During the French Revolution a young English lawyer goes to the guillotine to save a French aristocrat, husband of the woman he loves. "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times ..." With these famous words, Charles Dickens plunges the reader into the French Revolution. From the storming of the Bastille to the relentless drop of the guillotine, Dickens vividly captures the terror and upheaval of that tumultuous period. At the center is the...

Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, eager to experience life to the full in her quest for 'music, poetry, passion and war.' On her travels she meets Clym Yeobright, a native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions and her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.

"A Room with a View" by E. M. Forster is a delightful and satirical exploration of the Edwardian society, love, and the clash between societal expectations and individual desires. Set against the picturesque backdrop of England and Italy, Forster's novel is a nuanced portrayal of the awakening of a young woman's spirit in the face of societal constraints. The story follows the journey of Lucy Honeychurch, a spirited and independent young woman...

"Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era. Alexandre Dumas's thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time. In it the dashing young hero, Edmond Dant©·s, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Ch©Øteau d'If--doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell. The story of his long, intolerable years in captivity, his miraculous escape, and his carefully wrought revenge...

Published to great acclaim and fierce controversy in 1866, Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment has left an indelible mark on global literature and our modern world, and is still known worldwide as the quintessential Russian novel. Readers of all backgrounds have debated its historical, cultural, and spiritual dimensions, probing the moral and ethical dilemmas that Dostoevsky so brilliantly stages throughout his narrative. Yet, at its heart, this...

"Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish marshes, the story abounds with some of Dickens' most memorable characters. Among them are the kindly blacksmith Joe Gargery, the mysterious convict Abel Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Havisham and her beautiful...

A new illustrated gift edition of a beloved classic. Three hundred years ago, a great deal of the world as we now know it was still undiscovered. A voyage in those days was not a pleasant thing, and a traveller was likely to encounter mysterious islands and strange people. Danger lurked around every corner, and friends and foes are to be found unexpectedly, and in equal measure. When Lemeul Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, sets off on the high seas in...

“Six Plays” by Henrik Ibsen is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies of contemporary...

First published posthumously in 1779, "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion" is Scottish philosopher David Hume's classic work of religious philosophy. This detailed and exhaustive examination of the nature and existence of God was begun by Hume in 1750, but not completed until shortly before his death in 1776. Hume was an important and influential English Empiricist, along with other English philosophers such as Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Thomas...

After seven years of marriage, Lady Brenda Last is mildly bored with country life in the Victorian Gothic mansion that is the symbol of her husband's family pride. The affair she drifts into with a wholly worthless young man begins as a diversion fashionable in her class and generation--and becomes a vortex of calamities.