Item category 1: Classics

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...

On they went singing 'Eternal Memory', and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing ...Doctor Zhivago is the epic novel of Russia in the throes of revolution and one of the greatest love stories ever told. Yuri Zhivago, phys...

A wonderful, panoramic novel that goes back to Irene Memirovsky's roots, sweeping the reader from the Jewish quarter of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century to Paris in the twenties and thirties and again in eastern Europe in a snowy winter on the eve of war.

In 1953, in the presence of an investigator, Aldous Huxley took four- tenths of a gramme of mescaline, sat down and waited to see what would happen. Huxley described his experience in 'The Doors of Perception' and its sequel 'Heaven and Hell'. This joint volume has a foreword by J.G. Ballard.

Moscow-born Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) served time in a convict prison in Siberia for his political alliances, and in his later years his passion for gambling led him deeply into debt. His many brilliant novels include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. This book tell...