Real Reads Series

Under the influence of rum, Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a sailor. Years later, the widowed wife returns to find her husband the Mayor of Casterbridge.

The persuasion of "Persuasion" is the persuasion of Anne Elliot by a family friend that the young man that she is in love with is an inappropriate match for her. Instead of following her heart Anne follows the advice of the family friend and lets her love go. Seven years passes and Anne, who is still alone, finds a second opportunity for true love when the man returns from sea. "Persuasion," Jane Austen's last completed novel, is the story of lost love and an older woman's chance to recapture the love that she thought was hopelessly lost.

Well's science fiction of time travel, and his protagonist's adventures in the future.

I had been given a simple but enormous task. This was the role for which I had spent my whole life preparing.

The Penguin English Library Edition of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens "What do you think that is?' she asked me, again pointing with her stick; 'that, where those cobwebs are?" "I can't guess what it is, ma'am." "It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!" Great Expectations, Dickens's funny, frightening and tender portrayal of the orphan Pip's journey of self-discovery, is one of his best-loved works. Showing how a young man's life is transformed by a mysterious series of events - an encounter with an escaped prisoner; a visit to a black-hearted old woman and a beautiful girl; a fortune from a secret donor - Dickens's late novel is a masterpiece of psychological and moral truth, and Pip among his greatest creations. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby.

While enjoying a six weeks' stay in fashionable Bath, the young and callow Catherine Morland is introduced to the delights of high society. Thanks to a new literary diet of the sensational and the macabre, Catherine travels to Northanger Abbey fully expecting to become embroiled in a Gothic adventure of intrigue and suspense – and, once there, soon begins to form the most gruesome and improbable theories about the exploits of its occupants. An early work, but published posthumously, Northanger Abbey is a parody of the Gothic genre typified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, as well as a witty comedy of manners in the style of Jane Austen's later novels and, ultimately, an enchanting love story.

Dickens's classic tale of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come.

As Fanny becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of her companions, she finds herself isolated and forced to face the conflict between her sense of integrity and social expectation.

Elizabeth Bennet's early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy is a prejudice only matched by his arrogant pride.

Personal account of the life of the man who freed India from colonization through the Satyagraha (nonviolent protest)movement. His early boyhood life, legal studies, purification,and ultimate salvation of his homeland is carefully recounted in this inspiring and critical work of insurmountable importance.

A strange figure stood in front of him, dressed from head to foot in white clothing. The moonlight showed her pale, youthful face.

In ancient China a magical monkey appears, creating chaos everywhere he goes. The only way to put his tricks and talents to good use is to make him protector of Xuanzang, a young and handsome monk determined to travel from China to India in search of the precious scriptures.

David Copperfield is the story of a young man’s adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; his nemesis, the eternally humble Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora; and the magnificently impecunious Micawber, one of literature’s great comic creations. In David Copperfield – the novel he described as his ‘favourite child’ – Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of his most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure.

"A Study in Scarlet" provides the reader with a dramatic adventure which ranges from the gas-lit streets to the burning planes of Utah. The second story, "The Sign of the Four", presents Holmes with one of his greatest challenges - the theft of the Agra treasure in India.

READ BY DAVID SOUL Duration: 2 hours 28 minutes Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe’s full-blooded Gothic style influenced generations of writers, filmmakers and musicians, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Baudelaire to Roger Corman and Lou Reed. The five tales collected here range from the famous to the obscure, but each displays Poe's unique sense of the macabre and his love for the baroque. A victim of the Inquisition finds himself in a nightmarish torture chamber, a castle is besieged by plague, a man becomes obsessed by the evil eye of his fellow lodger, a mesmerist suspends a man's life at the point of death and a jester takes his revenge on his cruel employers.

Presenting a tale of imprisonment, both literal and metaphorical, this novel highlights its concern with personal responsibility in private and public life.

Emma Woodhouse imagines that she dominates those around her in the small town of Highbury, but her inept matchmaking creates problems for herself and others.

Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie.

Penguin presents the companion book to the "Masterpiece Theatre" miniseries starring Gillian Anderson (T"he House of Mirth, The X-Files"). This stunning production features a screenplay written by Andrew Davies ("Bridget Jones's Diary"). Part romance, part melodrama, part detective story, the novel spreads out among a web of relationships in every level of society.