Middlemarch, George Eliot

As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is the Penguin Proust that makes Proust accessible to a new generation.

"I did have hallucinations, but did they harm anyone? Who did they harm, that's what I'd like to know!'

Old terrors are dredged up from the shipwreck of history. And ultra-explosive state secrets are threatening to flood the entire nation. Mark, an artist, finds the peaceful rhythms of his life turned upside down by ancient love and modern barbarism and by the particular brutality of a country surprised and divided by its new freedom.

But Giuliano is a man entwined in a bloody web of violence and vendettas. In Sicily, Giuliano is a modern day Robin Hood who has defied corruption--and defied the Cosa Nostra. Now, in the land of mist-shrouded mountains and ancient ruins, Michael Corleone's fate is entwined with the dangerous legend of Salvatore Giuliano: warrior, lover, and the ultimate...

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.

 In this rousing book, he charts the absurdities that underpin calls for austerity, as well as his own battles with a bureaucracy bent on ignoring the human cost of its every action. Passionately outspoken and tuned to the voices of the oppressed, Varoufakis presents a guide to modern economics, and its threat to democracy, like no other.

'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'

‘When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books; for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved, and the heart.’

Written when execution by guillotine was still legal in France, Albert Camus' devastating attack on the 'obscene exhibition' of capital punishment remains one of the most powerful, persuasive arguments ever made against the death penalty.

Focussing on the principle that one can outsmart your foe mentally by thinking very carefully about strategy before resorting to physical battle, this philosophy continues to be applied to the corporate and business world.

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.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg.

He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.

In Moby Dick, Melville reflects on evil as represented in the principal characters: on the one hand the whale, which represents seseless evil, as it destroys everything it cames across, ao the other hand Captain Ahab, who represent a stubborn evil, as his personal hatred and desire for revenge makes him hunt the whale down, even though he is putting his...

When her parents die in India, Mary is sent to live with her uncle on the bleak Yorkshire moors. It’s a sad lonely life until one day she discovers a hidden door into a mysterious secret garden.