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On the coast of Maine in the early twentieth century, young Captain Boyd Mayo commands the steam yacht of Julius Marston, a Wall Street financier, and falls in love with his daughter Alma. Humiliated by Marston in front of his guests, he decides to leave. That same night, in the fog, a very old sailing ship loaded with timber catches him as it passes and carries him out to sea. What follows is a storm, the help he gives to fishing families driven off their island, and a struggle against Marston, who wants to seize the steamship lines of the coast. A novel of adventure and love, full of humour, set to the rhythm of old sea shanties.

A collection of essays published in 1862 by John Hill Burton, a Scottish historian. With humour, the author sketches the book hunters: the collector who buys his first duplicate copy, the browser of second-hand bookstalls, the regular at auction sales, the wandering reader who reads a little of everything. He also describes how great libraries came into being, the work of librarians, and the clubs of enthusiasts that reprint old texts, such as the Roxburghe Club. This edition opens with a biography of the author written by his widow. A learned and good-humoured look at the love of books.

An English novel. In the Ziller valley, in the Tyrol, two young Englishmen on their travels, Will Deverill, a poet and musician, and his friend Florian Wood, an affected aesthete, discover Linnet, a young cowherd from the mountain pasture who sings with an exceptional voice. The village innkeeper, Andreas Hausberger, her master and singing teacher, means to make her an opera singer and to marry her; Franz Lindner, a jealous young hunter, is courting her too. From the mountain pastures to the opera stage, a story of love and ambition told with humour.

A British novel of war and love, told by its hero. In 1854, Harry Hardinge, a young officer of the Welsh Fusiliers, waits in Winchester to leave for the war against Russia. Invited by Sir Madoc Lloyd, an old friend of his family, to a great estate in North Wales, he finds there Lady Estelle Cressingham, the woman he loves in silence, and a disturbing rival, Hawkesby Guilfoyle. Then the regiment sails for the Crimea: the battle of Inkerman, the trenches before Sebastopol, a lonely mission through enemy country. A vivid story that follows the soldiers who march under the flag of the red dragon.

Ferdinand, an ambitious and unscrupulous adventurer, moves across Europe manipulating and deceiving those he meets to climb the ranks. He adopts multiple identities and strategies to achieve his goals, indifferent to consequences. His schemes eventually expose him to increasingly risky situations. The story follows his rise and setbacks in a world dominated by appearances and cunning. This novel dives into the mind of a calculating anti-hero. The author constructs a sharp critique of ambition and duplicity.

This collection brings together Lu Xun’s first stories, published in the years just after the fall of the empire. A man reads in the history books that his neighbours eat people, a down-at-heel scholar clings to his dignity in a tavern, a father buys his son a remedy soaked in blood. The True Story of Ah Q, the longest, follows a village labourer who turns every humiliation into an imaginary victory. Together the stories explore the servitude of habit and the gap between words and deeds. Lu Xun writes in the spoken language, in a dry prose that refuses consolation.

A Wall Street lawyer hires a new copyist, Bartleby, silent and at first beyond reproach. Asked one day to do an ordinary task, the clerk answers that he would prefer not to, and repeats it to every later request. Settled in the office, demanding nothing and yielding nothing, he faces his employer with a refusal no authority answers. The story explores office work, urban solitude and the helplessness of kindness before absolute withdrawal. From an office anecdote Melville draws an uneasy fable about the individual's place in the modern city.

An unloved younger son, blunt to the point of rudeness, a young man from Tokyo takes a post as a mathematics teacher in a small town on Shikoku. His pupils put him to the test from his very first weeks, in class and then during his first night on duty at the school, and the staff room proves even more devious, with its intrigues and its nicknames. Unable to scheme or to compromise, he takes sides, makes enemies and prepares a revenge of his own kind. The novel explores clumsy honesty, the hypocrisy of institutions and homesickness. Sōseki turns it into a brisk comedy, carried by a spoken voice that passes judgement out loud.

Irene Wagner leads an untroubled bourgeois life in Vienna, married to a well-known defence lawyer and mother of two, and has been visiting a young pianist for some months. Leaving his flat one afternoon, she is stopped by a stranger who claims to be the man's discarded mistress and demands money. The demands return, and dread settles into the smallest routines of her household. Zweig follows the effect of blackmail on a woman who can confide in no one. The story examines guilt, silence, and what a secret does to an ordered life.

On Christmas Eve, little Marie finds among the presents a wooden nutcracker, which she takes under her protection when her brother Fritz breaks three of its teeth. Left alone in the parlour, she sees the toys come to life and do battle with an army of mice led by a seven-headed king. Hurt in the fighting, she listens to the story of Princess Pirlipat, which explains where the little wooden soldier comes from. The tale explores childhood, the border between dreaming and waking, and how far we believe what a child tells us. Hoffmann nests one story inside another in a fantasy where the marvellous always keeps a possible explanation.

These two Petersburg stories each follow a minor official whom the capital overwhelms. Akaky Akakievich, a copying clerk mocked by his colleagues, goes without for months to pay for the new overcoat that finally earns him some regard. Collegiate assessor Kovalyov wakes up with no nose, and soon meets the runaway organ in uniform and outranking him. Both tales explore the vanity of rank and the strangeness that shows through the paperwork. Gogol mixes farce with pity, making Petersburg a city where the absurd has the force of regulation.

At a Riviera guest house, the flight of Madame Henriette with a young Frenchman she met the day before divides the guests. The narrator, alone in defending her, is soon taken into the confidence of Mrs C., an Englishwoman of sixty-seven still held by the memory of a single day. Widowed and idle, she once spent an evening at the Monte Carlo casino watching the players' hands rather than their faces. Those of a very young man hold her, and she resolves to intervene. Zweig examines sudden passion, chance, and how much of a life fits into a day.

Five biographical studies of six people from old England, most of them little remembered: Magdalen Herbert, friend of the poet John Donne; the Welsh poet and physician Henry Vaughan; the writer of comedies George Farquhar; Topham Beauclerk and Bennet Langton, friends of Samuel Johnson; and the critic William Hazlitt. From 1561 to 1830, the author follows their families, friendships and works. Lively portraits, full of true detail about three centuries of English life.

Chichikov arrives in a provincial town, charms everyone who matters, and calls on the landowners nearby. He offers them a peculiar bargain: to buy the serfs who have died since the last census but still stand on the registers and are taxed to their owners. From estate to estate come the miser, the boor, the suspicious widow and the dreamer, until the town starts wondering who its visitor is. The novel explores greed and a country revealed by its small arrangements. Gogol's comic gallery turns gradually into a moral inventory.

This collection brings together ten of Poe’s tales, from houses eaten away by their past to the confessions of murderers who believe themselves perfectly sane. It includes The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart and the first investigation of the Chevalier Dupin. Most are told in the first person by a narrator caught between reason and terror, and the tension tightens until the very last line. Together they explore guilt, madness, death and the limits of the mind that observes them. Here Poe sets the lasting forms of the horror story as well as of the detective story.

Paris, 1482: the gypsy Esmeralda dances on the Place de Grève while the city keeps the Feast of Fools. Quasimodo, the cathedral's misshapen bell-ringer, and Claude Frollo, the archdeacon who raised him, are both overcome by her. Between cloister, Court of Miracles and pillory, she becomes the stake of a desire that will not admit itself. The novel explores fanaticism, the violence of crowds, beauty and ugliness, and the cathedral as a memory in stone. Hugo makes medieval Paris a character in its own right, rebuilt street by street.

In 1866 an unexplained sea monster alarms the navies of the world; in July 1867 Professor Aronnax sails to hunt it down. A collision with the monster throws him overboard along with a Canadian harpooner, and his servant jumps in after him: all three are taken aboard the Nautilus, a submarine under Captain Nemo. Guests and prisoners of a man who has broken with dry land, they travel the oceans of the globe with him. The novel explores science, the freedom of a man beyond the laws of any country, and an underwater world still unknown. Verne combines a naturalist's inventory with an adventure narrative, paced by landfalls and storms.

Seventeen linked comic stories, told by Torchy in the everyday speech of New York. Once a red-haired office boy, now private secretary to the president of a large company, Torchy is married to Vee and has a baby. The stories take place in 1918 and 1919, in New York and its suburbs, at the end of the First World War. At the office and at home, he helps his colleagues, neighbours and friends in his own way, often in matters of love. A lively, funny look at American life of the period.

Franklin recounts his course from his brother's printing shop in Boston to public affairs in Philadelphia. He describes his self-taught apprenticeship, his first newspapers, the reading societies he founded and his plan for thirteen virtues. The account follows him from craftsman to publisher, inventor and agent of the colonies in Europe. The book explores work, frugality, public usefulness and the idea that character is built like a trade. He offers one of the first accounts of self-made success, in the plain tone of a letter to his son.

In the tenth year of the siege of Troy, Agamemnon takes from Achilles the captive awarded to him, and the best of the Achaeans withdraws to his tent. Without him the Greek army fights on the plain: the duel of Paris and Menelaus, the feats of Diomedes, Hector's farewell to Andromache. An embassy begs Achilles to return and fails, while the Trojans press on and break the rampart before the ships. This first volume explores anger, honour and the weight of the gods. Homer gives each fighter a name, a birthplace and a death described in full.

In 1805 Russia goes to war against Napoleon, and the salons of Petersburg discuss it in French. The novel follows Pierre Bezukhov, an awkward heir seeking meaning, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who joins the army to escape his life, and Natasha Rostov, whose childhood ends between two balls. From Moravia to the burning of Moscow, private lives are caught up in the armies. The book explores love, death, faith and how far individuals shape events. Tolstoy weaves family chronicle with reflection on history, refusing to let great men explain it.

An English novel. One May morning in 1919, the painter Philip Esdaile gives a breakfast for his friends in his studio in Chelsea, London. Suddenly an aeroplane crashes nearby, and two airmen, caught in the same parachute, fall onto the roof: one is dead, while the other, Chummy Smith, a wartime friend of the painter, survives. On the roof lies a pistol that has been fired. Instead of alerting the police, the friends decide to keep the affair secret and seek the truth among themselves. An original and ironic tale of investigation, told by one of the guests.

An English novel, sequel to The School for Saints. London, 1869: Robert Orange, a young Catholic Member of Parliament of French descent and a protégé of Disraeli, marries Brigit, a young widow he loves with an almost mystical devotion. On the very day of the wedding, word comes that Brigit's first husband, believed drowned, is alive: their marriage is therefore not valid. Torn between politics, his faith and the judgement of society, Orange must decide how to act, while the ambitious Lady Sara de Treverell takes an interest in him. A serious novel about love, honour and conscience.

The Trojans have reached the ships and fire threatens the fleet when Patroclus takes Achilles' armour to drive them back. His death at Hector's hands brings Achilles into the battle, with armour forged by Hephaestus and a fury nothing can check. The plain, the river, then the walls of Troy see the two men close on each other, while the city watches. This second volume explores grief, revenge and the pity an enemy can still command. Homer carries the poem to Hector's funeral, after a night in which a father comes to ask for his son's body.