Item category 1: Classics

Malcolm, Peter and Charlie and their Soave-sodden wives have one main ambition left in life: to drink Wales dry. But their routine is both shaken and stirred when they are joined by professional Welshman Alun Weaver (CBE) and his wife, Rhiannon, returning to their Celtic roots..

'So many mysteries in one boarding house!' Not everyone who lodges with Madame Vauquer is quite what they seem. The penniless student Rastignac is poised to buy the finest waistcoat in Paris; old man Goriot, lodged in the cheapest room, is visited by two wealthy women; while the jovial merchant, ...

The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favorite motifs of physical and moral challenge.

No one has done more to shape our view of what makes us human than Charles Darwin, whose seismic theory of evolution turned the Victorian world upside down, utterly rewrote our notions of life on earth and is still attacked by religious creationists today.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road rocked the establishment with its seminal, stream-of-consciousness portrayal of 1950s underground America. Amidst a whirlwind of sex, drugs and jazz, writer Sal Paradise and his hero 'the holy con-man with the shining mind', Dean Moriarty traverse the country in search ...

When Jay's husband is diagnosed with a grave illness and returns home to the care of his parents in Louisiana, Jay--a location scout for a movie production company--struggles to stay on the good side of her husband's extended family.