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Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.

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

Thomas Hardy

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

Charlotte Brontë

The narrator, the autobiographical Lucy Snowe, flees England and a tragic past to become an instructor in a French boarding school in the town of Villette. There she unexpectedly confronts her feelings of love and longing as she witnesses the fitful romance between Dr. John, a handsome young Englishman, and Ginerva Fanshawe, a beautiful coquette

Villette

Jane Austen

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

Henry James

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

Joseph Conrad

3et in the Malay Archipelago, where Conrad spent much of his youth as an officer in the British Merchant Navy, VICTORY is a sombre yet brilliant study of good and evil in Conrad's mature manner. The characteristic theme of a man reaching out from his apparently total solitude in sympathy for another human being is explored through the story of Axel Heyst's attempt to rescue a girl from the machinations of a brutal gang. Conrad's extraordinary blend of moral profundity, pathos and bitter irony is conjured up in prose which is at once atmospheric and inimitable. The book is published to coincided with the film staring Rufus Sewell Sam Neill, William Defoe and Irene Jacob

Victory

Francois Rabelais

Rabelais's hilarious, scabrous and often scatological fantasy of life amonth the monks and friars of sixteenth-century France remains a satirical and comic classic. A great broth of a book in which every conceivable literary form is parodied and every human desire satirized. But under the comedy there is a serious purpose, for Rabelais also enspouses a positive view of life in which tolerance, goodness, understanding and wisdom are opposed to dogmatism, pride and cruelty. The book is here presented in the classic translation by Urquhart and Motteux.

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Charles Dickens

The story of Scrooge, a miser who becomes a different man when he is presented with visions of past, present and future by Marley's ghost. First published on 17th December 1843, it had, by Christmas Eve of that year, sold 6000 copies at a price of five shillings.

A Christmas Carol

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoesky's drama of sin, guilt and redemption transmutes the sordid story of an old woman's murder by a desperate student into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Grim in theme and setting, the book nevertheless seduces by its combination of superbly drawn characters, narrative brilliance and manic comedy.

Crime And Punishment

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

Anton Chekhov

Primarily known as a dramatist, Chekhov also wrote short stories. This selection of his work includes &quot;The Swedish Match&quot;, &quot;Easter Eve&quot;, &quot;Mire&quot;, &quot;On the Road&quot;, &quot;Verotchka&quot;, &quot;Volodya&quot;, &quot;The Kiss&quot;, &quot;Sleepy&quot; and &quot;The Steppe&quot;.

The Steppe And Other Stories

George Eliot

When the weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he becomes a miser and vows to turn his back on the world. But an etraordinary sequence of events, including the appearance of a tiny child in his cottage, melts Silas's heart and transforms his life. George Eliot's tender pastoral is at once a realistic story of rural life and a symbolic drama of sin and repentance, Written in her simplest style, it paints a vivid picture of a rural life long since vanished.

Silas Marner

The Weaver of Raveloe

Emile Zola

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal

Germinal

This complex tale of self-discovery -- considered by the author to be  his best work -- traces the path of an aging idealist, Lambert Strether.  Arriving in Paris with the intention of persuading his young charge to  abandon an obsession with a French woman and return home, Strether  reaches unexpected conclusions.

The Ambassadors

Nikolai Gogol

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humour, and delight in human oddity and error.

Dead Souls

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

Anthony Trollope

FRAMLEY PARSONAGE continues the Barchester series of novels in which Trollope explores the social, political and domestic life revolving around a mid-nineteenth-century cathedral town. Popular since it was first published, the story combines romantic comedy with satirical commentary.

Framley Parsonage

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

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - stories which combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller - allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way of Dostoevsky and Kakfa. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. The wholly unique blend of satire and realism that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time.

Gogol Collected Tales

William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer.

Vanity Fair

A Novel Without a Hero

Jules Verne

In Journey to the Centre of the Earth, an obsessive German professor and his nephew travel towards the earth’s core in the steps of a medieval explorer beneath an Icelandic volcano where they discover a lost world. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is famous for its portrayal of the Byronic Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus, in which he explores the ocean while wreaking vengeance on mankind for their wickedness. In Around the World in Eighty Days, a starchy Englishman suspected of robbing the Bank of England accepts a bet that he cannot circumnavigate the globe in that time, and proceeds to do so, accompanied by his resourceful valet, Passepartout. 
 
The three novels combine fantasy and rich local colour with true learning and cod science in a mixture which attracts readers of all ages.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Round the World in Eighty Days

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

This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the character of Sidney Carton who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine' it is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done '- the novel is also a powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the Revolution, illuminated by Dickens' lively comedy

A Tale of Two Cities

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

Lord Jim explores the dilemmas of conscience, of moral isolation, of loyalty and betrayal confronting a sensitive individual whose romantic quest for an honourable ideal are tested to the limit. In this novel, Conrad draws on his background as Polish emigré, as well as his first-hand experience as a seaman, to experiment radically with the presentation of human frailty and doubt in the modern world

Lord Jim

Probably the popular favourite among Jane Austen's novels, Pride and Prejudice was the first to be written (1796-7), when the author was just twenty-one. Revised for publication thirteen years later, it combines the freshness of youth with the skill of maturity, not least in the brilliance of the characterization and the attractiveness of the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet.

Pride And Prejudice

In the third novel of the Barsetshire series, Trollope continues his study of a small cathedral city and the surrounding rural community which he presents as a microcosm of nineteenth-century England. Through each of the Barsershire novels can be read on its own, the six together present an incomparable portrait of life and manners in the quiet but troubled heart of a great nation at the zenith of its prosperity. DOCTOR THORNE revolves round the characters of the doctor and his niece, Mary, but the complex social life of which they are a part, ranging in scope from great houses to poor cottages, is almost more important than individual characters. If God is in the details, these novels are indeed divine.

Doctor Thorne

The first of Dickens's historical novels, Barnaby Rudge, written in 1841, is set at the time of the anti-Catholic riots of 1780, with the real Lord George Gordon, leader of the riots, appearing in the book. The characters are caught up in the resulting mob lawlessness which climaxes in the destruction of Newgate prison, an actual event brought to life in the novel. 
 
The plot turns on the relationship between Catholic Emma and Protestant Edward, further complicated by the earlier murder of Reuben Haredale, supposedly by Barnaby though actually by his evil father; but the real focus of the book, as so often in Dickens, is London itself. This is a nightmarishly vivid picture ofa capital city's subterranean life. In A Tale of Two CitiesDickens was to recapture his vision of the mob in all its moods, but he never surpassed the sense of pulsating energy and dangerevoked in thecrowd scenes of Barnaby Rudge. Nor did he often rival the touching relationship between Barnaby and his pet raven, Grip, who embodies the mystical powerof innocence. Although Barnaby Rudge is one of Dickens's lesser known novels, the bond between boy and bird makes it one of his most touching.

Barnaby Rudge

Alexandre Dumas

THE THREE MUSKETEERS has proved enduringly popular for more than a century and a half. Inspiration for many a movie and TV adaptation, this swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honour and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is satisfyingly peopled with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines, kings, queens, cavaliers and criminals, and contains in abundance adventure, espionage, conspiracy, murder, vengeance, love, scandal and suspense. Taking as its starting point the memoirs of the historical Comte d'Artagnan, Dumas's imagination transforms the bit-players of history into larger-than-life characters: d'Artagnan himself, the impetuous young man in pursuit of glory but ever ready to respond to an insult; the beguilingly evil seductress 'Milady' (entirely his own creation) and of course the Three Musketeers of the title, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, whose motto 'all for one, one for all' has come to epitomize devoted friendship. Interwoven amongst them are vivid fictionalized portraits of major historical figures, amongst them the powerful and devious Cardinal Richelieu, the weak and ineffectual Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, his unhappy Spanish queen. Throw in some stolen diamonds, masked balls, purloined letters, a crumbling medieval prison and a great deal of sword-fighting together with a gripping plot, tremendous narrative drive and a hint of discreet humour, and you have a book totally impossible to put down.

The Three Musketeers

Henrik Pontoppidan

Social realism and fairy tale combine in Lucky Per, a bildungsroman about the ambitious son of a clergyman who rejects his faith and flees a restricted life in rural Jutland for Denmark's capital city. Per is a gifted young man who firmly believes that 'you had to hunt down luck as if it were a wild creature, a crooked-fanged beast ... and capture and bind it'. He falls in with Copenhagen's Jewish community, and falls for Jakobe Salomon, a wealthy heiress, who is not only the strongest character in the book but among the great Jewish heroines of European literature. 
 Per becomes obsessed with a grand engineering scheme that he believes will both reshape Denmark's landscape and correct its minor position in the world. Eventually personal and his career ambitions alike come to grief. At the heart of Lucky Per lies the question of the relationship of 'luck' to 'happiness' (the Danish word in the title can have both meanings), a relationship which Per comes to view differently by the end of his life.

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