Everyman's Library CLASSICS

Flaubert’s Parrot, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, concerns the attempts of an increasingly bemused researcher to establish certain facts about a famous French novelist and the stuffed bird which used to sit on his desk.A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters blends fact and fiction in a virtuoso kaleidoscope of vignettes from Noah’s time to the present. One of the author’s most inventive works, it was praised by Salman Rushdie as ‘frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic and a delight to read’.

Voss describes an epic journey, both physical and spiritual. The eponymous hero, Johann Voss, is based on Ludwig Leichhardt, the nineteenth-century German explorer and naturalist who had already conducted several major expeditions into the Australian outback before making an ambitious attempt to cross the entire continent from east to west in 1848. He never returned.
White re-imagines his story with visionary intensity. Voss’s last journey across the desert and the waterlogged plains of central Australia is a true ‘venture to the interior’. But Voss is also a love story, for the explorer has become inextricably bound up with Laura Trevellyn, whose inner life, like his own, is at odds with the world. In language poetic and passionate, yet at the same time grounded by shrewd, often comic, social observations and naturalistic portrayals of a wide variety of characters – farmers, convicts, aborigines, the colonial middle class and their servants.

Mark Twain’s famous novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (available in Everyman) have long been hailed as major masterpieces, but it is less well known that the father of American literature also made his mark as a master of the short story. This is the only edition in hardcover of his complete shorter fiction: sixty tales spanning a long career – many rollicking and uproarious, some sombre and even shocking. Included, of course, are such immortal classics as ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ (1865), a humorous piece set in Gold-Rush California, which helped establish the young author’s reputation, and ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’ (1899), a satirical novella in which a self-righteously respectable American small town is exposed as a fraud.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte's second and most celebrated novel. Set in the dramatic northern landscape made familiar by the author's more famous sisters, it tells the story of Helen Graham, a mysterious single woman who rents the semi-ruinous Hall of the title. With a child but no husband, Helen divides the community between those who admire her charm and spirit and those who suspect her morals. Chief among her supporters is a local farmer, Gilbert Markham, who tells her story.

Written before The Tenant, Agnes Grey, based on the author's own experience, explores the position of women in Victorian society through the story of a young woman forced to work as a governess when her father is ruined financially.

Hugo's grand medieval melodrama tells the story of the beautiful Esmeralda, a gypsy girl loved by three men: Archdeacon Frollo, his adoptive son Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre-Dame cathedral, and Captain Phoebus. Falsely accused of trying to murder Phoebus, who attempts to rape her, Esmeralda is sentenced to death and rescued from the gallows by Quasimodo who defends her to the last.
The subject of many adaptations for stage and screen, this remains perhaps one of the most romantic yet gripping stories ever told.

Inspired by the Indian Mutiny of 1857, The Siege of Krishnapur is set in the fictional town of that name where a British garrison withstands a four-month siege by mutineers. Eventually rescued after undergoing terrible privations, the leading characters all find their ideals tested and their smug assumptions of military and moral superiority severely shaken.
In Troubles Major Brendan Archer travels to Ireland in the aftermath of World War I in order to meet his fiancée Angela in a remote seaside hotel owned by her father. Angela dies unexpectedly, but Archer remains in Kilnalough, captivated by the Majestic and its inhabitants, and seemingly unaware of the approaching political storm as Ireland dissolves into revolt and civil war.
Both novels combine high comedy with vivid realism and reveal Farrell as 'one of the finest post-colonial novelists' - John Sutherland.

Fantasy, mystery, war and love - it's all here in the magical trilogy His Dark Materials

This BEAUTIFUL GIFT collection features ALL THREE titles in the award-winning trilogy: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and THE AMBER SPYGLASS

The Amber Spyglass
Will and Lyra, whose fates are bound together by powers beyond their own worlds, have been violently separated. But they must find each other, for ahead of them lies the greatest war that has ever been - and a journey to a dark place from which no one has ever returned . . .

Northern Lights
Lyra Belacqua lives half-wild and carefree among the scholars of Jordan College, with her daemon familiar always by her side. But the arrival of her fearsome uncle, Lord Asriel, draws her to the heart of a terrible struggle - a struggle born of Gobblers and stolen children, witch clans and armoured bears.

The Subtle Knife
Lyra finds herself in a shimmering, haunted otherworld - Cittàgazze, where soul-eating Spectres stalk the streets and wingbeats of distant angels sound against the sky. But she is not without allies: twelve-year-old Will Parry, fleeing for his life after taking another's, has also stumbled into this strange new realm.
On a perilous journey from world to world, Lyra and Will uncover a deadly secret: an object of extraordinary and devastating power. And with every step, they move closer to an even greater threat - and the shattering truth of their own destiny.

Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicentre of the suicides, the bleak, impoverished border city of Kars, is also home to the beautiful Ipek, a friend of Ka's youth whom he has never forgotten and whose spirited younger sister is a leader of the rebellious schoolgirls. As a fierce snowstorm descends, cutting them off from the world, violence between the military and local Islamic radicals begins to explode, and Ka finds his sympathies drawn in unexpected and dramatic directions.

Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories - of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal - illuminate the story, and leave all the characters for ever changed.

At the turn of the twentieth century. When their father dies young, exhausted by the failure of his attempts at agriculture, it is left to the visionary Alexandra to guide the family to prosperity and safeguard the fortune of her brothers. Strong-willed and fiercely independent, she succeeds against all odds, but only at the cost of her own fulfilment as a woman. Central to the novel's action is the Nebraskan landscape it describes, by turns unyielding and fruitful, bitter and ecstatic.O Pioneers! joins Cather's My Antonia in Everyman's Library.

George Orwell was a novelist unlike any other, fiercely devoted to presenting the truth as he saw it. The three novels in this collection date from the 1930s, before his political satires Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four made him world-famous. Compelling works in their own right, they are all studies of men at odds with their surroundings. In Burmese Days, the darkest of the three, a frustrated expatriate finds himself trapped between the decadence of his own people and the corruption of the natives they claim to rule. Coming Up for Airdramatizes the frustration of every little man in his hopeless struggle against bourgeois respectability. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a sort of comedy in which minor poet Gordon Comstock engages briefly with romantic dreams before realizing that salvation is to be found, not in escape from his life but engagement with it.

Included here are some of the well-loved Father Brown detective stories, surely among the best in the genre, and a range of poetry, serious and light-hearted - Chesterton wrote some of the best nonsense and satirical verse in the language. The main bias of the selection, however, will be towards his non-fictional prose, where, Dr Ker argues, his real greatness lies. In that sense he is the successor of the great Victorian 'Sages', Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin and Newman. Selections will be made from his studies of Victorian literature (particularly his classic essays on Dickens, originally published by Everyman), his critical biographies of St Francis of Assisi, St Thomas Aquinas and William Cobbett; his apologetic classics Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, his journalistic essays (a form in which he excelled) and from his best political and social criticism, with particular emphasis on his championing of the common man and the masses against virtually all the intellectuals of his day. Edited and introduced by an expert in the field, this substantial volume promises to bring its author back into prominence with a thorough intellectual and literary reassessment of his achievements

THE THREE MUSKETEERS has proved enduringly popular for more than a century and a half. Inspiration for many a movie and TV adaptation, this swashbuckling epic of chivalry, honour and derring-do, set in France during the 1620s, is satisfyingly peopled with romantic heroes, unattainable heroines, kings, queens, cavaliers and criminals, and contains in abundance adventure, espionage, conspiracy, murder, vengeance, love, scandal and suspense. Taking as its starting point the memoirs of the historical Comte d'Artagnan, Dumas's imagination transforms the bit-players of history into larger-than-life characters: d'Artagnan himself, the impetuous young man in pursuit of glory but ever ready to respond to an insult; the beguilingly evil seductress 'Milady' (entirely his own creation) and of course the Three Musketeers of the title, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, whose motto 'all for one, one for all' has come to epitomize devoted friendship. Interwoven amongst them are vivid fictionalized portraits of major historical figures, amongst them the powerful and devious Cardinal Richelieu, the weak and ineffectual Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, his unhappy Spanish queen. Throw in some stolen diamonds, masked balls, purloined letters, a crumbling medieval prison and a great deal of sword-fighting together with a gripping plot, tremendous narrative drive and a hint of discreet humour, and you have a book totally impossible to put down.

It is the story of the Galactic Empire, crumbling after twelve thousand years of rule. And it is the particular story of psycho-historian Hari Seldon, the only man who can see the horrors the future has in store: a dark age of ignorance, barbarism and violence that will last for thirty thousand years. Gathering together a band of courageous men and women, Seldon leads them to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy where he hopes they can preserve human knowledge and wisdom against all who would destroy them.
Asimov went on to add numerous sequels and prequels to the trilogy, building up what has become known as the Foundation series, but it is the original three books, first published in the Forties and Fifties, which remain the most powerful, imaginative and breathtaking.

The Ottoman Sultan has commissioned the best artists in the land to create a book celebrating the glories of his realm: but he wants them to illuminate it in the European style. Because figurative art is deemed by many to be an affront to Islam, the project must be kept secret. Panic and scandal erupt when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears, along with a crucial page of the manuscript. The surviving artists - bitter rivals variously motivated by pride, greed, jealousy, faith and love - are all under suspicion of murder, and the only clue to the mystery lies in the half-finished illustrations themselves. My Name is Red reveals the clash between two views of artistic meaning and the chasm between two world civilizations. In this special edition the author includes a chronology of Islamic and Western art history to provide valuable context for his story, and has contributed a fascinating introduction throwing light on his methods, his aims and his inspiration

Though Stoker did not invent vampires - and in fact based his character's life-in-death on extensive research into European folklore - his novel elevated the nocturnal monster to iconic stature, spawning a genre of stories and movies which flourishes to this day. A century of imitation has done nothing to diminish its power. As the suave and chilling Count stalks his prey from a crumbling castle in the Carpathians to a lunatic asylum in Purfleet and the bedrooms of his swooning female victims, the drama builds to a fever pitch of sensuality and suspense.
Dracula is not only a classic of Gothic horror and a wellspring of modern mythology: it is also irresistible entertainment.