Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once a historical war epic, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit.Noted for its mastery of realistic detail and psychological analysis, War and Peace follows the metamorphosis of five aristocratic families against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Individual stories interweave as each of Tolstoy’s memorable characters seek fulfillment, fall in love, make ...

Set in the Parisian underworld of the early nineteenth century, Les Misérables follows the adventures of Jean Valjean, once an honest peasant, who spent nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving family.A hardened and bitter criminal upon his release, Valjean is transformed when an act of compassion by a priest, whom he robbed, saves him from returning to prison. Changing his identity and his ways, Valjean becomes a...

Admired by J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and considered by W. H. Auden to be “the only English children’s book in the same class as the Alice books,” The Princess and the Goblin is a classic example of nineteenth-century children’s literary fairy tales. This is an ageless tale of courage and loyalty, beauty and mystery, and above all, good and evil.The discovery of a secret stairway running to the top of the castle where she lives leads Princess Irene to a revelation even more w...

This passionate novel of ethics and morality, religion and philosophy was Dostoevsky’s final and best work.After spending four years in a Siberian penal settlement, during which time he underwent a religious conversion, Dostoevsky developed a keen ability for deep character analysis. In The Brothers Karamazov, he explores human nature at its most loathsome and cruel but never flinches at what he finds.The Brothers Karamazov tells the stirr...

E. M. Forster’s celebrated social comedy explores romantic intrigue and prim propriety among a colorful cast of Edwardian characters. Lucy Honeychurch, a young English woman traveling in Italy with her stuffy chaperone aunt, finds herself constrained by the claustrophobic influence of her British guardians and attracted to the free-spirited George Emerson, whose family’s radical politics make him entirely unsuitable. Sharing a spontaneous moment of passion with him in the Italian countrysi...

This monumental work made the Arthurian cycle available for the first time in English. Malory took a body of legends from Celtic folklore that had been adapted into French literature, gave them an English perspective, and produced a work which ever since has had tremendous influence upon literature.The story begins with King Uther Pendragon’s use of enchantment to lay with Igraine, Duchess of Cornwall. Arthur is conceived and taken away in secret, returning as a young man to claim ...

Detective fans of all races and creeds, of all tastes and fancies will delight in the exploits of this wise and whimsical padre. Father Brown’s powers of detection allow him to sit beside the immortal Holmes, but he is also “in all senses a most pleasantly fascinating human being,” according to American crime novelist Rufus King. You will be enchanted by the scandalously innocent man of the cloth, with his handy umbrella, who exhibits such uncanny insight into ingeniously tricky human prob...

Perhaps Stevenson’s best-known work, this adventure novel set in the eighteenth century is inspired by the actual exploits of pirate Captain Kidd and the search for his buried treasure. For pure imaginative delight, Treasure Island is unsurpassed. From the moment young Jim Hawkins meets the blind pirate Pew at the Admiral Benbow inn, to the spirited battle for hidden treasure on a tropical island, the novel spawns unforgettable scenes and characters that have thrilled young and ol...

In 1963 Norman F. Cantor published his breakthrough narrative history of the Middle Ages. Here is a significant revision, update, and expansion of that work.The Civilization of the Middle Ages incorporates newer research and novel perspectives, especially on the foundations of the Middle Ages and the late Middle Ages of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A sharper focus on social history, Jewish history, women’s roles in society, and popular religion and heresy distin...

He was a gossip columnist’s dream. Piccadilly Jim’s life was a collage of broken promises and drunken brawls.And Jim’s straight-laced Victorian aunt was not amused. So, she decided to reform him. Unfortunately, her reform project started at a time when Jim had fallen in love and had already decided to reform himself. Thus, life became complicated.Jim pretends to be himself—a beautiful display of Wodehousean logic; hilarious indeed!

This masterful biography by one of Germany’s best known journalists was the leading nonfiction bestseller in Germany. Fest shows Hitler as the receptacle of the dreads and resentments of a shaken social order, gifted with an uncanny instinct for all that was hollow behind the appearance of power, at home and abroad. Though a warped human being, he was neither clown nor puppet, as many liked to think; Hitler appears here as an enormously astute politician, impressing and hypnotizing Germans...

How is it that the small continent of Europe, with its rich multiplicity of cultures and traditions, has managed to exert so profound an influence on the rest of the world? Roberts’ sweeping and entertaining history notes the paradoxical effect, for good and ill, on everything touched by those Western values that originated in Europe.Beginning with its Paleolithic origins and the early civilizations of the Aegean, Roberts traces the development of the European identity over the cou...