Eugene wants to get on in the world. So he has come to Paris, where the streets teem with chancers, criminals and social climbers and everyone is out for what they can get. He sees a plan to make a fortune. Two women mysteriously come at night to visit him, Could they bring him the status and acceptance he craves?

William Dorrit is a long-term inmate in the debtors' prison, Marshalsea. He must stay there until his fortune improves and his debt is paid. For her entire life so far, his daughter Amy has faithfully nursed him in jail. Trying to keep herself out of debt she works as a seamstress for the stern Mrs Clennam.

The Flowers of Evil, which T. S. Eliot called the greatest example of modern poetry in any language, shocked the literary world of nineteenth century France with its outspoken portrayal of lesbian love, its linking sexuality and death, its unremitting irony, and its unflinching celebration of the seamy side of urban life. The volume was seized by the police, and Baudelaire and his published were .

This is the story of the men and women whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Chicago World Fair, and of two men in particular: an architect and a serial killer. Spicing the narrative are the stories of a cast of historical characters including Buffalo Bill, Scott Joplin and Theodore Dreiser.

Blending realism with non-realistic genres such as fairy-tale, allegory, and pastoral, this title presents the tale of Nell's tragedy that contains some of the author's most memorable comic and grotesque creations, including the dwarf Daniel Quilp, Dick Swiveller and Kit Nubbles.

Problems involving a man with a twisted lip, a fabulous blue carbuncle and five orange pips tax Sherlock Holmes' intellect alongside some of his most famous cases, including A Scandal in Bohemia and The Red-Headed League.

Set in mid-Victorian England, this novel follows the fight for ascendancy among the clergy and dependents of a great English cathedral.

Presenting the apology and confession of a minor mid-19th-century Russian official, this title offers a half-desperate, half-mocking political critique and an account of man's breakaway from society and descent 'underground'.

Presents stories and poems that probe to the depths of the human psyche. This book includes the detective story Murders in the Rue Morgue ; the disturbing classic, The Fall of the House of Usher and the horrifyingly claustrophobic, The Pit and the Pendulum .

Based on a real-life crime which horrified Russia in 1869, this novel castigates the fanaticism of the country's revolutionaries, particularly those known as Nihilists. It presents a disturbing portrait of five young men saturated in ideology and bent on destruction, and a study of terrorism.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the community and ...

Details the life of the internationally famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass, from his birth into slavery in 1818 to his escape to the North in 1838 - how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and drivers, how he learned to read and write, and how he grew into a man who could only live free or die.

Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner's son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the two men.

Describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. This title argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission, but in a powerful life force.

A story of sixteen-year-old David Balfour, an orphan, who after being kidnapped by his villainous uncle manages to escape and becomes involved in the struggle of the Scottish highlanders against English rule.

The making of the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the OED's editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him.

Premiered at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum theatre, this translation presents both parts of Goethe's lifelong masterpiece.

In print since 1948, this is a single-volume collection of Oscar Wilde's texts. It contains his only novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray as well as his plays, stories, poems, essays and letters. Illustrated with many photographs.

Originally published in 1854, Walden or Life in the Woods, is a vivid account of the time that Henry D. Thoreau lived alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. It is one of the most influential and compelling books in American literature.