

Silas Marner is a tender and moving tale of sin and repentance set in a vanished rural world and holds the reader's attention until the last page as Eppie's bonds of affection for Silas are put to the test.

Ivanhoe returns from the Crusades in secret and is joined in his plans to re-establish Richard on the thrown by the moneylender Isaac of York, his daughter Rebecca, the mysterious Black Knight, Lady Rowena, and Robin Hood and his merry men.

'But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as if by a miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the tremendous sunshine.'

Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution.

Anaïs Nin's second volume of erotic short stories after Delta of Venus, Little Birds is broader in scope, encompassing the entire breadth of human sensuality.

'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast'

 In three short narratives, Kadare shows how legends of betrayal and defeat simmered in European civilisation for six hundred years, culminating in the agony of one tiny population at the end of the twentieth century.