The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories, Washington Irving

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

 Through drink, Bukowski is able to be alone, to be with people, to be a poet, a lover, and a friend—though often at great cost. As Bukowski writes in a poem simply titled “Drinking,”: “for me/it was or/is/a manner of/dying/with boots on/and gun/smoking and a/symphony music background.”

'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!'

Simenon explores the complexity of parent child relationships and the bitterness of things left unsaid in this stark, confessional piece.

A selection of Austen's dark and hilarious early writings - featuring murder, drunkenness, perjury, theft, poisoning, women breaking out of prison, men forging wills and babies biting off their mothers' fingers..

Through wordplay, parody and logical and philosophical puzzles, Carroll engenders a variety of sub-texts, teasing, ominous or melancholy. For all the surface playfulness there is meaning everywhere. The author reveals himself in glimpses.

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.

Edward Prendick, the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the South Pacific, is set ashore on an island where he meets the mysterious Doctor Moreau. Horrified by the discovery that Moreau is performing vivisection on animals to form monstrous human hybrids, Prendick flees into the jungle. 

On Writing reveals an artist brutally frank about the drudgery of work and canny and uncompromising about the absurdities of life—and of art. It illuminates the hard-edged, complex humanity of a true American legend and counterculture icon—the “laureate of American lowlife” (Time)—who stoically recorded society’s downtrodden and depraved. It exposes an...

The fiery Paul Emanuel, another teacher in the school, proves to be her saviour when he recognizes her passionate nature in spite of the many barriers she has erected to hide it.

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.

It was a time when injustice was met by a lust for vengeance, and rarely was a distinction made between the innocent and the guilty. It was published in weekly installments from April 1859 to November 1859 in Dickens's new literary periodical titled 'All the Year Round'. This novel is regarded as one of Dickens's most popular and most innovative works.