Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories, a much acclaimed collection of short semi-comic mystery stories, was first published in 1891. It includes: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Canterville Ghost,...
The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a handsome young man, whose full-length portrait was painted by an artist infatuated by Dorian's beauty. Fearing that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses...
Dracula (a Gothic horror novel, first published in 1897) tells the story of the vampire Count Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead...
Robinson Crusoe, a novel, first published in 1719, tells the story of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers, before being rescued....
The Great Gatsby (1925) follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long Island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire...
Tender is the Night (1934), tells the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst, and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. The early 1930s, when Fitzgerald...
Three Men in a Boat, first published in 1889, is a humorous account of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames, taken by three English gentlemen. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel...
Great Expectations, published in 1861, is the author's penultimate completed novel; narrated in the first person, it depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip. The...
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, first published in 1892, is a collection of twelve short stories, featuring a fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, related in first-person narrative from the point of...
Sense and Sensibility was first published anonymously in 1811. The novel tells the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne, both of age to marry, following their life in a country cottage, where they...
Pride and Prejudice, first published in 1813 tells the story of the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage.
Although Wuthehng Heights is now regarded as a classic of English literature, contemporary opinions were deeply polarized; the novel was considered controversial because of its naturalistic depiction of...
Through the Looking-Glass (1871) is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Set some six months later than the earlier book, Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing...
Emma, first published in 1815, is a novel about youthful hubris and the perils of misconstrued romance. As in her other novels, Austen explores concerns and difficulties of genteel English women; she also...
Dubliners, a collection of fifteen short stories, first published in 1914, form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, first published in 1865, tells of a girl named Alice falling through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures. The tale plays...
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (first published in 1826) is the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy and the best known to contemporary readers. It is set in 1757, during the...
The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by Charles Dickens, unfinished at the time of the author's death. Though the novel is named after the character Edwin Drood, the story focuses on his uncle,...
The Hound of the Basketyilles is the third of the crime novels featuring Sherlock Holmes, first published in 1901-1902. It tells the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a fearsome, diabolical...
The Valley of Fear is the fourth and final Sherlock Holmes novel, first published in the Strand Magazine in 1914-1915. It is a captivating mystery about the murder of a certain John Douglas with a quite...
Northanger Abbey (1817) was the first of Jane Austen's novels to be completed, but it was published only after her death. The novel is a satire of the Gothic novels popular at the time. The heroine, Catherine,...
The Beautiful and Damned, first published in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. It explores and portrays New York caf societu and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after...
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) is a collection of eleven short stories - all of them had been published earlier, independently. Divided into three separate parts, according to subject matter, the collection...
A Study in Scarlet (first published in 1987) marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who would become two of the most famous characters in popular fiction. Although Conan Doyle wrote...
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading...
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is Joyce's first novel. Written in the modernist style, it traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego...
Jacobs published his English Fairy Tales in 1890 and More English Fairytales in 1894 but also went on after and in between both books to publish fairy tales collected from continental Europe as well as...
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, commonly known as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is...
The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a handsome young man, whose full-length portrait was painted by Basil Hallward, an artist infatuated by Dorian's beauty. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry...
Vanity Fair was first published in 1848, with the subtitle A Novel without a Hero, reflecting Thackeray's interest in deconstructing his era's conventions regarding literary heroism. The story follows...
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) belongs to the classics of early science fiction. It tells the story of Edward Prendick a shipwrecked man rescued by a passing boat and left on the island home of Doctor...
The War of the Worlds (1898) is a science fiction novel, telling about a conflict between mankind and an extraterrestrial race. The novel has been both popular and influential, spawning half a dozen feature...
Romeo and Juliet, continuing the tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity, tells the story of two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately reconcile their feuding families. It...
Shakespeare's Sonnets, first published in a 1609, is the title of a collection of 154 sonnets, which covers themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. The author plays with gender...
Treasure Island, first published in 1883, is an adventure novel, narrating a tale of "buccaneers and buried gold". It is traditionally considered a coming-of-age story, and is noted for its atmosphere,...
New Arabian Nights, first published in 1882, is a collection of short stories, containing Stevenson's first published fiction, highly acclaimed by literary critics as pioneering works in the English short...
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is a novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River, set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg. Tom Sawyer is more than a boyhood adventure story,...
The Time Machine is a science fiction novel (1895) about time travel by way of using a vehicle that allowed its operator to travel forwards or backwards in time. The novel has since been adapted into three...
Named after the first story the collection When God Laughs and Other Stories explores themes for which London became famous: the struggle for survival in the midst of hostile environments, human nature's...
