Oliver Twist is a classic tale of a boy of unknown parentage born in a workhouse and brought up under the cruel conditions to which pauper children were exposed in the Victorian England. With this novel, Dickens did not merely write a topical satire on the workhouse system and the role of the 1834 New Poor Law in fostering criminality. He created a moral fable about the survival of good, a romance, and a gripping story in which he exploited suspense...

A poor workman named Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken rage, sells his wife and baby daughter to a stranger at a country fair. Stricken with remorse, Henchard forswears alcohol and works hard to become a prosperous businessman and the respected mayor of Casterbridge. But he cannot erase his past.

"Young Philip Pirrip, nicknamed Pip, is meant to become an apprentice for his brother-in-law, a poor blacksmith. But his destiny changes upon meeting three unusual people: an escaped convict, a tragic woman, and a captivating young girl. Pip's life is altered in an instant when a secret benefactor gives him a large sum of money. Pip has "great expectations" for his new life as successful and wealthy life as a young gentleman. Has his life actually...

Caryl Phillips, who "pits himself against any kind of received wisdom" (London Review of Books), gives us a hypnotic, heartbreaking novel lit by the bright and changing lights of 1960s London. In London's swinging sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in Britain with dreams of becoming a journalist in the "mother country." Instead, he finds work collecting rent for Peter Feldman, a landlord equally kind and unscrupulous,...

This story deals with the imperfect workings of the legal system in the trial and acquittal of Lady Mason. Trollope wrote in his autobiography that his friends considered this 'the best I have written'.