The Adventures of Pinocchio
Carlo Collodi
The story of the wooden puppet who learns goodness and becomes a real boy is famous the world over, and has been familiar in English for over a century. From the moment Joseph the carpenter ...
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Against Nature
Joris-Karl Huysmans and Nicholas White (ed.)
‘It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I had to say.’ As Joris -Karl Huysmans ...
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
‘Love… it means too much to me, far more than you can understand.’ At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate ...
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Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne
Having assured the members of London’s exclusive Reform Club that he will circumnavigate the world in 80 days, Fogg – stiff, repressed, English – starts by joining forces with an ...
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The Assommoir
Émile Zola and Robert Lethbridge (ed.)
Gervaise had waited up for Lantier until two in the morning. Then, shivering all over from sitting half undressed in the cold air from the window, she’d slumped across the bed, ...
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The Belly of Paris
Émile Zola
‘Respectable people… What bastards!’ Unjustly deported to Devil's Island following Louis-Napoleon's coup-d'état in December 1851, Florent Quenu escapes and returns to Paris. He finds the ...
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The Bright Side of Life
Émile Zola and Andrew Rothwell (ed.)
‘Neither spoke another word, they were gripped by a shared, unthinking madness as they plunged headlong together into vertiginous rapture.’ Orphaned with a substantial inheritance at the ...
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Capital: An Abridged Edition
Karl Marx and David McLellan (ed.)
A classic of early modernism, Capital combines vivid historical detail with economic analysis to produce a bitter denunciation of mid-Victorian capitalist society. It has also proved to be ...
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The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal Stendhal, Margaret Mauldon (ed.), and Roger Pearson (ed.)
The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) is a compelling novel of passion and daring, of prisons and heroic escape, of political chicanery and sublime personal courage. Set at the beginning of the ...
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The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and David McLellan (ed.)
The Communist Manifesto is one of the most influential pieces of political propaganda ever written. It is a summary of the whole Marxist vision of history and is the foundation document of ...
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The Conquest of Plassans
Émile Zola and Patrick McGuinness
‘Abbé Faujas has arrived!’ The arrival of Abbé Faujas in the provincial town of Plassans has profound consequences for the community, and for the family of François Mouret in particular. ...
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Corinne: or Italy
Madame de Staël, Sylvia Raphael (ed.), and John Isbell
‘Look at her, she is the image of our beautiful Italy.’ Corinne, or Italy (1807) is both the story of a love affair between Oswald, Lord Nelvil and a beautiful poetess, and an homage to the ...
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The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas and David Coward (ed.)
‘People get out of prison, and when they get out, and their name is Edmond Dantès, they take their revenge!’ Falsely accused of treason, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested on his ...
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Cousin Bette
Honoré de Balzac and David Bellos
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 ...
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Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky and Sarah J. Young (ed.)
‘One death, in exchange for thousands of lives - it's simple arithmetic!’ A new translation of Dostoevsky's epic masterpiece, Crime and Punishment (1866). The impoverished student ...
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David Copperfield
Charles Dickens, Nina Burgis (ed.), and Andrew Sanders
‘I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD,’ wrote Dickens of what is the most personal, certainly one of the most popular, of all his novels. ...
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Leo Tolstoy and Andrew Kahn (ed.)
‘No one pitied him as he would have liked to be pitied.’ As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In ‘The ...
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The Devil and Other Stories
Leo Tolstoy and Richard F. Gustafson (ed.)
‘It is impossible to explain why Yevgeny chose Liza Annenskaya, as it is always impossible to explain why a man chooses this and not that woman.’ This collection of eleven stories spans ...
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Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Patrick Coleman (ed.)
In his Discourses (1755), Rousseau argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process. If inequality is intolerable - and Rousseau shows ...
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