Klasika

Catherine Morland, an unremarkable tomboy as a child, is thrown amongst all the "difficulties and danger" of Bath at the ripe age of seventeen. Armed with an unworldly charm and a vivid imagination, she must overcome the caprices of elegant society, encoutering along the way such characters as the vacuous Mrs Allen, coquettish Isabella and the brash bully John Thorpe. Catherine's invitation to Northanger Abbey, in her eyes a haven of coffins, skeletons and other Gothic devices, does lead to an adventure, though one she didn't expect, and her misjudgement of the ambitious, somewhat villainous General Tilney is not wholly unjustified. However, with the aid of the "unromantic" hero Henry Tilney, Catherine gradually progresses towards maturity and self-knowledge.

Dickens wrote of David Copperfield: 'Of all my books I like this the best'. Millions of readers in almost every language on earth have subsequently come to share the author's own enthusiasm for this greatly loved classic, possibly because of its autobiographical form. Following the life of David through many sufferings and great adversity, the reader will also find many light-hearted moments in the company of a host of English fiction's greatest stars including Mr Micawber, Traddles, Uriah Heep, Creakle, Betsy Trotwood, and the Peggoty family.

An American Masterpiece Clyde Griffiths finds his social-climbing aspirations and love for a rich and beautiful debutante threatened when his lower-class pregnant girlfriend gives him an ultimatum

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 the gothic, involving a bloodsucking vampire, crypts at midnight and strange bones in a furnace. The collection His Last Bow features some of Sherlock Holmes' most dramatic cases, including the vicious revenge intrigue connected with 'The Red Circle' and the insidious murders in 'The Devil's Foot'. The title story recounts how Sherlock Holmes is brought out of retireme

The Complete Short Stories of Roald Dahl in the first of two unsettling and sinister volumes. "They are brutal, these stories, and yet you finish reading each one with a smile, or maybe even a hollow laugh, certainly a shiver of gratification, because the conclusion always seems so right". (Charlie Higson, from his introduction). Roald Dahl is one of the most popular writers of the modern age, effortlessly writing for children and adults alike. In this, the first of two volumes chronologically collecting all his published adult short stories, we see how Dahl began by using his experiences in the war to write fiction but quickly turned to his powerful and dark imagination to pen some of the most unsettling and disquieting tales ever written. In 27 stories, written between 1944 and 1953,

Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist's meticulous account of provincial matters. For the writer, subject matter was subordinate to his anguished quest for aesthetic perfection. For his twentieth-century successors the formal experiments that underpin Madame Bovary look forward to the innovations of contemporary fiction. Flaubert's protagonist in particular has never ceased to fascinate. Romantic heroine or middle-class neurotic, flawed wife and mother or passionate protester against the conventions of bourgeois society, simultaneously the subject of Flaubert's admiration and the butt of his irony - Emma Bovary remains one of the most enigmatic of fictional

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Woman in White" by Wilkie Collins. 'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop ...There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth ...stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'. "The Woman in White" famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, "The Woman in White" is the first and most influential o

"The Sea is My Brother" is Jack Kerouac's very first novel, begun shortly after his tour as a merchant sailor in 1942. Lost during his lifetime, it is an intense portrait of friendship and brotherhood and a meditation on the desire to escape society, following the fortunes of two men as they impulsively decide to work their passage on the S.S. Westminster: drinking, arguing, playing cards, dodging torpedoes and contemplating the vast, terrible beauty of the sea. Published with fragments of early stories and letters, this visceral work gives a unique insight into the young Kerouac and the formation of his genius.