We takes place in a distant future, where humans are forced to submit their wills to the requirements of the state, under the rule of the all-powerful Benefactor, and dreams are regarded as a sign of mental illness. In a city of straight lines, protected by green walls and a glass dome, a spaceship is being built in order to spearhead the conquest of new planets. Its chief engineer, a man called Delta-503, keeps a journal of his life and activities: to his mathematical mind everything seems to make sense and proceed as it should, until a chance encounter with a woman threatens to shatter the very foundations of the world ... |
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The unnamed narrator of the novel, a former government official, has decided to retire from the world and lead a life of inactivity and contemplation. His fiercely bitter, cynical and witty monologue ranges from general observations and philosophical musings to memorable scenes from his own life, including his obsessive plans to exact revenge on an officer who has shown him disrespect and a dramatic encounter with a prostitute. Seen by many as the first existentialist novel and showcasing the best of Dostoevsky's dry humour, Notes from Underground was a pivotal moment in the development of modern literature and has ... |
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When Sherlock Holmes receives a bungled tip-off from one of the agents of his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, the great detective hopes to avoid a murderous crime and bring the would-be assassin to justice. But on being informed soon afterwards that one John Douglas of Birlstone Manor has been found with his head blown apart by a shotgun, he realizes that he is too late. And so begins an enthralling tale of revenge, vigilantism and secret societies, one that transports the reader from the English countryside to the violent world of the American frontier of the 1860s. The fourth and final novel in the Sherlock Holmes canon, ... |
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer charts the escapades of a thirteen-year-old boy growing up on the banks of the Mississippi. Testing the patience of his aunt Polly, the bold and sharp-witted Tom Sawyer frequently skips school in search of excitement, and the scrapes he gets into with his friend Huckleberry Finn range from innocent japes to more serious events such as the witnessing of a murder. One of the most popular and influential American novels, Mark Twain's masterpiece is at the same time a highly entertaining romp which celebrates youth and freedom and a more profound investigation of his times, touching on ... |
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Controversial, scandalous, erudite and funny, Ulysses is undisputedly a landmark of twentieth-century modernism. It charts one day - 16th June 1904 - in the lives of three inhabitants of Dublin: the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, the artist Stephen Dedalus and Bloom's wife Molly. Their peregrinations, thoughts and encounters form the basis of the narrative, which becomes a celebration of all human experience through the lives of specific individuals in a specific place at a specific time. Ulysses is both an experimental novel and a book intimately concerned with the events of modern life. A lively repository of ... |
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"Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." Blind, broken by the death of his wife and bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, Milton dictated his sweeping biblical epic Paradise Lost to a series of helpers. While the struggle between God and Satan rages across the cosmos, the human tragedy of Adam and Eve - the temptation and fall - is movingly depicted in language unsurpassed in its musicality and beauty. A staggering and audacious undertaking - seeking, in Milton's words, to justify the ways of God to men - Paradise Lost has been revered since its initial publication, inspiring writers from Mary ... |
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Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky business interests and a shadowy past. As the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, details of Gatsby's impossible love for a married woman emerge, until events spiral into tragedy. Regarded as Fitzgerald's masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of American literature, The Great Gatsby is a vivid chronicle of the excesses and decadence of the Jazz Age, as ... |
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When the corpse of Sir Charles Baskerville is found on the grounds of his Dartmoor estate next to a mysterious animal footprint, thoughts turn to a fabled family curse: that of a hellhound set out to avenge a crime committed by one of Sir Charles’s ancestors. As the only surviving heir of the Baskervilles is terrified for his safety, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are called in to investigate. The most famous novel in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes cycle, The Hound of the Baskervilles is a masterpiece of terror, suspense and mystery which has enthralled readers young and old since it was first published in 1902. ... |
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A Victorian scientist and inventor creates a machine for propelling himself through time, and voyages to the year AD 802701, where he discovers a race of humanoids called the Eloi. Their gently indolent way of life, set in a decaying cityscape, leads the scientist to believe that they are the remnants of a once great civilization. He is forced to revise this assessment when he comes across the cave dwellings of threatening ape-like creatures known as Morlocks, whose dark underground world he must explore to discover the terrible secrets of this fractured society, and the means of getting back to his own time. A biting ... |
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On his return to London after serving in the Second Anglo-Afghan War as an assistant surgeon, Doctor Watson is looking for a place to live. He is introduced to a certain Mr Holmes, an eccentric, pipe-smoking gentleman who shows an interest in chemistry and is currently engaged in a test to detect human haemoglobin. What begins as a simple house-sharing enquiry soon turns into a fully fledged study in scarlet, a case of blood, murder and betrayal that will transport the reader from the streets of London to the early settlements of Salt Lake City in Utah... The book is part of the Alma Junior Classics series by Alma ... |
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Based on lectures given at Cambridge colleges and first published by the Hogarth Press in 1929, A Room of One's Own is an extended essay about the predicament of female writers and a stirring call for autonomy and recognition. As well as settling scores with reactionary critics and laying the foundations of a history of women's literature, the text is also a triumph of imagination, with a celebrated passage envisaging the fate of a fictional sister of Shakespeare's. A seminal, widely studied feminist polemic that touches on both literature and politics, A Room of One's Own is essential reading for those ... |
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After spending several years in a sanatorium recovering from an illness that caused him to lose his memory and ability to reason, Prince Myshkin arrives in St Petersburg and is at once confronted with the stark realities of life in the Russian capital - from greed, murder and nihilism to passion, vanity and love. Mocked for his childlike naivety yet valued for his openness and understanding, Prince Myshkin finds himself entangled with two women in a position he cannot bring himself to resolve. Dostoevsky, who wrote that in the character of Prince Myshkin he hoped to portray a wholly virtuous man, shows the workings of ... |
