"On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge. By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have...

A young governess turns up at a country estate in Essex to care for Miles and Flora, two young orphans left in care of their absentee uncle. Soon after her tenure begins, the governess begins to see strangers walking the grounds, and interacting with the siblings in odd and disturbing ways. The governess begins to feel they are not wholly human-but rather are ghosts haunting Miles and Flora, and their influence upon the children has tragic consequences....

Voyage of the Beagle chronicles Charles Darwin's five years as a naturalist on board the H.M.S. Beagle. The notes and observations that he recorded in his diary included Chile, Argentina and Galapagos Islands and encompasses the ecology, geology and anthropology of the places he visits. A fascinating travel memoir the ideas that were later to evolve into Darwin's theory of natural selection find their naissance in Voyage of the Beagle.

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Young man's inheritance of his father's estate depends upon the conditions of his marriage. Dickens's last complete and full length novel, first published in 1865.

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean - a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert - Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

"In Bleak House, competing claims of love and inheritance--complicated by murder--have given rise to a costly and decades-long legal battle that one litigant refers to as 'the family curse.' The insidious London fog that rises from the river Thames and seeps into the very bones of the characters symbolizes the pervasive corruption of the legal system and the society that supports it, targets of Dickens's satirical wrath."--P. [2] of cover.

Here is Kazuo Ishiguro's profoundly compelling portrait of Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the "great gentleman," Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about...

"The greatest writer of his time."-Edmund Wilson "One of the great poets of the novel, a genius of his art"-Edgar Johnson "His characters are marvelous, his insights wonderful…you don't expect reality but you get something bigger and better."-Ruth Rendell The Old Curiosity Shop was initially published in a weekly serial, "Master Humphrey's Clock", between 1840 and 1841. Charles Dickens' story of the frail and innocent orphan had become such...

Henry Jekyll was the kindest, most respected man in England. Why then was the foul, brutal Hyde his sole heir? The answer to this was so shocking it could drive men mad.

"On the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I: a hardcover edition of the classic tale of a young German soldier's harrowing experiences in the trenches, widely acclaimed as the greatest war novel of all time. When twenty-year-old Paul Baumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during World War I, they are full of youthful enthusiam. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught to believe in shatters under...