Set in Puritan New England, this American classic tells the story of Hester Pynne who wears the scarlet letter forced upon her as social condemnation for her crimes of passion and adultery.

The first of Trollope's popular Barsetshire novels, set in the fictional cathedral town of Barchester, The Warden centers on the honorable cleric Septimus Harding, one of Trollope's most memorable characters. When Harding is accused of mismanaging church funds, his predicament lays bare the complexities of the Victorian world and of nineteenth-century provincial life.

Retells the classic Christian story of the war in Heaven between angels led by the Archangel Michael and others led by Satan. The war ends with the defeat and casting to Earth of the latter. The plot emphasises themes of protagonists fighting a ruling hierarchy, and attempting to escape it, as well as "hiddenness, delusion, revolution, and epiphany ... a literary exploration of existential choices in an apocalyptic context". It is written, says René...

As its title suggests, the book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram's own birth is not even reached until Volume III.

Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honore de Balzac's Eugenie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics. In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugenie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely,...

The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) is a compelling novel of passion and daring. Set at the beginning of the 19th-century in northern Italy, it traces the joyous but ill-starred amorous exploits of a handsome young aristocrat called Fabrice del Dongo. The novel's great achievement is to conjure up the excitement and romance of youth while never losing sight of the harsh realities which beset the pursuit of happiness. This new translation captures Stendhal's...

Illustrated by Edy Legrand. The text as abridged and arranged by Edward Garnett, with a prefatory note by M. Garnett, and a general introduction by T. E. Lawrence. The special content of this edition were copyrighted in 1953 by the George Macy Company. TRAVELS IN ARABIA DESERTA has been recognized, almost since its publication in 1888, as one of the greatest travel books in the English language. Doughty spent almost two years traveling, going on pilgrimages,...