Hiring themselves out as “young adventurers willing to do anything” is a smart move for Tommy and Tuppence. All Tuppence has to do is take an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris and pose as someone named Jane...
In her first published mystery, Agatha Christie introduces readers to the heroic detective, Hercule Poirot. This is a classic murder mystery set in the outskirts of Essex. The victim is the wealthy mistress...
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, popularly known as Fanny Hill, is a novel by John Cleland. Written in 1748 while Cleland was in debtor's prison in London, it is considered the first modern "erotic novel" in...
Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams...
My Ántonia (first published 1918) is considered the greatest novel by American writer Willa Cather. My Ántonia — pronounced with the accent on the first syllable of "Ántonia" — is the final book of the...
The first of her renowned prairie novels--a story that expresses Cather's conviction that "the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman." When Alexandra Bergson takes over the family...
Described by Hardy as a tale of "mystery, entanglement, surprise and moral obliquity", his first published novel violated the literary decorum of its day with blackmail, murder, and romance. It relates the story...
The Jungle is a 1906 novel written by author and socialist journalist Upton Sinclair. It was written about the corruption of the American meatpacking industry during the early 20th century. The novel depicts...
The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1918 novel by Booth Tarkington which won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize. It was the second novel in the Growth trilogy, which included The Turmoil (1915) and The Midlander (1923, retitled...
The Call of the Wild is a novel by American writer Jack London. The plot concerns a previously domesticated and even somewhat pampered dog named Buck, whose primordial instincts return after a series of events...
My Man Jeeves is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the UK in May 1919 by George Newnes. Of the eight stories in the collection, half feature the popular characters Jeeves and...
Vast and crowded, rich in irony and suspense, Middlemarch is richer still in character, with two of the era's most enduring characters, Dorothea Brooke, trapped in a loveless marriage, and Lydgate, an ambitious...
Jane Eyre, the story of a young girl and her passage into adulthood, was an immediate commercial success at the time of its original publication in 1847. Its representation of the underside of domestic life...
The House of Mirth (1905), by Edith Wharton, is a novel about New York socialite Lily Bart attempting to secure a husband and a place in rich society. It is one of the first novels of manners in American literature.
Set against the bleak winter landscape of New England, Ethan Frome is the story of a poor farmer, lonely and downtrodden, his wife Zeena, and her cousin, the enchanting Mattie Silver. In the playing out of this...