Item category 1: Classics

"Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a story in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. The first part is a picaresque account of living on the breadline in Paris and the experience of casual lab...

Count Dracula's castle is a hellish world where night is day, pleasure is pain and the blood of the innocent prized above all. Young Jonathan Harker approaches the gloomy gates with no idea what he is about to face...

A young lawyer on an assignment finds himself imprisoned in a Transylvanian castle by his mysterious host. Back at home his fiance and friends are menaced by a malevolent force which seems intent on imposing suffering and destruction. Can the devil really have arrived on England's shores? And wha...

"The villain was in custody as they say, but villains were coming out of the woodwork and the past was sending out tentacles which were winding around the necks of people living and dying in the present. It's a dying trade I'm in." Meet Cliff Hardy. Smoker, drinker, ex-boxer. And private investig...

Anthony Burgess' epic work revolves around a writer, Kenneth Marchal Toomey, and the man he is linked to through family ties, Carlo Campanati, an earthy Italian priest destined to become Pope. Toomey, now in his 80s recalls the past.

Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship with their absent father, and later her seemingly golden marriage. The path she chooses for herself is less safe and conventional a...

Echo's Bones was intended by Samuel Beckett to form the 'recessional' or end-piece of his early collection of interrelated stories, More Pricks Than Kicks , published in 1934. The story was written at the request of the publisher, but was held back from inclusion in the published volume. Echo's B...