A self-made American goes to Europe to enjoy his fortune and becomes engaged to a French widow from a noble family. Depicts the contrast between American and European culture.

King Solomon's Mines tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa. Allan Quatermain, an adventurer and white hunter based in Durban, in what is now South Africa, is approached by aristocrat Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good, seeking his help finding Sir Henry's brother, who was last seen travelling north into the unexplored interior on a quest for the fabled King Solomon's Mines. Quatermain has a mysterious map purporting to lead...

"All the world's a stage... One of the most quoted lines of Shakespeare was first heard in this play. As You Like It is set in the enchanted Forest of Arden, where Rosalind, the daughter of an exiled duke, and Orlando, the son of one of her father's courtiers, become entangled in a game of love and mistaken identity. This short narrative version of the play has been suitably adapted to help introduce the play to young readers. It can be read by children...

Ferdinand Lopez aspires to marry into respectability and wealth and join the ranks of British society. One of the nineteenth century's most memorable outsiders, Lopez's story is set against that of the ultimate insider, Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, who reluctantly accepts the highest office of state, becoming "the greatest man in the greatest country in the world." The Prime Minister is the fifth in Trollope's six-volume Palliser series and...

The third volume of the d'Artagnan Romances, of which The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After constitute the first and second volumes, was first serialized between October 1847 to January 1850. It has subsequently been published in three, four, and five-volume editions. Our edition follows the four-volume edition. The books in this edition in their chronological order are as follows: 1. "The Vicomte de Bragelonne" (chapters 1-75), 2. "Ten Years...

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide; his ascent of Mount Purgatory and encounter with his dead love, Beatrice; and finally, his arrival in Heaven. Examining questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, the poem is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human redemption. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and belonged to a noble but impoverished family. His life was divided by political duties...

"Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has been enjoyed by generations of readers across the world since its publication in 1876. With its humorous glimpses into life in nineteenth-century, small-town America, this novel has provided unique social commentary that continues to be discussed in classrooms today. Tom Sawyer, a mischievous boy growing up in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, is constantly getting in and out of...

Following a tragedy, Lucy Snowe travels to the fictional country of Labassecour, where she becomes a teacher, falls in love with an antagonistic professor and encounters a spooky nunlike figure.

Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Anne" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for...

The story of Kimball O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, who spends his childhood as a vagabond in Lahore. With an old Tibetan lama, he travels through India, enthralled by the 'roaring whirl' of the landscape and cities of richly colored bazaars and immense diversity of people. Creates a vision of harmony - and of India - that unites the secular and the spiritual, the life of action with that of contemplation.