Set against the sweeping panoply of Napoleons invasion of Russia, "War and Peace" is often considered the greatest novel ever written. Set in Russia during the Napoleonic era, this epic novel follows the fortunes of five aristocratic Russian families over the course of the French invasion. Tolstoy's timeless portrayal of the fates of families set against the backdrop of war is ultimately optimistic and life-affirming, with the educated, but socially...

Trying to forget his past and live an honest life, escaped convict Jean Valjean risks his freedom to take care of a motherless young girl during a period of political unrest in Paris.

"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence, Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper seeks to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths...

Rand's hero is Howard Roark, a brilliant young architect who won't compromise his integrity, especially in the unconventional buildings he designs. Roark is engaged in ideological warfare with a society that despises him, an architectural community that doesn't understand him, and a woman who loves him but wants to destroy him. His struggle raises questions about society's attitude toward revolutionaries. Since this book's publication in 1943, Rand's...

A Confederacy of Dunces is an American comic masterpiece.

Emma Woodhouse arrives home in Norfolk ready to embark on adult life. Not only has her sister, Isabella, been whisked away on a motorcycle up to London, but her astute governess, Miss Taylor is at a loose end, abandoned in the giant family pile, Hartfield, alongside Emma's anxiety-ridden father. Someone is needed to rule the roost and young Emma is more than happy to oblige. But there is only one person who can play with Emma's indestructible confidence,...

The turbulent romance of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler is shaped by the ravages of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Phileas Fogg bets his friends he can circumnavigate the globe in just eighty days. So he sets out from London with his faithful servant, Passepartout, on an incredible journey,

The Pilgrim's Progress is a 1678 Christian allegory written by the Puritan preacher John Bunyan. Begun while Bunyan served a 12-year jail sentence for his nonconformist preaching, the novel unfolds over two parts, one concerning Christian, and the other his wife Christiana and their sons. Both concern the central characters' ordeals in traveling from the worldly to the sublime, and are filled with allegorical characters with names like Hypocrisy and...

‘Within a Budding Grove’ (1919) is the second volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time. Written while Proust was virtually confined to his bedroom from a lifelong respiratory illness, ‘Within a Budding Grove’ is a story of memory, history, family, and romance from a master of Modernist literature. Praised by Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Chabon, and Graham Greene, In Search of Lost Time explores the nature...