The Vigilante, John Steinbeck

George Orwell's best-known novels, Animal Farm, describing a revolution that goes horribly wrong, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, portraying a world where human freedom has been crushed, are two of the most famous, well-quoted and influential political satires ever written.

‘Three Guineas’, Woolf’s most impassioned polemic, came almost a decade later and broke new ground by challenging the very notions of war and masculinity.

On what grounds could we place ourselves above and beyond the animal world? What are the definitive forms of our relationships – love, marriage, family, friendship – really worth? And how might they be otherwise?

The Professor was the first novel by Charlotte Brontë. It was originally written before Jane Eyre and rejected by many publishing houses, but was eventually published posthumously in 1857. The book is the story of a young man, William Crimsworth.

Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father.

Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenges the social conventions of the early nineteenth century in a strong defence of women's rights in the face of psychological abuse from their husbands. Anne Brontë's style is bold, naturalistic and passionate, and this novel, which her sister Charlotte considered 'an entire mistake', has earned her a position in English...

From a child coming to terms with the death of a priest to a young woman torn between leading an uneventful life in Dublin and fleeing Ireland with her lover, these fifteen stories bring to life the day-to-day existence of ordinary Dubliners in the early years of the twentieth century. 

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau hiked into the Walden Woods and built a small hut, where he lived alone for the next two years. Thoreau wanted to prove that man could live entirely free from the society, and his experiment tested the limits of self-reliance while also immersing him in the lush of natural beauty of New England. The writings that resulted from...

A brilliant psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth pushed him into a glamorous lifestyle, and whose growing strength highlights Dick’s decline.

Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have spotted the playwright’s attempts to use the shift from republican to imperial Rome to highlight the political situation of the Elizabethans at the time. Featuring some of the most powerfully resonant and rousing speeches of any of Shakespeare’s plays, Julius Caesar remains one of his most well-loved historical...

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

Regarded as the first real heroine of American fiction, it is Hester Prynne's strength of character that resonates with the reader when her harsh sentence is cast. It is in her refusal to reveal the identity of the father in the face of her accusers that Hawthorne champions his heroine and berates the weakness of Society for attacking the innocent.

'Although he feared death, he could not stop. 'If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, they'd call me an idiot!'

These witty vignettes, set in Charlotte Brontë's imaginary world of Angria, feature debauched aristocrats, high-society courtesans and the rakish, brooding hero Zamorna, and offer a fascinating insight into Brontë's early writing.

His interpretation of the biblical story of Genesis is vivid and intense in its language, justifying the actions of God to men. In his sequel poem, Paradise Regained, Milton shows Satan trying to seduce Jesus in a similar way to Eve, but ultimately failing as Jesus remains steadfast.