George Orwell's famous satire of the Soviet Union, in which "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." A satire on totalitarianism in which farm animals overthrow their human owner and set up their own government.

Charles Dickens's classic story of orphan David Copperfield growing up in nineteenth-century England.

This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...

Wilde lived out a conflict between his public identity and his private self; and this fissure between the two is interestingly typical of his age. Introduction by Terry Eagleton.

I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year, observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest and most appealing women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many fascinating figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray 's wonderfully satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Scorned for her lack of money and breeding, Becky must use...

A drama focusing on the volatile relationship between three brothers and their father, who reunite after being separated since childhood. Each brother represents a different aspect of the Russian people: Dmitiri is unrestrained in love, hatred, jealousy, and generosity; Ivan is an intellectual who gives impromptu speeches about good and evil; and Alyosha is patient, good, and loving, even in the face of adversity.

While the totalitarianism that provoked George Orwell into writing 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' seems to be passing into oblivion, his harrowing, cautionary tale of a man trapped in a political nightmare has had the opposite fate, and its relevance and power to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade.

Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief.