North and South tells the story of Margaret Hale, a southerner newly settled in the northern industrial town of Milton, whose ready sympathy with the discontented millworkers sits uneasily with her growing attraction to the charismatic mill owner, John Thornton. The novel poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience, ranging from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny and industrial action. Margaret's...

A satire on the follies and dangers of collectivism in which the United States is faced with the prospect of economic collapse when the country's leading innovators and industrialists go into hiding.

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...

"Ware can't wait to spend summer "off in his own world"--dreaming of knights in the Middle Ages and generally being left alone. But then his parents sign him up for dreaded Rec camp, where he must endure Meaningful Social Interaction and whatever activities so-called "normal" kids do. On his first day Ware meets Jolene, a tough, secretive girl planting a garden in the rubble of an abandoned church next to the camp. Soon he starts skipping Rec, creating...

        
Etched against the background of a dying rural society, Tess of the d'Urbervilles was Thomas Hardy's "bestseller," and Tess Durbeyfield remains his most striking and tragic heroine. Of all the characters he created, she meant the most to him. Hopelessly torn between two men—Alec d'Urberville, a wealthy, dissolute young man who seduces her in a lonely wood, and Angel Clare, her provincial,...

The protagonists are Sophie Amundsen, a 14-year-old girl, and Alberto Knox, her philosophy teacher. The novel chronicles their metaphysical relationship as they study Western philosophy from its beginnings to the present. A bestseller in Norway.

A man and a great ape conduct a series of philosophical conversations in a work that presents a new vision of evolution and humankind and asks the question: does the Earth belong to humans, or do humans belong to the Earth?

"A passionate portrait of love's contradictory power, in five illuminating stories André Aciman, who has been called "the most exciting new fiction writer of the twenty-first century" (New York magazine), has written a novel that chronicles the life of Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and covetous throughout his life as they were in adolescence. Whether in southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents' cabinetmaker; or on a snowbound...

In Thomas Hardy's first major literary success, independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy, and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues, threatening...

In the course of his wanderings from a Southern college to New York's Harlem, an American Black man becomes involved in a series of adventures. Introduction explains circumstances under which the book was written. Ellison won the National Book Award for this searing record of a Black man's journey through contemporary America. Unquestionably, Ellison's book is a work of extraordinary intensity -- powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly...