Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Classics

With an Introduction by John S. Whitley, University of Sussex.

After Sherlock Holmes' apparently fatal encounter with the sinister Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, the great detective reappears, to the delight of the faithful Dr Watson in The Adventures of the Empty House.

The stories are illustrated by Sidney Paget, the finest of illustrators, from which our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive.

This is the second of three volumes of The Complete Sherlock Holmes newly typeset from the original copies of The...

With an Introduction by Roger Clark, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling.

Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist's meticulous account of provincial matters. For the writer, subject matter was subordinate to his anguished quest for aesthetic perfection. For his twentieth-century successors the formal experiments that underpin Madame Bovary look forward to the innovations of contemporary...

With an Introduction and Notes by Professor Roger Cardinal. University of Kent at Canterbury.

Translationsare by Paul Desages (Around the World in Eighty Days) and Arthur Chambers (Five Weeks in a Balloon).

JULES VERNE (1828-1905) POSSESSED that rare storyteller's gift of being able to present the far-fetched and the downright unbelievable in such a way as effortlessly to inspire his reader's allegiance and trust. This volume contains two of his best-loved yarns, chosen from among the sixty-four titles of Les Voyages...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Nicola Bradbury, University of Reading.

This simple and haunting story captures the transcience of life and its surrounding emotions.

To the Lighthouse is the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels. It is based on her own early experiences, and while it touches on childhood and children's perceptions and desires, it is at its most trenchant when exploring adult relationships, marriage and the changing class-structure in the period spanning the Great War.

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Reading.

Transplanted to Europe from her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An unexpected inheritance apparently gives her freedom, but despite all her natural advantages she makes one disastrous error of judgement and the result is genuinely tragic. Her tale, told with James' inimitable poise, is of the widest relevance.

Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cattermole, with a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.

This vivid historical and political novel by Dickens is centred on the infamous 'No Popery' riots, instigated by Lord George Gordon, which terrorised London in 1780. Dickens' targets are prejudice, intolerance, religious bigotry and nationalistic fervour, together with the villains who exploit these for selfish ends.

His intense account of the riots is interwoven with the mysterious tale of a...

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.

Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is a huge literary paradox, for it is both a novel and an anti-novel. As a comic novel replete with bawdy humour and generous sentiments, it introduces us to a vivid group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. As an anti-novel, it is a deliberately tantalising and exuberantly egoistic work, ostentatiously digressive, involving the reader in the labyrinthine...

With an Introduction and Notes by Phillip Mallett, Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews.

Educated beyond her station, Grace Melbury returns to the woodland village of little Hintock and cannot marry her intended, Giles Winterborne. Her alternative choice proves disastrous, and in a moving tale that has vibrant characters, many humorous moments and genuine pathos coupled with tragic irony, Hardy eschews a happy ending.

With characteristic derision, he exposes the cruel indifference of the archaic legal system off his day, and shows the tragic...

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of 'Poetry Review'.

Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.

But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible...

Notes and Introduction by David Ellis, University of Kent at Canterbury.

With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated edition. The famous 'Lady Chatterley trial' heralded the sexual revolution of the coming...

Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'There is no harm in a man's cub.'

Best known for the 'Mowgli' stories, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book expertly interweaves myth, morals, adventure and powerful story-telling. Set in Central India, Mowgli is raised by a pack of wolves. Along the way he encounters memorable characters such as the foreboding tiger Shere Kahn, Bagheera the panther and Baloo the bear. Including other stories such as that of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a heroic mongoose and Toomai, a young elephant handler, Kipling's fables...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

'Where, you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.'

Orphaned and sent to live with her uncle in his austere manor on the moors, Mary Lennox is a lonely and unhappy child. A meeting with Dickon, her servant's brother begins her adventure and it is through their friendship and her relationship with her troubled hypochondriac cousin Colin that she begins to learn about herself. Their lives all begin to change when a Robin shows Mary the door to a mysterious secret garden.

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

'Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"'

So begins the tale of Alice, who follows a curious White Rabbit down a hole and falls into Wonderland, a fantastical place where nothing is quite as it seems: animals talk, nonsensical characters...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

'Wouldn't it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true and we could live in them?'

A heart-warming tale of love, sisterhood and hardship during the New England Civil War, Little Women tells the story of the lovable March family. Meg, Beth, Jo and Amy try to support their mother at home while their father is away at war and enter into various scrapes and adventures as they do so. Alcott beautifully interweaves bad times and good as her characters struggle with the trials...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.'

Austen's best-loved tale of love, marriage and society in class-conscious Georgian England still delights modern readers today with its comedy and characters. It follows the feisty, quick-witted Elizabeth Bennet as her parents seek to ensure good marriages for her and her sisters in order to secure their future. The protagonists Darcy and Elizabeth learn much about themselves and...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

'Oh Mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat.'

Spirited and impulsive, Marianne Dashwood is the complete opposite to her controlled and sensible sister, Elinor. When it comes to matters of the heart, Marianne is passionate and romantic and soon falls for the charming, but unreliable Mr Willoughby. Elinor, in contrast, copes...