The opening novel in Anthony Powell's brilliant twelve-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time.Discover the extraordinary life of Anthony Powell – captured by acclaimed biographer Hilary Spurling in Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time

    However much the reader may sympathize with Hetty Sorrel and identify with Arthur Donnithorne, her seducer, and with Adam Bede, the man Hetty betrays,it is George Eliots's creation of the distant aesthetic whole - the complex, multifarious life of Hayslope - which so grips the reader's imagination. As Stephen Gill comments: 'Reading the novel is a process of learning simultaneously about the world of Adam Bede and the world of Adam Bede.'

    It is generally regarded as the masterpiece of Conscience, which earned him the title "the man who taught his people to read".

    The first of Roussel's two major prose works, Impressions of Africa is not, as the title may suggest, a conventional travel account, but an adventure story put together in a highly individual fashion and with an unusual time sequence, whereby the reader is even made to choose whether to begin with the first or the tenth chapter.A veritable literary melting pot, Roussel's groundbreaking text makes ample use of wordplay and the surrealist techniques of automatic writing and private allusion.

    Alternately voyeur and seer, he obsessively studies the private moments and secret activities of his neighbors: childbirth, first love, marriage, betrayal, illness and death all present themselves to him through this spy hole. Decades ahead of its time, "Hell" shocked and scandalized the reviewing public when first released in English in 1966. Even so, the New Republic praised "the beauty of the book's nervous yet fluid rhythms... The book sweeps away life's illusions."

    K. Chesterton (1874–1936) is best known as the creator of detective-priest Father Brown (even though Chesterton's mystery stories constitute only a small fraction of his writings). The eight adventures in this classic British mystery trace the activities of Horne Fisher, the man who knew too much, and his trusted friend Harold March. Although Horne's keen mind and powerful deductive gifts make him a natural sleuth, his inquiries have a way of developing moral complications. Notable for their wit and sense of wonder, these tales offer an evocative portrait of upper-crust society in pre–World War I England.

    While their travels are fraught with complications and intrigue, Mercier and Camier at least “did not remove from home, they had that good fortune.”

    Expensively insulated from the outside world, he nonetheless finds that memories of his impoverished childhood will not be kept so easily at bay. Focusing on the one area of vitality and chaos that remains in the streets below him, he formulates a plan to leave a mark on the city – one as indelible and disruptive as the mark the city left on him.

    That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby - and that the baby should be raised as an Italian! - are matters requiring immediate correction by Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.

    Subtitled a "psychological novel" by its author, who also called it a biography, the work is actually a highly authentic autobiography. The work is singular for two reasons, the first being its perspective. Moritz was a neglected child of a loveless marriage living in a family near the bottom of the social ladder. It is small wonder that Moritz developed into the eternal outsider. With this background, his description of the struggles he endured in acquiring an education give us an unusually rich picture of that day. This autobiography is also quite singular in that it is not the usual summation by some elderly person of his road to success; rather, it is an examination by a thirty-year-old of how the various forces playing on him in his first twenty years joined to misdirect him into hopes for a theatrical career. With a gift for self-examination doubtless acquired from his Pietistic background, he is able to give a brilliant picture of how he acquired and struggled with his own neuroses, and it is this struggle that gives his book its timeless character.

    John Galsworthy, a Nobel Prize-winning author, chronicles the ebbing social power of the commercial upper-middle-class Forsyte family through three generations, beginning in Victorian London during the 1880s and ending in the early 1920s.

    Full of wit and disdain, he records the mounting tensions on the ancient, stinking warship where officers, sailors, soldiers and emigrants jostle in the cramped spaces below decks. Then a single passenger, the obsequious Reverend Colley, attracts the animosity of the sailors, and in the seclusion of the fo'castle something happens to bring him into a 'hell of degradation', where shame is a force deadlier than the sea itself.

    He observes the gradual but profound changes wrought on the English countryside by the march of progress.

    Beautifully rendered, this is a world and a time never before dealt with in fiction-a period when powerful colonizers took over the lands of Hottentot tribes, exposing aborigines for the first time to Western eyes and Western ways. Through the life stories of seven men-all involved with and defined in one way or another by Pieternella, the beautiful daughter of the first mixed marriage of the new colony-we gain an understanding of the vast historical forces at work.Teeming with characters, rich with lived experience, gripping in its unexpected turns, Islands is a story of greed, power, war, courage, and international intrigue, at once a meticulously researched portrait of the age, and a great adventure story.

    Portraying her heroine's inner life, creating a thick atmosphere of fear, and providing a gripping plot that continues to thrill readers today, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the story of orphan Emily St. Aubert, who finds herself separated from the man she loves and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt's new husband, Montoni. Inside the castle, she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni's threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors that threaten to overwhelm her. This new edition includes an introduction that discusses the publication and early reception of the novel, the genre of Gothic romance, and Radcliffe's use of history, exotic settings, the supernatural, and poetry.