An apocalyptic tale set in a nation ruled by Big Brother, where speech is doctored and thoughts are controlled by totalitarian agents. From the author of Animal Farm and Down and Out in Paris and London.
'You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.' Humbert Humbert, a European intellectual adrift in America, is a middle-aged college professor. Haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love, he falls outrageously (and illegally) in lust with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Dolores Haze. Obsessed, he'll do anything, will commit any crime, to possess his Lolita. But once Lolita belongs to Humbert, once he has got what he wants, what next? And what of Lolita? How long is she willing to be possessed?
The central character of this story is the bored wife of a provincial doctor whose desires and illusions are shattered. The author vents his profound contempt for the bourgeois mentality, but betrays a certain sympathy for the human frailty of Emma Bovary.
This tale begins with the hero, Candide, being expelled from the Westphalian castle of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh for making love to the Baron's daughter, Cunegonde. So begins a series of disastrous misadventures on a fantastic odyssey for Candide, Cunegonde and Dr Pangloss.
This text is an updated edition of George Eliot's classic tale. The novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community.
Orlando has always been an outsider. His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England amd imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man?
In this novel, Dickens describes one boy growing up in a world which is by turns magical, fearful and grimly realistic. In a book which is part autobiographical, the novelist transmutes his life-experience into a series of comic and sentimental adventures.
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 fortunenor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all,it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
First published in 1814, this is a study of three families - the Bertrams, the Crawfords and the Prices - in which Jane Austen uses the unlikely heroine, Fanny Price, to explore the social and moral values by which these families' lives are ordered.
Hailed by Victor Hugo as "the real epic of our age," Ivanhoe was an immensely popular bestseller when first published in 1819. The book inspired literary imitations as well as paintings, dramatizations, and even operas. Now Sir Walter Scott's sweeping romance of medieval England has prompted a lavish new television production. In the twelfth century, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe returns home to England from the Third Crusade to claim his inheritance and the love of the lady Rowena. The heroic adventures of this noble Saxon knight involve him in the struggle between Richard the LionHearted and his malignant brother John: a conflict that brings Ivanhoe into alliance with the mysterious outlaw Robin Hood and his legendary fight for the forces of good. "Scott's characters, like Shakespeare's and Jane Austen's, have the seed of life in them," observed Virginia Woolf. "The emotions in which Scott excels are not those of human beings pitted against other human beings, but of man pitted againstNature, of man in relation to fate. His romance is the romance of hunted men hiding in woods at night; of brigs standing out to sea; of waves breaking in the moonlight; of solitary sands and distant horsemen; of violence and suspense." For Henry James, "Scott was a born storyteller. . . . Since Shakespeare, no writer has created so immense a gallery of portraits."From the Hardcover edition.
Philip Roth won the National Book Award for "Goodbye, Columbus", the story which gives this collection of stories its title. The story traces the love relationship of Neil, a young college boy, and Brenda, the spoilt but love-starved daughter of a wealthy manufacturer.
In these wickedly anarchic stories, Dahl explores the dark, sinister side of the psyche: the cunning, sly, selfish part of human nature that makes for unexpected outcomes and horrifying conclusions.
Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities.
Everybody who is anybody is seen at Gatsby's glittering parties. None of the socialites understand Gatsby. He seems to always be watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. But as the tragic story unfolds, Gatsby's destructive dreams and passions are revealed.
