A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray's masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a charmingly ruthless social climber who is determined to leave behind her humble origins, no matter the cost. Her more gentle friend Amelia, by contrast, only cares for Captain George Osborne, despite his selfishness and her family's disapproval. As both women move within the flamboyant milieu of Regency England, the political...

Three-Volume Boxed Set
Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men.

As Napoleon's army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from...

Though James Joyce began these stories of Dublin life in 1904 when he was twenty-two and completed them in 1907, their unconventional themes and language led to repeated rejections by publishers and delayed publication until 1914. In the century since, his story "The Dead" has come to be seen as one of the most powerful evocations of human loss and longing that the English language possesses; all the other stories in Dubliners are as beautifully turned and as greatly admired. They remind us once again that James Joyce was not only modernism's chief...

In his first and still most widely read novel, James Joyce makes a strange peace with the traditional narrative of a young man's self-discovery by respecting its substance while exploding its form, thereby inaugurating a literary revolution.

Published in 1916 when Joyce was already at work on Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is exactly what its title says and much more. In an exuberantly inventive masterpiece of subjectivity, Joyce portrays his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, growing up in Dublin and struggling through religious and sexual guilt toward an...

Leo Tolstoy's earliest published work, the trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, was written when he was in his twenties, offering a tantalizing first glimpse of the literary talents that would come to fruition in his later masterpieces.
Chronicling the experiences of a wealthy landowner's son as he grows up and becomes aware of the world and his place in it, these three short novels were only loosely inspired by Tolstoy's own memories. In old age he condemned the work as -an awkward mixture of fact and fiction, - but the imaginative powers that enabled him to capture...

First published in 1910, Howards End is the novel that earned E. M. Forster recognition as a major writer.

At its heart lie two families--the wealthy and business-minded Wilcoxes and the cultured and idealistic Schlegels. When the beautiful and independent Helen Schlegel begins an impetuous affair with the ardent Paul Wilcox, a series of events is sparked--some very funny, some very tragic--that results in a dispute over who will inherit Howards End, the Wilcoxes' charming country home.

As much about the clash between individual wills as the clash between the sexes and the...

The Sicilian prince, Don Fabrizio, hero of Lampedusa's great and only novel, is described as enormous in size, in intellect, and in sensuality. The book he inhabits shares his dimensions in its evocation of an aristocracy confronting democratic upheaval and the new force of nationalism. In the decades since its publication shortly after the author's death in 1957, The Leopard has come to be regarded as the twentieth century's greatest historical fiction.

Introduction by David Gilmour; Translation by Archibald Colquhoun

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

In the grand tradition of the epic novel, Boris Pasternak's masterpiece brings to life the drama and immensity of the Russian Revolution through the story of the gifted physician-poet, Zhivago; the revolutionary, Strelnikov; and Lara, the passionate woman they both love. Caught up in the great events of politics and war that eventually destroy him and millions of others, Zhivago clings to the private world of family life and love, embodied especially in the magical Lara.

First published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago was not allowed to appear in the Soviet...

Of all Jane Austen's great and delightful novels, Persuasion is widely regarded as the most moving. It is the story of a second chance.

Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish, spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen, she fell in love with-and was engaged to-a naval officer, the fearless and headstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, and Anne allowed herself to be persuaded, against her profoundest instinct, to give him up.Now, at twenty-seven, and believing that she has lost her bloom, Anne is startled...