Middlemarch, George Eliot

Little orphan Heidi is sent to live with her grandfather in his remote house in the Swiss Alps. She soon begins to love her life with her grandfather and makes friends with Peter, the goat-herder and his grandmother. Idyllic as her existence is, her aunt sends Heidi to live in Frankfurt to become a companion to the invalid daughter of a wealthy family...

When the body of Sir Charles Baskerville is found on the misty and desolate Devon moors, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson decide to investigate. The locals blame his death on the family curse, a legendary phantom hound which has supposedly haunted the Baskervilles for generations.

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.

Asking for directions at a big, beautiful house, she’s mistaken for an interviewee and finds herself being offered a job as housekeeper. Her employers have no idea they’ve hired a lawyer–and Samantha has no idea how to work the oven.

Wilde’s supremely witty tale of dandies, anarchists and a murderous prophecy in London high society.

'Everything was dead, everything unreal; the dark mob was made up of stiff lay-figures'

However, they are separated by several miles and to counter this distance, they use love letters and telegraph to convey their emotions. Their resistance bears fruit as they are united only to find out that they are strangers to each other and hence cannot live together.

Ursula's relationship with Rupert Birkin, an introspective and misanthropic school inspector, is contrasted with that of Gudrun and Gerald Crich, an overbearing industrialist. Set in a coal-mining town in the English Midlands, their stories explore the disastrous effects of industrialization on the psyche and suggest that rebirth can be achieved only...

'There sat the dog with eyes as big as mill wheels'

Hemingway’s frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto—of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized—is one of the greatest moments in literary...

'... slowly uncoiling their tentacles... and making a soft purring sound to each other'

But as he travels through obscure and impoverished territories, he makes money from illicit side-shows, offering villagers the spectacle of death. The head of the rebellious Albanian governor would fetch a very high price.

The autobiographical Ham on Rye is widely considered his finest novel. A classic of American literature, it offers powerful insight into his youth through the prism of his alter-ego Henry Chinaski, who grew up to be the legendary Hank Chinaski of Post Office and Factotum.

A divorcee, Olenska is ostracised by those around her, yet Newland is fiercely drawn to her wit, determination and willingness to flout convention. With the Countess, Newland is freed from the limitations that surround him and truly begins to ‘feel’ for the first time.

'Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.'

Patty and Walter Berglund were the pioneers of old St. Paul―the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant garde of the Whole Foods generation. But now, in the new millennium, they have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door?