Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

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Henry James

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Isabel Archer is a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. Yet in the intoxicating worlds of Paris, Florence, and Rome, her fond illusions of self-reliance are twisted by the machinations of her friends and apparent allies. What had seemed to be a vista of infinite promise steadily closes around her and becomes instead a 'house of suffocation'.

The Portrait Of A Lady

Marcel Proust

In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.” 
 
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

In Search Of Lost Time Volume 2

Generally agreed to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century – and possibly any other – Proust’s masterpiece is here presented in the latest revision to the classic Scott Moncrieff translation. On the surface a traditional Bildungsroman describing the narrator’s journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author’s lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others – Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time.

In Search Of Lost Time Boxed Set (4 Volumes)

Thomas Hardy

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D&rsquo;Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her &lsquo;cousin&rsquo; Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future

Tess Of The D'urbervilles

Charlotte Brontë

Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour saving machinery to his Yorkshire mill, arousing a ferment of unemployment and discontent among his workers. Robert considers marriage to the wealthy and independent Shirley Keeldar to solve his financial woes, yet his heart lies with his cousin Caroline, who, bored and desperate, lives as a dependent in her uncle's home with no prospect of a career. Shirley, meanwhile, is in love with Robert's brother, an impoverished tutor - a match opposed by her family. As industrial unrest builds to a potentially fatal pitch, can the four be reconciled? Set during the Napoleonic wars at a time of national economic struggles, "Shirley" (1849) is an unsentimental, yet passionate depiction of conflict between classes, sexes and generations.

Shirley, The Professor

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.

The Age Of Innocence

D H Lawrence remarked that Hardy's best novels were about 'the struggle into love and the struggle with love', and THE MAJOR OF CASTLEBRIDGE is no exception. One of the long series of Wessex tales include FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, it is the story of the brooding and sometimes brutal Michael Henchard and the women with whom he searches for happiness in the harsh world of the nineteenth-century rural England

The Mayor Of Casterbridge

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter with a man to whom she is not married and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. As punishment, she must wear a scarlet letter 'A' (for &quot;adultery&quot;). Containing a number of religious and historic allusions, the book explores themes of legalism, sin and guilt.

The Scarlet Letter

Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something&mdash;fastidiousness or integrity&mdash;prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.

The House Of Mirth

Charles Dickens

One of Dicken's great middle period novels, in which fairy tale, melodrama and realism mingle with halluncinatory power, DOMBEY AND SON weaves together a number of stories which centre upon the family of the self-important merchant, Paul Dombey, and his children Paul and Florence. Supplied with the usual extraordinary cast of Dickensian grotesques, both comic and sinister, the novel also boasts a wonderful villain, in the person of Mr Carker, who tries to seduce Florence and meets his death under a train - the first such death in literary history.

Dombey And Son

When Catherine Sloper falls for Maurice Townsend, her father, a wealthy New York doctor, believes that Townsend is a fortune hunter after his daughter’s inheritance. He forbids the marriage but Catherine persists in her affection, encouraged by her foolish aunt Lavinia who has a weakness for Maurice herself. Dr Sloper takes Catherine abroad to distract her from the infatuation, but she proves to be as stubborn as her father. The book is a vivid study of the four central characters drawn in what are, for this author, unusually strong primary colours. 
Six novels by Henry James and two volumes of his shorter fiction are already published in Everyman’s Library.

Washington Square

Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick.

Tristram Shandy

Amy Dorrit's father is not very good with money. She was born in the Marshalsea debtors' prison and has lived there with her family for all of her twenty-two years, only leaving during the day to work as a seamstress for the forbidding Mrs. Clennam. But Amy's fortunes are about to change: the arrival of Mrs. Clennam's son Arthur, back from working in China, heralds the beginning of stunning revelations not just about Amy but also about Arthur himself.

Little Dorrit

Anthony Trollope

The Warden is a novel by English author Anthony Trollope published by Longman in 1855. It is the first book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, followed by Barchester Towers. 
 
Church of England, The Warden is also a subtle exploration of the rights and wrongs of moral crusades and, in its account of Harding's intensely felt personal drama, a moving depiction of the private impact of public affairs.

The Warden

Jane Austen

Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel (1811), which, though revised later, was completed in 1797 at the age of twenty-two. This meticulously constructed story of two sisters with opposing temperaments and romantic inclinations exemplifies the distilled spirit of classicism in English literature.

Sense And Sensibility

Mark Twain

Politics, religion, culture, travel, science and technology, family life: nothing escaped the eye and pen of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, nineteenth-century America's most famous writer and a legend in his own lifetime. Though chiefly known today for his classic novels of childhood, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and for his short stories, he produced even more nonfiction of an impressive quality. 
 
Twain lived a life as exciting as his fiction, and in his Autobiography we find him running wild, like the heroes of his novels, in the countryside around his childhood home in Missouri and navigating the treacherous waters of the Mississippi River as a trained steamboat pilot, while his letters show him travelling thousands of miles over the United States on hectic lecture tours (he was a great showman, raconteur and performer of his own works), hobnobbing with princes and presidents and being lionized in the capitals of Europe. 
 
His trademark wit, candour, sarcasm and irrepressible humour shine through on every page of this selection, but here too, beyond the entertainer, we discover in his speeches and essays the social and moral issues - slavery, imperialism - which concerned him, and meet the private man behind that towering public figure, whose long marriage never lost its romance, but who bore the sorrow of losing two of his three daughters while still in their twenties. 
 
A sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious and always riveting read.

Collected Nonfiction Volume 1

Selections from the Autobiography, Letters, Essays, and Speeches

Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium and former Prime Minister of England, is widowed and wracked by grief. Struggling to adapt to life without his beloved Lady Glencora, he works hard to guide and support his three adult children. Palliser soon discovers, however, that his own plans for them are very different from their desires. Sent down from university in disgrace, his two sons quickly begin to run up gambling debts. His only daughter, meanwhile, longs passionately to marry the poor son of a county squire against her father's will. But while the Duke's dearest wishes for the three are thwarted one by one, he ultimately comes to understand that parents can learn from their own children.

The Duke's Children

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The illegitimate son of a landowner and his common-law peasant wife, Arkady Dolgoruky has scarcely seen these parents during his nineteen years of life. In a narrative combining farce and pathos, Dostoevsky describes Arkady's visit to St Petersburg in search of the 'accidental family' who have dominated his dreams. The confrontation with them does not turn out quite as he imagined it. This relatively late novel, written in the last decade of the author's life, nevertheless captures the exuberance and embarrassments, the bliss and bale of adolescence in all its volatility and uncertainty.

The Adolescent

Although described by Jane Austen as a character 'whom no one but myself will much like', the irrepressible Emma Woodhouse is one of her most beloved heroines. Clever, rich and beautiful, she sees no need for marriage, but loves interfering in the romantic lives of others, until her matchmaking plans unravel, with consequences that she never expected. Jane Austen's novel of youthful exuberance and gradual self-knowledge is a brilliant, sparkling comic masterpiece.

Emma

Emily Brontë

The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and the people around them

Wuthering Heights

Anton Chekov

Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. The Steppe-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia to enroll in a distant school. The Duel sets two decadent figures-a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical plans to spy on an important official by serving as valet to his son, however, as he gradually becomes involved as a silent witness in the intimate life of his young employer, he finds that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant, engaging time as a narrative element in a way unusual in Chekhov's fiction. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labour, and the resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in an apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov's work.

The Complete Short Novels

Hardy described the theme of THE WOODLANDERS as 'the immortal puzzle -given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation'. Set in the familiar Dorset landscape, this time on the wooded outskirts of Blackmoor Vale, it tells the story of two women who love the same man. The elegant Grace Melbury and homelier Marty South compete for the attention of Giles Winterbourne, but both are doomed to disappointment. Written in 1887, shortly before TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES, THE WOODLANDERS has none of that novel's fierce cruelty. Though often sad, it is also lyrical and gentle, drawing the complexities of female desires with a notably subtle hand. This is one of Hardy's most accomplished mature novels, with a fine finish he did not always achieve, and it was among his own favourites. The Everyman edition is published to coincide with the launch of the Channel 4 Film starring Rufus Sewell, Polly Walker, Tony Haygarth and Emily Woolfe, directed by Phil Agland.

The Woodlanders

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

Mansfield Park

George Eliot

Carpenter Adam Bede is in love with the beautiful Hetty Sorrel, but unknown to him, he has a rival, in the local squire&rsquo;s son Arthur Donnithorne. Hetty is soon attracted by Arthur&rsquo;s seductive charm and they begin to meet in secret. The relationship is to have tragic consequences that reach far beyond the couple themselves, touching not just Adam Bede, but many others, not least, pious Methodist Preacher Dinah Morris. A tale of seduction, betrayal, love and deception, the plot of Adam Bede has the quality of an English folk song. Within the setting of Hayslope, a small, rural community, Eliot brilliantly creates a sense of earthy reality, making the landscape itself as vital a presence in the novel as that of her characters themselves.

Adam Bede

In this extraordinary variation on the theme of the eternal triangle, Henry James contrasts two women who love one man: the magnificent but ambitious and unscrupulous Kate Croy, and the fragile heiress Millie Theale whose early death precipitates the story's surprising outcome. Together with THE GOLDEN BOWL and THE AMBASSADORS, this novel completes a celebrated trilogy in which James explores his perennial themes of love and renunciation with all the strength, drama and subtlety of a very great writer at the height of his powers.

The Wings Of The Dove

Alessandro Manzoni

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers including plague, famine and imprisonment, and confront a variety of strange characters - the mysterious Nun of Monza, the fiery Father Cristoforo and the sinister 'Unnamed' - in their struggle to be reunited. A vigorous portrayal of enduring passion,

The Betrothed

Edith Wharton's subtle variation on the theme of the eternal triangle features Anna Leath, a rich American widow living in France; her daughter's delightful governess, Sophy Viner; and the first love of Anna's youth, George Darrow, who has come back into her life. Hoping to be reunited with George, Anna finds the path of love does not run smooth. THE REEF first appeared in 1912 when Edith Wharton was just fifty and at the height of her powers as a writer. It is a beautifully written, highly characteristic and eminently readable novel by a writer whose popularity is increasing by the year.

The Reef

Honoré de Balzac

Monsieur Goriot is one of a disparate group of lodgers at Mademe Vauquer's dingy Parisian boarding house. At first his wealth inspires respect, but as his circumstances are mysteriously reduced he becomes shunned by those around him, and soon his only remaining visitors are his two beautifully dressed daughters. Goriot's fate is intertwined with two other fellow boarders: the young social climber Eugene Rastignac, who sees a way to gain the acceptance and wealth he craves, and the enigmatic figure of Vautrin, who is hiding darker secrets than anyone

Old Goriot

Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past - the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella - and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great expectations but the mystery of his own heart.

Great Expectations

Daniel Defoe

Born in Newgate prison and abandoned six months later, Moll's drive to find and hold on to a secure place in society propels her through incest, adultery, bigamy, prostitution and a resourceful career as a thief ('the greatest Artist of my time') before she is apprehended and returned to Newgate. 
If Moll Flanders is on one level a Puritan's tale of sin and repentance, through self-made, self-reliant Moll its rich subtext conveys all the paradoxes and amoralities of the struggle for property and power in Defoe's newly individualistic society.

Moll Flanders

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