James' novel featuring a complex and bizarre battle between two wives - the shy Maggie, who marries an Italian prince, and the prince's former mistress, who marries Maggie's widowed father. Determined to take back her lover, the brilliant Charlotte is nevertheless defeated by her rival.

This selection of stories by Katherine Mansfield has been chosen by Claire Tomalin and emphasize the stronger, feminist side of her writing rather than the popular, more sentimental view. The 21 stories are presented in chronological order and include Prelude, The Garden Party and At the Bay.

A portrayal of genius possessed, through the biography of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, narrated by his friend Zeitblom in the years 1943-45, as Germany faces ruin.

The story of Hester Prynne, taken in adultery, arraigned by her puritan community and abandoned by her husband and her lover. Combining moral force, austere beauty and psychology, it is a narrative which provides the framework for the author's reflections on the metaphysics of good and evil.

When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell's native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. This title offfers a portrait how these two men explored the feudal world.

Naguib Mahfouz's magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time. The Nobel Prize--winning writer's masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain's occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century. The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha...

In The Guermantes Way Proust's narrator recalls his initiation into the dazzling world of Parisian high society. Looking back over his time in the glamorous salons of the aristocracy, he satirises this shallow world and his own youthful infatuation with it. His observations, and his experiences with his lover Albertine, also educate him in the volatile nature of desire as he walks the path towards adulthood.

Offers a selection of the poet's work, including all the lyrics and the important prophetic books.

After he is wrongly accused of a crime and expelled from his community, weaver Silas Marner becomes a miser and a recluse. A strange sequence of events, and the appearance of a small child, transforms his life in this realistic tale of rural life, and symbolic drama of sin and repentance.

Encompassing a period of almost 50 years, the stories of Henry James represent the most remarkable feat of sustained literary creation in modern times. These two volumes contain his best work from 1892 to 1910.