Item category 1: Classics

The title of this novel refers to an ultra-aesthetic game played by scholars in the kingdom of Castalia around the year 2400. The game involves all branches of knowledge and spiritual values, especially those of the East.

First published in 1936, this book is a historical novel set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Civil War. It tells the love story of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

Margaret Mitchell's page-turning, sweeping American epic has been a classic for over eighty years. Beloved and thought by many to be the greatest of the American novels, Gone with the Wind is a story of love, hope and loss set against the tense historical background of the American Civil War. The...

When Olan, a servant girl, marries the peasant Wang Lung, she toils tirelessly through four pregnancies for their family's survival. Reward at first is meagre, but there is sustenance in the land until the famine comes. Half starved, the family joins thousands of peasants to beg on the city stree...

Wealthy American John Dowell describes in a disarmingly casual, compellingly intimate manner how he and his wife Florence meet an English couple in a German spa resort. They become friends over the years and gradually the history of their relationships and the passions that lie behind the orderly...

Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning epic remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of dust bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to trav...