Dracula, Bram Stoker

By day, he tramped the streets, often passing time with 'screevers' or street artists, drunks and other hobos. At night, he stood in line for a bed in a 'spike' or doss house, where a cup of sugary tea, a hunk of stale bread and a blanket were the only sustenance and comfort on offer.

For Leila, each minute after her death recalls a sensuous memory: spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the birth of a yearned-for son; bubbling vats of lemon and sugar to wax women's legs while men are at prayer; the cardamom coffee she shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works.

 Yet despite her youthful nature, she is not without her own enigmas. Most of all, she fears that her intellectual, radical son will exchange her for a superior mother when he becomes a famous writer.

The lights of Hollywood do little to distract Cecelia as she watches Monroe Stahr, wunderkind studio executive and object of her desire, descend into a reckless and ardent love affair with an auspicious starlet – an affair that threatens to destroy his reign as the Silver Screen’s golden boy. 

A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd - a man who will risk everything to win. Stefan Zweig's acclaimed novella Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of obsession and the price of genius.

Plato's The Republic has influenced Western philosophers for centuries, with its main focus on what makes a well-balanced society and individual.

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. 

Complex and epic in its scope, Homer’s The Odyssey was written almost 3,000 years ago and it is considered to be the foundation stone upon which literary culture was built.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard contains five richly diverse fairy tales, each with its own magical character, that will variously bring delight, laughter and the thrill of mortal peril.

George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with children, is an insurance salesman with an expanding waistline, a new set of false teeth - and a desperate desire to escape his dreary life. He fears modern times - since, in 1939, the Second World War is imminent - foreseeing food queues, soldiers, secret police and tyranny. 

'It's a dreadful thing to yield...but resist now?Lay my pride bare to the blows of ruin?That's dreadful too.'

Stoker spent his childhood sick in bed and his mother entertained him with ghost stories. He produced an original interpretation of the legend of the vampire Dracula, as althought he was inspired by folklore and other literary works, he gave his character an irresistibile attraction, thus combining the fear of death with the thirst for immortality and love.

The story is set in July 1809, in the midst of the Talavera Campaign during the Peninsular War. It was the first Sharpe novel published, but eighth in the series' chronological order.

After taking an elixir created in his laboratory, mild mannered Dr Jekyll is transformed into the cruel and despicable Mr Hyde. Although seemingly harmless at first, things soon descend into chaos and Jekyll quickly realises there is only one way to stop Hyde.

1841: Solomon Northup is a successful violinist when he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Taken from his family in New York State – with no hope of ever seeing them again – and forced to work on the cotton plantations in the Deep South, he spends the next twelve years in captivity until his eventual escape in 1853.

There are many who deny the Dark Lord's return, but Harry is not alone: a secret order gathers at Grimmauld Place to fight against the Dark forces. Harry must allow Professor Snape to teach him how to protect himself from Voldemort's savage assaults on his mind. But they are growing stronger by the day and Harry is running out of time.