Klasika

With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin the new guest at The Coach and Horses is at first assumed to be a shy accident-victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that has made him invisible, and is locked in a struggle to discover the antidote. Forced from the village, and driven to murder, he seeks the aid of an old friend, Kemp. The horror of his fate has affected his mind, however and when Kemp refuse to help, he resolves to wreak his revenge.

Hasek's most important work was centered around the deeply funny story of a hapless Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army -- dismissed for incompetence only to be pressed into service by the Russians in World War I (where he is captured by his own troops). A mischief-maker, bohemian and drunk, Hasek demonstrated his wit in this classic novel of the Czech character and preposterous nature of war.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, an intrepid and eccentric adventurer, transferred his passion for flying to the written word by writing several classics of aviation literature, including "Southern Mail" and "Night Flight". Based on Saint-Exupery's trail-blazing flights for the French airmail service over the Sahara and later, the Andes, these two novels evoke the tragic courage and nobility of the airborne pioneers who took enormous risks, flying in open cock-pits in planes that were often fragile and unstable.

In part, "Moby-Dick" is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, "Moby-Dick" is also a profound enquiry into character, faith and the nature of perception.

From the acclaimed translators of "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", a stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece, the first since the 1958 original. Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, "Doctor Zhivago" is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have restored the rhythms, tone, precision, and poetry of Pasternak's original, bringing this classic of world literature gloriously to life for a new generation of readers.

There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst the swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.' Thus Bram Stoker, one of the greatest exponents of the supernatural narrative, describes the demonic subject of his chilling masterpiece Dracula, a truly iconic and unsettling tale of vampirism.

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. From its first publication in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been printed in over 700 editions. It has inspired almost every conceivable kind of imitation and variation, and been the subject of plays, opera, cartoons, and computer games. The character of Crusoe has entered the consciousness of each succeeding generation as readers add their own interpretation to the adventures so thrillingly 'recorded' by Defoe. Praised by eminent figures such as Coleridge, Rousseau and Wordsworth, this perennially popular book was cited by Karl Marx in Das Kapital to illustrate economic theory. However it is readers of all ages over the last 280 years who have given Robinson Crusoe its abiding position a

This is a Jeeves and Wooster novel. Jeeves is on holiday in Herne Bay, and while he's away the world caves in on Bertie Wooster. For a start, he's astonished to read in "The Times" of his engagement to the mercurial Bobbie Wickham. Then at Brinkley Court, his Aunt Dahlia's establishment, he finds his awful former head master in attendance ready to award the prizes at Market Snodsbury Grammar School. And finally the Brinkley butler turns out for reasons of his own to be Bertie's nemesis in disguise, the brain surgeon Sir Roderick Glossop. With all occasions informing against him, Bertie has to hightail it to Herne Bay to liberate Jeeves from his shrimping net. And after that, the fun really starts.

It is June, 1808 - and off the Coast of Nicaragua Captain, Horatio Hornblower has his hands full...Now, in command of HMS Lydia, a thirty-six-gun frigate, Hornblower has instructions to form an alliance against the Spanish colonies with a mad and messianic revolutionary, El Supremo; to find a water route across the Central American isthmus; and 'to take, sink, burn or destroy' the fifty-gun Spanish ship of the line Natividad - or face court-martial. And, as if that wasn't hard enough, Hornblower must also contend with the charms of an unwanted passenger: Lady Barbara Wellesley...This is the fifth of eleven books chronicling the adventures of C. S. Forester's inimitable nautical hero, Horatio Hornblower.

The second story in the ever-popular "Anne of Green Gables" series. Now Anne is half past sixteen and she's ready to begin a new life teaching in her old school. She's as feisty as ever and is fiercely determined to inspire young hearts with her own ambitions. But some of her pupils are as boisterous and high-spirited as Anne, and so life in her Avonlea classroom becomes a lesson in discovery and adventure.

This is a collection of 160 stories from over forty cultures. The stories are grouped thematically: fooling the devil, shape shifters, the not-quite-human, numbskulls and noodleheads, true loves and false, likely and unlikely heroes, and death and the world's end.