Cousin Bette (1846) is considered to be Balzac's last great novel, and a key work in his Human Comedy. Set in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, it is a complex tale of the devastating effect of violent jealousy and sexual passion. Against a meticulously detailed backdrop of a post-Napoleonic France struggling with massive industrial and economic change, Balzac's characters span many classes of society, from impoverished workers and wealthy courtesans to successful busines...

Indiana (1831) is an absorbing and vivid romantic novel, set partly in provincial France, partly in Paris, and partly on a tropical island. It tells the story of a beautiful and innocent young woman, married at sixteen to a much older man. She falls passionately in love with a handsome, frivolous neighbour but discovers too late that his idea of love is quite different from her own. It is only after a series of painful experiences that she comes to appreciate the silent devotion o...

Acclaimed 19th-century French novelist HonorE de Balzac is widely regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. In Cousin Bette, Lisbeth Fischer feels she's been wronged -- though much of what she perceives may only reside in her imagination. Seeking vengeance against the family of her beautiful cousin, Adeline, she leverages the uncontrollable sexual appetites of her cousin's husband as the linchpin of her plans.

Family drama and the legacy of slavery haunt this epic tale of an enigmatic stranger in Jefferson, Mississippi—from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century.First published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkner’s ninth novel and one of his most admired. It tells the story of Thomas Sutpen and his ruthless, single-minded attempt to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830. Although his grand design is ultimately destroye...

Bookish, sensitive, and given to wild enthusiasms, Rickie Elliot is virtually made for a life at Cambridge, where he can subsist on a regimen of biscuits and philosophical debate. But the love-smitten Rickie leaves his natural habitat to marry the devastatingly practical Agnes Pembroke, who brings with her, as a sort of dowry, a teaching position at the abominable Sawston School.Out of this misalliance comes Forster's most stylistically daring novel. As it follows Rickie from the c...

Men of great wealth bought her love. She gave it to only one.Marguerite Gautier, the greatest beauty in Paris, was known to all as “the Lady of the Camellias” because she was never seen without her favorite flowers. She was luxuriously kept by the richest men in France, who thronged to her boudoir to lay their fortunes at her feet. She lived violently, spending herself and her money in reckless abandon. She had many lovers, but she never reallyloved—until she met Armand Du...

An American Tragedy is the story of Clyde Griffiths, who spends his life in the desperate pursuit of success. On a deeper, more profound level, it is the masterful portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's ambitions and seal his fate; it is an unsurpassed depiction of the harsh realities of American life and of the dark side of the American dream. Extraordinary in scope and power, vivid in its sense of wholesale human waste, unceasing in its rich compassion, An ...

Rob Roy is a captivating novel of chivalry and romance set in the Scottish Highlands of the 18th century. After rejecting the life his father has laid out for him, Frank Osbaldistone is sent to live with his uncle in the north of England. When his father’s wealth and reputation are threatened, he travels to the Scottish Highlands, aiming to retrieve a set of stolen documents. It is here that he is pulled into a number of skirmishes relating to the Jacobite uprising of 1715, and where his p...

What Galsworthy did for Edwardian England, Wharton did for turn-of-the-century New York, and she did it to perfection in The House of Mirth. Hackles bristle discreetly, lips curl ever-so politely, and every breach of good taste is carefully recorded, as social aspirant Lily Bart launches a desperate bid for a place on the city's elite social register.

This series looks sharply at those who perceive themselves as the rich - the elite, and revolves around expensive cars, clothes and posh country clubs. Fans of Sue Grafton, J.A. Jance, and Sara Peretsky will find Shelton's female sleuth captivating. Devout in her dedication for the underdog, Charlie Parker gets drawn into perilous predicaments while sticking her neck out for friends and clients in trouble. She proves a wily opponent for the evil she discovers. Using her trusty jeep for sur...

On March 18, 1990, thirteen works of art today worth over $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It remains the largest unsolved art heist in history, and Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there’s more to this crime than meets the eye.Making a living reproducing famous artworks for a popular online retailer and desperate to improve her situation, Claire is lured into a Faustian bargain with Aiden Markel, a powerf...

Unscrupulous financial speculator Ferdinand Lopez, aspiring to marry into respectability and wealth, has society at his feet: well-connected ladies vying with each other to exert influence on his behalf. Even Lady Glencora, the wife of Plantagenet Palliser, prime minister of England, supports the exotic imposter.Palliser, respectable man of power and inherited wealth, is appalled by the rise of this man who seemingly appeared out of nowhere. When Lopez achieves his socially advanta...