Catherine Sloper is heiress to a fortune and is easily overwhelmed by the attentions of a handsome but penniless suitor. Her clever father is implacably opposed to the match, and the scene for a classic confrontation is set. This new edition of James's most enduringly popular work offers more information than any previous edition.

A NEW TRANSLATION BY ADAM THORPE'A great novel that is also an inexhaustible pleasure to read' GuardianEmma Bovary is an avid reader of sentimental novels; brought up on a Normandy farm and convent-educated, she longs for romance. At first, Emma pins her hopes on marriage, but life with her well-meaning husband in the provinces leaves her bored and dissatisfied. She seeks escape through extravagant spending sprees and, eventually, adultery.

As Emma pursues her impossible reverie she seals her...

One of the most spectacular successes of the flourishing literary marketplace of eighteenth-century London, Pamela also marked a defining moment in the emergence of the modern novel. In the words of one contemporary, it divided the world "into two different Parties, Pamelists and Anti-pamelists," even eclipsing the sensational factional politics of the day. Preached for its morality, and denounced as pornography in disguise, it vividly describes a young servant's long resistance to the attemp...

THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION ‘WINNER OF WINNERS’ CHOSEN AS SERVICE95 BOOK CLUB'S BOOK OF THE MONTH FOR AUGUST 2023 ‘A literary masterpiece’ DAILY MAIL ‘An immense achievement’ OBSERVER ‘A gorgeous, pitiless account of love, violence and betrayal’ TIME In 1960s Nigeria, three lives intersect. Ugwu works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic lover, the lecturer.

And Richard, a shy Englishman,...

`It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.' As Joris -Karl Huysmans announced in 1884, Against Nature was fated to be a novel like no other. Resisting the models of classic nineteenth-century fiction, it focuses on the attempts of its anti-hero, the hypersensitive neurotic and aesthete, Des Esseintes, to escape Paris and the vulgarity of modern life. Holed up in his private mu...

The Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing's first novel is a taut and tragic portrayal of a crumbling marriage, set in South Africa during the years of Arpartheid. Set in Rhodesia, `The Grass is Singing' tells the story of Dick Turner, a failed white farmer and his wife, Mary, a town girl who hates the bush and viciously abuses the black South Africans who work on their farm. But after many years, trapped by poverty, sapped by the heat of their tiny house, the lonely and frightened Mary turns to M...

The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed itTo the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding strength in the savage beauty of the land even as loneliness and personal tragedies crowd in. A rapturous work of understated...

Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight is an unforgettable portrait of a woman bravely confronting loneliness and despair in her quest for self-determinationIn 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. She has escaped personal tragedy and has come to France to find courage and seek independence. She tells herself to expect nothing, especially not kindness, least of all from men.

Tomorrow, she resolves, she will dye her hair blonde...

A brilliant new translation of Koestler's long-lost original manuscript. A chilling and unforgettable 20th century classic. From a prison cell in an unnamed country run by a totalitarian government Rubashov reflects.

Once a powerful player in the regime, mercilessly dispensing with anyone who got in the way of his party's aims, Rubashov has had the tables turned on him. He has been arrested and he'll be interrogated, probably tortured and certainly executed. Darkness at Noon is as gripping as...

After her parents' bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself turned into a 'little feathered shuttlecock' to be swatted back and forth by her selfish mother, Ida, and her vain father, Beale, who value her only as a means of provoking one another.