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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour's dog murdered he set...

Combined for the first time here are Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary class...

Baldwin's ground-breaking second novel, which established him as one of the great American writers of his time David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's fiancée returns and, denying his true nature, he rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man. His decision eventually brings trag...

Translated by J.J. Graham, revised by F.N. Maude Abridged and with an Introduction by Louise Willmot. On War is perhaps the greatest book ever written about war. Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian soldier, had witnessed at first hand the immense destructive power of the French Revolutionary armies which swept across Europe between 1792 and 1815. His response was to write a comprehensive text covering every aspect of warfare. On War is both a philosophical and practical work in...

As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will, had been killed on the Western Front in 1915. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, written between 1919 and 1926, tells of the vastly different campaign against the Turks in the Middle East - one which encompasses gross acts of cruelty and revenge and ends in a welter of stin...

Our Mutual Friend, Dickens' last complete novel, gives one of his most comprehensive and penetrating accounts of Victorian society. Its vision of a culture stifled by materialistic values emerges not just through its central narratives, but through its apparently incidental characters and scenes. The chief of its several plots centres on John Harmon who returns to England as his father's heir. He is believed drowned under suspicious circumstances - a situation convenient to h...

Motherless Sara Crewe was sent home from India to school at Miss Minchin's. Her father was immensely rich and she became "show pupil" - a little princess. Then her father dies and his wealth disappears, and Sara has to learn to cope with her changed circumstances.

Her strong character enables her to fight successfully against her new-found poverty and the scorn of her fellows.

"War and Peace" is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which rec...

A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens’ greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens based his historical detail on Carlyle’s great work – The French Revolution – and also on his own observations and investigations during numerous visits to Paris. ‘The best story I have written’ was Dickens’ own verdict on A Tale of Two Cities, and the reader is unlikely to disagree with thi...

Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way t...

Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury. It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander ...

"Moby-Dick" is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sa...

The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond which had been brought to England as spoils of war, is given to Rachel Verrinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night, the stone is stolen. Suspicion then falls on a hunchbacked housemaid, on Rachel's cousin Franklin Blake, on a troupe of mysterious Indian jugglers, and on Rachel herself. The phlegmatic Sergeant Cuff is called in, and with the help of Betteredge, the Robinson Crusoe-reading loquacious steward, the mystery of t...

With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull. Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer. Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the bri...

Continuing the story of The Hobbit, this three-volume boxed set of Tolkien's epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, features striking black covers based on Tolkien's own design, the definitive text, and three maps including a detailed map of Middle-earth.Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power - the means by which he intends to rule Middle-earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring - the ring that rules them all - which has falle...

Introduction and Notes by Elaine Jordan, Reader in Literature, University of Essex. What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances. A woman of no importance, she manoeuvres in her restricted circu...

Agnes Grey is a trenchant exposé of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a deeply personal novel written from the author’s own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which mark it out as a landmark work of literature dealing with the social and moral evolution of English society during the last century.

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by James Carroll Beckwirth (1899). Set in 1482, Victor Hugo’s powerful novel of ‘imagination, caprice and fantasy’ is a meditation on love, fate, architecture and politics, as well as a compelling recreation of the medieval world at the dawn of the modern age. In a brilliant reworking of the tale of Beauty and the Beast, Hugo creates a host of unforgettable characters – amongst them, Q...

With a new Introduction by David Stuart Davies. ‘Surely no man would take up my profession if it were not that danger attracts him.’ In The Casebook, you can read the final twelve stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about his brilliant detective. They are perhaps the most unusual and the darkest that he penned. Treachery, mutilation and the terrible consequences of infidelity are just some of the themes explored in these stories, along with atmospheric touches of ...

I have burned down the court of King Midas and from those flames, I will rise and wield my own power.The problem is, the world won't let me.Because when you turn against a King - everyone turns against you.But with Slade by my side we will fight the monarchs that come for us.And if we need to become the villains, then so be it.Because as long as I live in this world, I won't be used again.I must be strong. I must be undefeatable. I will shine like the sun - and blind my enemi...

The blockbuster danmei/Boys' Love novels from China that inspired the animated series! This epic historical fantasy about a prince and the mysterious man by his side is now in English, for the very first time. Born the crown prince of a prosperous kingdom, Xie Lian was renowned for his beauty, strength, and purity. His years of dedication and noble deeds allowed him to ascend to godhood. But those who rise, can also fall...and fall he does, cast from the Heavens again and aga...

This volume brings together Virginia Woolf’s last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer preceding the Second World War which successfully interweaves comedy, satire and disturbing observation. Rewriting the traditional family saga and the pageant, these unsettling novels provide extraordinary critiques of Englishness and...

With an Introduction by Donald McFarlan.Robert Burns, the most celebrated of all Scottish poets, is remembered with great devotion - his birthday on 25th January provokes fervour and festivity among Scots and many others the world over. Born in 1759 into miserable rustic poverty, by the age of eighteen Burns had acquired a good knowledge of both classical and English literature. In June 1786 his first collection of verse, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which included ...