Item category 1: Classics

With an introduction by Michael Irwin. The young Thomas Hardy was working as an architect, but fired with literary ambition, tried for years to get into print. He finally succeeded with Desperate Remedies, a sensation novel in the mode of Wilkie Collins. Here was a racy specimen of the genre, rep...

She pouts. I was expecting more of a story, she says. It is difficult to get into the swing when the subject keeps changing. An ageing writer fills his journal: he has opinions about everything. He is challenged by Anya, the smart, irreverent young woman he hires to type his notes.

Mr Charles Pooter is a respectable man. He has just moved into a very desirable home in Holloway with his dear wife Carrie, from where he commutes to his job of valued clerk at a reputable bank in the City. Unfortunately neither his dear friends Mr Cummings and Mr Gowing, nor the butcher, the gre...

This book charts the complex personal relationships in an upper middle class Anglo-Australian family. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1956.

Wills knew that he was fading fastest. On 26 June, he decided the only honourable thing to do was to sacrifice himself to save his companions. In 1860, an eccentric Irish policeman and a shy English scientist led a cavalcade of men and camels out of Melbourne to cross the continent south to north...

Describing Dante's descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins.

Doctor Thorne is the third novel in the series known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire. In it Mary Thorne, the niece of Dr. Thomas Thorne, is raised by her kind uncle, not knowing the true circumstances of her birth. She falls in love with rich Frank Gresham, but there are complications in their r...