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.

At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank.

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 adventures of an orphaned young man in Victorian England who is given a great deal of money by an unknown benefactor to enable him to live as a gentleman, pursuing a good education and fulfilling great expectations.

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While enjoying a stay in fashionable Bath, the young and callow Catherine Morland is introduced to the delights of high society. A satire on the gothic mode typified by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, 'Northanger Abbey' is a witty comedy of manners in the style of Jane Austen's later novels.

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

Fanny Price, a teenaged girl of low social rank brought up on her wealthy relatives' countryside estate, feels the sharp sting of rejection when her cousin Edmund, the only person who treats her as an equal, is won over by a flirtatious, exciting--and unprincipled--London girl.

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

Mohandas K. Gandhi is one of the most inspiring figures of our time. In his classic autobiography he recounts the story of his life and how he developed his concept of active nonviolent resistance, which propelled the Indian struggle for independence and countless other nonviolent struggles of the twentieth century. In a new foreword, noted peace expert and teacher Sissela Bok urges us to adopt Gandhi's "attitude of experimenting, of tesing what will and will not bear close scrutiny, what can and cannot be adapted to new circumstances,"in order to bring about change in our own lives and communities. All royalties earned on this book are paid to the Navajivan Trust, founded by Gandhi, for use in carrying on his work.

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 James Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble, yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora Spenlow; and the magnificently impecunious Wilkins 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 the most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure. This edition uses the text of the first volume publication of 1850, and includes updated suggestions for further reading, original illustrations by 'Phiz', a revised chronology and expanded notes. In his new introduction, Jeremy Tambling discusses the novel's autobiographical elements, and its central themes of memory and identity.

In this new translation of the "Odyssey," Norbert Albertson has succeeded in crafting a vivid and thoughtful English version of Homer's great work. Both true to the original and resonant in the present day, it is a masterful work of story-telling for readers of our time. Translator's note: The Greek "Odyssey" is one of the supreme achievements of the human mind and spirit. This book is not "that" Odyssey, but a translation, which-like all other translations of the Odyssey-like any translation of any work of literature-is a re-creation in a different language of "some" of the qualities of the original work. So at the very beginning, a translator must ask himself: "Which qualities of this work can I hope to re-create?" If you look at a number of translations of the Odyssey, you soon see that each translator has answered that question in his own way, a way that differs-and usually differs greatly-from that of all the others. In "On Translating Homer," Matthew Arnold, the great Victorian poet and critic, famously says that the qualities of Homer are four: he is rapid; he is plain and direct in thought and expression; he is plain and direct in substance; and he is noble. In this translation I have aimed at the first three, hoping (and partly believing) that, if I succeeded to some degree in those first three, the fourth would take care of itself.

The Penguin English Library edition When Dr John Watson takes rooms in Baker Street with amateur detective Sherlock Holmes, he has no idea that he is about to enter a shadowy world of criminality and violence. Accompanying Holmes to an ill-omened house in south London, Watson is startled to find a dead man whose face is contorted in a rictus of horror. There is no mark of violence on the body yet a single word is written on the wall in blood. Dr Watson is as baffled as the police, but Holmes's brilliant analytical skills soon uncover a trail of murder, revenge and lost love . . .

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.

The classic story of Amy Dorrit, who lives much of her life at the Marshalsea prison where her father is imprisoned for debt, earning meager wages at jobs outside the prison walls, including seamstress work for Mrs. Clennam, whose son Arthur takes an interest in her plight.

Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected.

This series of readers is aimed at students at 6 levels from elementary to advanced. All stages have exercises for classroom or private use, plus a glossary to help with vocabulary. The approximate vocabulary count for stage 4 is 1400 words.

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.