On 15 August 778, Charlemagne's army was returning from a successful expedition against Saracen Spain when its rearguard was ambushed in a Pyrenean pass. Written by an unknown poet, this book tells of Charlemagne's warrior nephew, Lord of Breton Marches, who valiantly leads his men into battle against the Saracens, but dies defiant to the end.

Born to drunken parents in the slums of Paris, Nana lives in squalor until she is discovered at the Theatre des Varietes. She soon rises from the streets to set the city alight as the most famous high-class prostitute of her day. Nana's hedonistic appetite for luxury and decadent pleasures knows no bounds - until, eventually, it consumes her.

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime.

One of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's great Comedie Humaine, 'Eugenie Grandet' (1833) is a story of family conflict, unrequited love and self-sacrifice set against the aftermath of the French Revolution.

Containing various essays, this work discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience.

In Search of Lost Time is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. This book is an English translation of the French original.

Cousin Bette (1846) is considered to be Balzac's last great novel, and a key work in his Human Comedy. Set in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, it is a complex tale of the devastating effect of violent jealousy and sexual passion. Against a meticulously detailed backdrop of a post-Napoleonic France struggling with massive industrial and economic change, Balzac's characters span many classes of ...

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. This is the story of two brothers, but the subject of the novel is in its dismantling of society and its assumptions, a dissection of modern lives and loves.

In Search of Lost Time is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. This book offers an English translation of the French original.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing la recherche du temps perdu . Moncrieff's translation strives to capture the extraordinary blend of muscular analysis with poetic reverie that typifies Proust's style.

Michel had been a blindfold scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency and morality. But the freedom from constraints that Michel finds on his restless travels is won at great cost.

One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. He sets off with his valet Passepartout, and passes through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand - whether train or elephant - overcoming set-backs and racing against the clock.

This work is a frank treatment of Rousseau's sexual and intellectual development. It offers a model for the reflective life: the solitary, uncompromising individual; the enemy of servitude and habit; and the selfish egoist who dedicates himself to a particular ideal.

A neurasthenic aristocrat turns his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreats to an isolated country villa. Here he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems and perfumes and embarks on a series of increasingly strange aesthetic experiments.

A sensational international bestseller, and winner of France's coveted Prix Goncourt, 'The Lover' is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart.

'A Simple Heart', 'The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller' and 'Herodias'. Unabridged republication of the work, originally published by Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1921.

'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.' This line was adopted by Jean Anouilh, to characterize the first production of Waiting For Godot at the Theatre de Babylone, in 1953. Anybody acquinted with Beckett's masterly black comedy would not question the recognition of this twentieth-century literature classic.

'If any man or woman should ask what I wish this romance...to be called, it is the Romance of the Rose, in which the whole art of love is contained'. Guillaume de Lorris's own introduction to his allegorical account of the progress of a courtly love affair gives no indication of the eventual scale and scope of the work, which became the most popular and influential of all medieval romances. In ..