When spoiled rich girl, Mary Lennox, is orphaned, she is shipped from India to live in her uncle's enormous manor in faraway England. The lonely girl is forbidden to play in most of the imposing house ? struggling to adjust to her new surroundings, she goes out into the grounds every day. Before long, Mary finds a key to a secret garden that has been left untouched for ten years, and a whole new world of enchantment opens up to her. For the first...

"With Candide, Voltaire bumptiously skewered the fashionable misinterpretation of the doctrine of philosophical optimism, unerringly offending kings, scientists, fanaticals, publishers, journalists, and even priests; composed in a mere three days, Candide's capacity to amuse, disgust, and surprise endures today, roughly ninety thousand days later. Theo Cuffe's new translation is invaluable for those English-speaking readers who cannot understand French,...

"Published in 1859, we are immediately intrigued by the narrative - a young and genial tutor of arts, Walter Hartright, encounters a woman dressed head to toe in white who is lost in the streets of London. After reporting her to the authorities Walter is informed that the lady was an escapee from a mental asylum. However, when Walter takes a new position in teaching art he encounters a girl named Laura, whose looks are stunningly similar to those...

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...

The Moonstone was published in 1868 and concerns the huge yellow diamond of the title that was once stolen from an Indian shrine. Rachel Verrinder receives the stone as a gift and does not realise that it has been passed to her in a sinister form of revenge by John Herncastle who, it transpires, acquired the moonstone by means of murder and theft. The jewel also brings bad luck. The stone disappears on the very night it is given to Rachel, though,...

"The culmination of Jane Austen's genius, a sparkling comedy of love and marriage--now in a stunning 200th-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Beautiful, clever, rich--and single--Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to...

"Jane Austen's final novel is her most mature and wickedly satirical. It follows the story of Anne Elliott, a teenager engaged to a seemingly ideal man, Frederick Wentworth. But after being persuaded by her friend Lady Russell that he is too poor to be a suitable match, Anne ends their engagement. When they are reacquainted eight years later, their circumstances are transformed: Frederick is returning triumphantly from the Napoleonic War, while Anne's...

Follows the adventures of the brave and bold frontiersman Natty Bumppo. James Fenimore Cooper's spirited romance has been praised for its authenticity as a portrait of life during America's western movement. At Lake Otsego, during the French and Indian Wars, great frontiersman Natty Bumppo forsakes his love to come to the aid of Thomas Hutter, a trapper under the attack of Iroquois Indians. Published in 1841, The Deerslayer is the first of the Leatherstocking...

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 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 today's top writers and scholars • Biographies...

In rural nineteenth-century England, a weaver, lonely and embittered at the unjust treatment he has received from people he considered to be his friends, finds his only solace in money until he inadvertently becomes the guardian of an orphaned little girl.