Real Reads Series

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled ‘A Story of a Man of Character’, Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.

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.

Though Aladdin's childhood had been full of beauty, comfort and happiness, without any trace of sadness or sorrow, he entirely failed to learn the lessons of hard work and responsibility.

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.

A retelling for students of English of one of Dickens's best-known novels, this is an upper intermediate-level Macmillan Reader. One bleak and windy evening, 8-year-old Pip meets an escaped convict on the marshes. Shortly afterwards, he is summoned to Satis House, the derelict, gloomy home of the strange, reclusive Miss Havisham.

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Spirited comedy of manners begins when Catherine Morland meets and falls in love with a young clergyman and is invited to be a guest at Northanger Abbey, the family's country estate.

If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the most famous of stories from India.

`It seems pretty clear to me that sooner or later we'll be at war with Germany, whether we like it or not.'

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

Can the path to the ultimate truth about human life be found by leaving behind wealth, comfort, family and security?

Mansfield Park is a novel by Jane Austen, written at Chawton Cottage between February 1811 and 1813. It was published in May 1814 by Thomas Egerton, who published Jane Austen's two earlier novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. When the novel reached a second edition in 1816, its publication was taken over by John Murray, who also published its successor, Emma.

'The moment I first met you, I noticed your pride, your sense of superiority, and your selfish disdain for the feelings of others. You are the last man in the world whom I could ever be persuaded to marry,' said Elizabeth Bennet. And so Elizabeth rejects the proud Mr Darcy. Can nothing overcome her prejudice against him? And what of the other Bennet girls - their fortunes, and misfortunes, in the business of getting husbands? This famous novel by Jane Austen is full of wise and humorous observation of the people and manners of her times.

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.

If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the most famous of stories from India.

Here is a test, a puzzle for you. It is a faithful account of two most gruesome murders. Can you work out what actually happened in the early hours of one fateful morning in the Rue Morgue?

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.

After ten long years of war and the fall of Troy, the Greek hero Odysseus sets sail for his homeland. His voyage, however, is destined to take much longer than he expects.

Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes mystery. This book also includes another Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Speckled Band.

Although Song Jiang is only a lowly local government official, he is loyal to the emperor and kind to all the citizens in his care. But Song is in trouble. A series of unfortunate incidents have led to him being arrested, and his political enemies are keen to see him sentenced to death.

The arrival of a gold bug leads the three men on an exciting adventure towards skeletons, a skull and a hunt for buried treasure.

The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. The intense darkness oppressed and stifled me so that I struggled for breath.

My darkness lifted, never to return. This man was truly the light of the world.

When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother's seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy's father, William Dorrit, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. As Arthur soon discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect the lives of many, from the kindly Mr. Pancks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, and the tipsily garrulous Flora Finching, to Merdle, an unscrupulous financier, and the bureaucratic Barnacles in the Circumlocution Office. A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dickens's maturity.

Catching fish. That's what I was doing on the day that changed my life for ever.

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When the weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from his community, he becomes a miser and vows to turn his back on the world. However, the arrival of a tiny child in his cottage melts his heart and changes his life.

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.

`Send the brat home? Oh no we won't! Her mother must have met some rich man - we can make a load of money out of this.'

Rachel opened the box and lifted out the diamond. She held it up in a ray of sunlight that poured through the window, and cried out in amazement.

If there ever was an epic that touches upon every conceivable human emotion and poses the most complex of questions, it has to be the Mahabharata, the most famous of stories from India.

A storm, a shipwreck, an enchanted island ...