Item category 1: Classics

Weaned on sentimental novels, Emma Bovary longs for a life of luxury and high romance. She is married to a kind but mediocre country doctor and is plagued by expectations of something more, some more intense experience, some wider horizon if she could only find it. She seeks to escape from boredo...

Charming, intelligent and forthright, the remarkable Madame Midas makes her fortune on the goldfields of Ballarat-and becomes the target of the villainous ex-convict Gaston Vandeloup, a charismatic Frenchman who soon makes himself indispensable to her mining operations. A companion piece to The M...

Against the backdrop of Darwin, that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half-outback, half-oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia, a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the 'maestro', a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. The occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many...

Young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching position on a Greek island where his friendship with the owner of the islands most magnificent estate leads him into a nightmare. As reality and fantasy are deliberately confused by staged deaths, erotic encounters, and terrifying violence, Urfe...

Tanizaki's masterpiece is the story of four sisters, and the declining fortunes of a traditional Japanese family. It is a loving and nostalgic recreation of the sumptuous, intricate upper-class life of Osaka immediately before World War Two. With surgical precision, Tanizaki lays bare the sinews ...

'Like all good comic writers Mr Burgess lives his creations as much as he writes them. First class' - Observer . Anthony Burgess was an officer in the Colonial Service. In The Malayan Trilogy - Time for a Tiger, The Enemy in the Blanket and Beds in the East - he satirises the dog days of colonial...

Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous events and characters. Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside in--visitors, and particularly not relatives--for they have to see something pretty humdrum, even if, as ...

Fanny Price's rich relatives offer her a place in their home so that she can be properly brought up. However, Fanny's childhood is a lonely one as she is never allowed to forget her place. Her only ally is her cousin Edmund.

In Jane Austen's third published novel after Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, young Fanny Price is sent to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park. Raised among her four cousins, Fanny - the poor relation - often goes unobserved in the ho...