Villette, Charlotte Brontë

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. 

Oscar Wilde’s only novel is the dreamlike story of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty.In this celebrated work Wilde forged a devastating portrait of the effects of evil and debauchery on a young aesthete in late-19th-century England.

Centred around one day in June where Clarissa is preparing for and holding a party, her interior monologue mingles with those of the other central characters in a stream of consciousness, entwining, yet never actually overriding the pervading sense of isolation that haunts each person.

‘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.

'The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.'

'But I ran up the broken stairway, and came out suddenly, as if by a miracle, clean on the platform of my San Tommaso, in the tremendous sunshine.'

Adventurous and spirited in tone, The Three Musketeers is considered one of the greatest historical French novels. When Athos, Porthos and Aramis befriend a young and determined country boy d’Artagnan, together they confront the scheming King’s Minister, Cardinal Richelieu and the female spy Milady who threaten to undermine the King.

Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. This first edition credited the work's fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents.

In these fourteen stories, Hemingway begins to examine the themes that would occupy his later works: the casualties of war, the often uneasy relationship between men and women, sport and sportsmanship. In "Banal Story," Hemingway offers a lasting tribute to the famed matador Maera. "In Another Country" tells of an Italian major recovering from war wounds...

The Piligrim’s Progess tells the story of everyman hero Christian as he abandons his world - the City of Destruction – on a journey towards paradise and the Celestial City. As he travels, Christian must fight off the temptation of the Worldly Wise, the Vain and the Ignorant. His adventure takes him through the Slough of Despond, the Hill of Difficulty and...

Jay Gatsby’s opulent Long Island mansion throngs with the bright young things of the Roaring Twenties. But Gatsby himself, young, handsome and mysteriously rich, never appears to his guests. He stands apart from the crowd, yearning for something just out of reach – Daisy Buchanan, lost years before to another man. 

Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world.

 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.”

 Stunned, his parents nevertheless try to raise him as they would any normal baby. By the time Benjamin is twelve, his parents realize their son is aging backwards, getting younger every day.

'Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.'

'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'