Other books that might interest you

• 

  A Day's Ride - A Life's Romance

  Charles Lever

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A young man with a small legacy and a large imagination sets out to be a romantic hero and is comprehensively misunderstood by everyone he meets. Lever wrote it as a serial for Dickens's magazine, and the readers hated the hero so much that Dickens asked him to finish early. This edition binds 56 plates of painting, among them works by James Barclay Grahame, Max Emanuel Ainmiller and Albin Egger-Lienz, alongside two illustrations restored and coloured for the text.

  Show book

• 

  The Brothers Karamazov - A...

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A father is murdered and three sons are suspects: the sensualist who wanted his money and his woman, the intellectual who proved that everything is permitted, and the novice who believes. Dostoevsky wrote it in the last two years of his life, working from the case of a man he had known in prison who was convicted of parricide and later cleared. The trial takes two hundred pages and settles nothing. One hundred plates of Russian painting from 1772 to 1920, among them Savrasov and Maximov, carry the novel's world of monasteries, peasants and troubled households.

  Show book

• 

  Hard Times - For These Times

  Charles Dickens

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A mill town where the schoolmaster teaches nothing but facts, the mill owner believes in nothing but arithmetic, and a circus turns out to be the only honest institution in the book. Dickens set it in a place he called Coketown after visiting Preston during a strike, and made it his shortest novel because it ran weekly and space was tight. Ruskin thought it his best. Ninety-nine plates by painters from Watteau to Frith, ranging from a draper's shop to Dolly Varden, give the novel's hard facts a visual life.

  Show book

• 

  The Invisible Man and The Island...

  H. G. Wells

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Two of Wells's early novels about what science does to the man who practises it. Griffin, in The Invisible Man (1897), arrives bandaged at a Sussex inn and cannot make himself seen again; Moreau, on his island (1896), cuts animals into the shapes of men and teaches them the Law. Both books are about the same thing — knowledge without anyone to answer to — and both end badly for the knower. Ninety-nine plates, from Constable's cloud studies to Munch's coastal landscapes, run alongside these tales of men who overreach and vanish.

  Show book

• 

  The Return Of The Native

  Thomas Hardy

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation ? The Return of the Native opens with Thomasin Yeobright returning from her wedding, which was aborted because of an error on the marriage license. She was supposed to wed Damon Wildeve, who seems ambivalent about the marriage, and still secretly longs for Eustacia Vye, a former lover. Eustacia imagines a better life than that of a lonely young woman living with her grandfather in the rural southwest of England. When Thomasin's cousin Clym returns from business in Paris, Eustacia sees him as someone who can take her away to a city with charm and beauty, so unlike the heath that she loathes. But Yeobright has other plans. Hardy originally conceived The Return of the Native as a classical tragedy in five parts, but as it was being serialized, he added a sixth part in consideration of a public that demanded a more satisfying ending. The novel was controversial at the time, dealing with marital dissatisfaction and infidelity. Thomas Hardy (died 1928) was a major literary figure of the early 20th century. Their work has endured across generations and continues to be read and studied worldwide. As a work of classic literary fiction, The Return Of The Native exemplifies the narrative craft and social insight that defined great storytelling of its era. Literary fiction of this period was characterized by careful attention to character psychology, social milieu, and the moral questions that animated public discourse.

  Show book

• 

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A chilling mystery stalks the misty moors… 
  In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle delivers one of the most iconic and atmospheric tales in the Sherlock Holmes canon. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead under suspicious circumstances near his estate on the Devonshire moors, whispers of a family curse resurface—one involving a terrifying spectral hound. Fearing for the safety of the new heir, Sir Henry Baskerville, Dr. James Mortimer seeks the help of master detective Sherlock Holmes. 
  Joined by the ever-loyal Dr. Watson, Holmes unravels a tangled web of deception, ancient legends, and sinister schemes. As the fog rolls over the moor, danger closes in, and the line between superstition and reality begins to blur. 
  Narrated with gripping intensity by Luke Oldham, this classic detective novel combines Gothic suspense, psychological drama, and the brilliance of Holmes’s deductive reasoning to keep listeners riveted until the final, unforgettable revelation.

  Show book