Fiction

Heart of Darkness tells the story of Charlie Marlowe, who takes a steamboat on a voyage into the heart of Africa. His mission is to relieve an ivory agent named Kurtz, who has been taken ill at a remote trading station. Marlowe's eyes are opened wide as he witnesses acts of cruelty on his journey and when he meets Kurtz, he is forced to examine his own values and views of humanity. In addition t

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a friend's copy of Tender Is the Night, "If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God's sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith.

Northanger Abbey is the light-hearted account of a young girl's first excursion into fashionable society. While in Bath, Catherine Morland is invited by Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor to visit their home, Northanger Abbey. A devotee of Gothic novels, Catherine hopes that the Abbey will live up to her vision of haunted ruins. This delightful novel pokes fun at the popular fiction of its day

One of the most popular characters of Victorian fiction, Sherlock Holmes returns here to take on his arch-enemy, Moriarty, in a collection of stories first published in The Strand Magazine between 1903 and 1904. This volume contains 13 classic detective stories featuring the iconic detective. ABOUT THE SERIES: Arcturus Essential Sherlock Holmes presents Arthur Conan Doyle's best-loved Holmes s

Once upon a time the brothers Grimm published a scholarly collection of folk tales, but only when they rewrote them for children did the Fairy Tales become popular. In addition to accusations of violence that led to more sanitized versions of the Tales than this 1884 translation

Hard Times is set in Victorian England in the 1850s and the fictitious industrial city of Coketown, where Thomas Gradgrind, 'A man of realities', is obsessed with a misguided utilitarianism that insists on 'nothing but fact', without emotion or imagination.

A shipwreck brings Lemuel Gulliver to Lilliput, where he finds himself in a kingdom of tiny people. This experience is later reversed when he lands among the giants of Brobdingnag. And yet more contrasts lie in store for him between the Houyhnhnms - a race of noble horses - and the savage sub-human Yahoos. Gulliver's Travels has not been out of print since its publication in 1726. Readers, 'fr

Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy''s Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her to both tragedy and true love.

Published in 1826, The Last of the Mohicans is an adventure story centred on the kinship between white frontiersman, Natty Bumppo - or 'Hawkeye' - and two Mohican Indians, Chingachgook and his son Uncas. The action takes place during the French and Indian War. Alice and Cora, daughters of a British fort commander, are on a perilous journey through the dark forests of western New York. Their Huron

Reading A Christmas Carol has become for many a tradition during the festive season. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge has become the epitome of miserliness, but A Christmas Carol is a story of redemption as Scrooge is visited in turn by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Arcturus Classics series brings together high-quality paperback editions of classics wo

Jim was first mate on the Patna, when the ship and passengers were abandoned by the crew in the Red Sea. Accused of cowardice, Jim immerses himself in work on a remote colonial trading post yet, despite the locals†high regard for him, the guilt of the Patna remains.

When shy Fanny Price arrives at Mansfield Park to live with her cousins, she is overwhelmed and only put at ease by her cousin, Edmund Bertram, whom she soon comes to love. But Edmund's head is turned by the beautiful Mary Crawford and she and her brother Henry spark a series of romantic entanglements that lead the Bertram family to the brink of social disaster. It becomes apparent to Fanny that

The publication of this masterpiece of realism gave rise to an obscenity trial in 1857, which earned Flaubert an acquittal, and established Emma Bovary as one of literature's greatest characters. The eponymous Emma is a victim of the smug, self-deluding French bourgeoisie that Flaubert despised. Trapped in a marriage to a second-rate provincial doctor, she escapes the suffocating confines of her

Vanity Fair follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847 to 1848 and is a satirisation of early 19th-century British society. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Arcturus Classics series brings together high-quality paperback editions of classics works, presented with conte

Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome (1911) is a classic of American literature. A young girl, Mattie Silver is hired to keep house on the bleak New England farm belonging to Ethan Frome and his sickly wife Zeena, who is her cousin. Mattie completely captures Ethan's heart but the would-be lovers are kept apart by the spiteful Zeena, who then banishes the girl without warning. Before she leaves,