Item category 1: Classics

When A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. Thus what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture grew into a disturbing satire of modern technology and social thought. The story ...

Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy takes the discipline of logic and the mind back to its roots. Drawing inspiration from six of the finest minds in history - Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche - he addresses lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy...

He straightened his spine, raised his head, and extended his gun arm towards me in a slow, vertical arc. I saw then what he was, and stood still in front of him, for he was here on business. He was a small, serious, stone-eyed angel of mercy.

On the eve of his wedding, a young sailor named Edmond Dantés is wrongly accused of treason and imprisoned for life in the Château d'If, a reputedly impregnable island fortress. After a daring escape, Dantés unearths a treasure revealed to him by another prisoner and devotes the rest of his li...

After a long absence, the young Mary Smith has returned to Cranford, that cosy sphere of delicate gentility and elegant economy. From the newly-arrived half-pay Captain Brown (so considerate he blacks his own boots to save the maid-servant) to Miss Betsy Barker (so devoted to her Alderney cow she...

Based on Elizabeth Gaskell novels, this book follows the small absurdities and major tragedies in the lives of the people of Cranford during one extraordinary year.

A novel of the friendships and woes of two couples, which tells the story of their lives in lyrical, evocative prose by one of the finest American writers of the late 20th century.

A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community. The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very...