Let young adults discover the exotic landscape, the wondrous magic, and the fascinating menagerie of creatures-jaguars and kangaroos, hedgehogs and leopards-that have made Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Stories worldwide favorites for a century. Included: The Crab that Played with the Sea, How the Camel Got His Hump, and ten others.

The Jungle Books, published in 1894 and 1895, and set in the far-away climes of India and the Aleutians, was actually written during the four years Kipling lived in the United States. Book I of The Jungle Books introduces us to all of the wonderful Kipling jungle characters: Bagheera, the black panther; Shere Khan, the lame but evil tiger who lives near the Waingunga River; Mowgli, the man-cub; Toomai of the Elephants; Kaa the Rock Python snake; Baloo, the sleepy brown bear whose job it is...

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General...

Classic novel of consuming passions, played out against the lonely moors of northern England, recounts the turbulent and tempestuous love story of Cathy and Heathcliff. A masterpiece of imaginative fiction, the story remains as poignant and compelling today as it was when first published in 1847.

Mansfield Park is the chronicle of the trials of Fanny Price. Sweet, innocent, sensitive, and thoroughly proper, Fanny is taken from her family and raised by wealthy, but selfish relatives. All her qualities are tested when she becomes the object of the unwanted attentions of an insincere rake.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London.

Amazingly fast, incredibly strong, and fantastically gentle, Black Beauty is a horse that touches the hearts of all who meet him. Born on a grand estate in the English countryside, he spends his days galloping across open meadows and carrying adoring children on his back. But when a tragic accident forces Black Beauty's owner to sell him, this joyful life quickly comes to an end. Outside the estate is a world where horses are treated with bitter cruelty and thoughtless violence. Nothing, h...

America's first psychological novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a dark tale of love, crime, and revenge set in colonial New England. It revolves around a single, forbidden act of passion that forever alters the lives of three members of a small Puritan community: Hester Prynne, an ardent and fierce woman who bears the punishment of her sin in humble silence; the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, a respected public figure who is inwardly tormented by long-hidden guilt; and the ma...

A story of the love between upper-class Anne Elliott and Captain Wentworth, who must earn his fortune. Set against the rarefied sensibilities of the upper-class England of Austen's day, the novel is both a satire upon class values and differences, and an engaging story.

Pocahontas: a story about a sweet little Indian girl who dramatically saved an Englishman's life? Hardly. This book covers the remarkable life of America's First Lady and depicts the fascinating times of the early 17th century, when a new age was awakening and the brave were seizing it.

Oliver Twist's famous cry of the heart - "Please, sir, I want some more" - has resounded with generations of readers of all ages. The author poured his own youthful experience of Victorian London's unspeakable squalor into this realistic depiction of a spirited young innocent's unwilling but inevitable recruitment into a scabrous gang of thieves. Masterminded by the loathsome Fagin, the underworld crew features some of Dickens's most memorable characters, including the vicious Bill Sikes, ...

Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor's warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love - and its threatened loss - the sisters learn that sense must mix with s...