A young man returns from abroad to claim his inheritance - but he never arrives and is presumed to have drowned in the Thames. Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, a warmhearted, working-class couple, are the next heirs in line, and their generosity is tested when their windfall opens the door to a vast gallery of scoundrels, strivers, and social climbers. Charles Dickens's genius for observing and characterizing people from every walk of life sparkles in this, his...

Jude the Obscure, the semi-autobiographical final novel from Thomas Hardy explores notions of surprising candor; within the eponymous protagonist lies the tragic truth of failed ambitions and relationships. In a fierce exploration of the darkness of love and the intellect, this is one of the great tragic novels of English literature. Jude Fawley, an earnest boy from a rural English village, dreams of a life of academia despite his working-class background....

"I see that it is by no means useless to travel, if a man wants to see something new." Jules Verne's classic novel Around the World in Eighty Days follows the adventures of Phileas Fogg and his faithful valet Passepartout as they attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days or less. A wealthy English gentleman, Fogg spends most of his time at his club. One day he got involved in an argument over a newspaper article stating that with the opening...

"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths...

Presents the first book of Proust's monumental work "Remembrance of Things Past", introducing such themes as the destructive force of obsessive love, the allure and the consequences of transgressive sex, and the selective eye that shapes memories.

On the day after his thirtieth birthday, Josef K, a bank teller, is arrested by two mysterious agents of an unspecified organization. Confused and shocked, Josef inquires about the crime he is being accused of, but the agents will not answer, leaving Josef to decide what he feels most guilty for. Though he is not imprisoned, Josef is told to await further instructions. Tortured by the unknown, Josef returns to his home and tries to guess what he could...

When the Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) first published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, capitalism as we know it today barely existed. Most people in the West still worked for themselves in small shops or as subsistence farmers. But the worldwide spread of European empires, with their global, interconnected networks of shipping and trade, and the growth of trading markets, created a burgeoning new business class. Smith...

"Jack Reacher has no place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, so a remote railroad stop with the curious name of Mother's Rest seems perfect for an aimless one-day stopover. He expects to find a lonely tombstone in a sea of nearly-ripe wheat ... but instead there is a woman waiting for a missing private investigator, a cryptic note about two hundred deaths, and a small town full of silent, watchful people"--Goodreads.com.

The voyages of an Englishman carry him to such strange places as Lilliput, a land of people six inches high, Brobdingnag, a land of giants, and Glubbdubdrib, an island of sorcerers.

"For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would be abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice's old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries...