Throws a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, this novel is a thinly disguised account of his own childhood and youth 'in the bosom of a Christian family'.

New Grub Street (1891), generally regarded as Gissing's finest novel, is the story of the daily lives and broken dreams of men and women forced to earn a living by the pen. With vivid realism it tells of a group of novelists, journalists, and scholars caught in the literary and cultural crisis that hit Britain in the closing years of the nineteenth century, as universal education, popular ...

The Dowells, a wealthy American couple, have been close friends with the Ashburnhams for years. Edward Ashburnham, a first-rate soldier, seems to be the perfect English gentleman, and Leonora his perfect wife, but beneath the surface their marriage seethes with unhappiness and deception. This is a novel of passion and betrayal.

Describes an imaginary visit to a topsy-turvy country called Erewhon, where it is a punishable offence to be physically ill, but where criminality and immorality are looked kindly upon as treatable diseases. The English church is pilloried in the system of Musical Banks, whose currency nobody believes in but everyone pretends to value.