Great Expectations is among the most masterful of Charles Dickens's novels. Displaying extraordinary tragicomic range, Dickens blends an atmosphere of brooding violence and guilt with sharp and often disturbing humor to create a drama charged with the thrilling intensity of a detective story and the poignancy of a spiritual autobiography. Much of the novel's power comes from Dickens's unequaled skill at making even the most wildly eccentric of characters...

Adentures of an orphan boy who lives in the squalid surroundings of a nineteenth-century English workhouse until he becomes involved with a gang of thieves.

Mowgli, left alone in the jungle as a toddler after his parents are run off by Shere Khan, a Bengal tiger, grows to adulthood with the help of kind animals, always knowing his own showdown with the tiger is yet to come.

"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...

"Hard Times is perhaps the archetypal Dickens novel, full as it is with family difficulties, estrangement, rotten values and unhappiness. It was published in 1854 and it is the story of the family of Thomas Gradgrind, and occurs in the imaginary Coketown, an industrial city inspired by Preston. Gradgrind is a man obsessed with misguided 'Utilitarian' values that make him trust facts, statistics and practicality more than emotion and is based upon...

In the mid-nineteenth century, a French professor and his two companions, trapped aboard a fantastic submarine as prisoners of the deranged Captain Nemo, come face to face with exotic ocean creatures and strange sights hidden from the world above.

Soon after the American Civil War, Confederate soldier John Carter joins the gold rush in Arizona. After striking a vein of gold, Carter runs into trouble with the natives of the area. In attempts to evade their pursuit, Carter hides in a cave, unaware of its magical properties. Mysteriously, Carter is transported to Mars, which the planet inhabitants call "Barsoom". When Carter discovers that the gravity difference between Mars and Earth has granted...

In 1919, young couple Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley form a partnership, hiring themselves out as "young adventurers". Their first case, however, is more of an adventure than they expect--working to find documents that, if they were known to the general public, would fuel a communist revolution in Britain. Undercover agents Tommy and Tuppence know that Jane Finn was carrying top secret documents when she disappeared five years ago. What they...

This 1872 sequel to Lewis Carroll's beloved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland finds the inquisitive heroine in a fantastic land where everything is reversed. Looking-glass land, a topsy-turvy world lurking just behind the mirror over Alice's mantel, is a fantastic realm of live chessmen, madcap kings and queens, strange mythological creatures, talking flowers and puddings, and rude insects.
Brooks and hedges divide the lush greenery of

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