Felix Holt the Radical, George Eliot

'My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!'

The first and most famous of Daniel Defoe's novels was Robinson Crusoe, which was published in 1719, when he was nearly 60 years old, and it was a great succes. This story shows how human beings are capable of overcoming difficulties throught effort, patience and ingenuity, at the same time as it shows our need to communicate and from part of a society.

First published in 1928, this tale of unrivalled imagination and wit quickly became the most famous work of women’s fiction. Sexuality, destiny, independence and desire – all come to the fore in this highly influential novel that heralded a new era in women’s writing.

While staying in Bath, Catherine meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor who invite her to their family estate, Northanger Abbey. A fan of Gothic Romance novels, naive Catherine is soon letting her imagination run wild in the atmospheric abbey, fuelled by her friendship with the vivacious Isabella Thorpe.

When the couple drift to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the Bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman that he loves.

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.

Conan Doyle's entire work was overshadowed by the success of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in instalments in the Strand magazine from 1891 and later gathered in a book containing 12 adventures in 1892. The author was right to publish them as short stories and create a detective with an enormous capacity for observation and deduction.

However human joy is not excluded thanks to ‘Mr Sleary’s Horse-Riding’ circus, a gin-soaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizens of Coketown.

The Mill on the Floss, based on George Eliot's own experiences of provincial life, is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age.

The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph - a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.

When Margaret Hale is uproted from Hampshire and moves to the industrial town of Milton in the North of England, her whole world changes. As her sympathy for the town’s mill workers grows, her sense of social injustice piques and she passionately fights their corner.  

A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. 

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last

 Stunned, his parents nevertheless try to raise him as they would any normal baby. By the time Benjamin is twelve, his parents realize their son is aging backwards, getting younger every day.

The Dark Lord is breathing fear into everything Harry loves, and to stop him Harry will have to find and destroy the remaining Horcruxes. The final battle must begin – Harry must stand and face his enemy.

An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s Presents a collage of author's own life story, snipped up and stuck down alongside his views on everything from suicidal depression to the future of the planet and Andrew Lloyd Webber.