Peopled by colourful characters from the nineteenth-century Parisian underworld; the street children, the prostitutes and the criminals, this novel tells the story of an escaped convict Jean Valjean, and his efforts to reform his ways and care for the little orphan girl he rescues from a life of cruelty.

Dorian Gray gives his soul for eternal youth. While his portrait changes hideously, reflecting his crimes and corruption, he remains outwardly flawless. This new edition uses the 1891 expanded text and shows how Wilde transformed his many sources.

Jean Paget is just twenty years old and working in Malaya when the Japanese invasion begins. When she is captured she joins a group of other European women and children whom the Japanese force to march for miles through the jungle - an experience that leads to the deaths of many.

This text is a revised edition of Dostoyevsky's classic tale. Rasholnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. As he embarks on a dangerous cat and mouse game, he is pursued by his conscience.

Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between her soft-hearted husband and Heathcliff, the passionate and resentful man who has loved her since childhood. The power of their bond creates a maelstrom of cruelty and violence which will leave one of them dead and cast a shadow over the lives of their children.

Includes tales that glitter and haunt.

During her first season at Bath, a young girl experiences the joys of fashionable society. When her sophisticated new aquaintances invite her to their father's mysterious house, she fabricates her own Gothic romance, imagining the crimes that have been committed there.

Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse.

This text is a revised edition of Dickens' classic tale. After 18 years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. Two very different men become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette.

Dr Jekyll has been experimenting with his identity. He has developed a drug which separates the two sides of his nature and allows him to occasionally abandon himself to his most corrupt inclinations as the monstrous Mr Hyde. But gradually he begins to find that the journey back to goodness becomes more and more difficult.

This text is an updated edition of Flaubert's classic tale. Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion.

After the war is over, a radioactive cloud begins to sweep southwards on the winds, gradually poisoning everything in its path. An American submarine captain is among the survivors left sheltering in Australia, preparing with the locals for the inevitable.

After reading A Christmas Carol, the notoriously reculsive Thomas Carlyle was 'seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality' and threw not one but two Christmas dinner parties.

Little Women has remained enduringly popular since its publication in 1868, becoming the inspiration for a whole genre of family stories. Set in a small New England community, it tells of the March family: Marmee looks after daughters in the absence of her husband, who is serving as an army chaplain in the Civil War, and Meg, Jo,Beth, and Amy experience domestic trials and triumphs as they ...

This text is a revised edition of Thomas Hardy's classic tale. When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her cousin Alec proves to be her downfall.

Dorian is a good-natured young man until he falls in with the immoral Lord Henry and discovers the power of his own exceptional beauty. As he gradually sinks deep into a world of selfish luxury, he apparently remains physically unchanged and untouched by age. But up in his attic, hidden behind a curtain, his portrait tells a different story.

An omnibus of Jeeves and Wooster stories. It contains Carry On, Jeeves , The Inimitable Jeeves , Very Good, Jeeves and the short stories Jeeves Makes an Omelette and Jeeves and the Greasy Bird .

Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other 'midnight's children' all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts.

Scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery, this novel is peopled with some of memorable characters (the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy). It combines the elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama.

Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each episode has its own literary style, and the epic journey of Odysseus is only one of many correspondencies that