"One family will emerge alive from this terrible storm: the Robinsons—a Swiss pastor, his wife, and four sons, plus two dogs and a shipload of livestock...this heartwarming tale portrays a family’s struggle to create a new life on a strange and fantastic tropical island. There each boy must learn to utilize his own unique nature as their adventures lead to difficult challenges and amazing discoveries, including a puzzling message tied to an albatross’s...

"From her childhood Jane Eyre, orphaned and poor, fights for the right to be happy. Fleeing harsh relatives and a miserable life at an Orphan's School, Jane finds peace, happiness, and unexpected love at Thornfield Hall. But Thornfield's peace is a fraud, and its master, Mr. Rochester, has secrets too terrible to tell. A vivid portrait of a young woman's struggle for survival in English society, Charlotte Brontë's novel follows Jane Eyre from...

Resting one night on a boat on the River Thames, Charlie Marlow tells his friends about his experiences as a steamboat captain on the River Congo. There, in the heart of Africa, his search for the extraordinary Mr. Kurtz caused him to question his own nature and values-- and the nature and values of his society.

“Up from Slavery” is the 1901 autobiography of American educator Booker T. Washington (1856—1915). The book describes his experience of working to rise up from being enslaved as a child during the Civil War, the obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, and his work establishing vocational schools like the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to help Black people and other persecuted people of color learn useful, marketable...

Set in the rural midlands of England, "The Rainbow" revolves around three generations of the Brangwen family over a period of more than sixty years, setting them against the emergence of modern England. When Tom Brangwen marries a Polish widow and adopts her daughter as his own, he is unprepared for the conflict and passion that erupt. Suffused with biblical imagery, "The Rainbow" addresses searching human issues in a setting of precise and vivid...

"American Journalist Jake Barnes is desperately in love with the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley. She moves seductively through the seemingly glamorous milieu of American and British expats, loving, living and partying in Paris in the 1920's. They're a hedonistic generation, marked by the violence and privations of WW1, in pursuit of adventure. Ever restless, Jake and Lady Brett travel together with a disparate group of friends through France to Pamplona...

"An intimate portrait of two men who cherish the slim bond between them and the dream they share in a world marred by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness. Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation. George and his simple-minded friend Lenny dream, as driftes will, of a place to call their own--a couple of acres and few pigs, chickens, and rabbits back in Hill Country where land is cheap. But after they come...

“There it lay, the great pearl, perfect as the moon.”
 
Like his father and grandfather before him, Kino is a poor diver, gathering pearls from the gulf beds that once brought great wealth to the Kings of Spain and now provide Kino, Juana, and their infant son with meager subsistence. Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with a pearl as large as a sea gull's egg, as "perfect as the moon." With the...

Graham Greene’s masterful novel of love and betrayal in World War II London is “undeniably a major work of art” (The New Yorker).
 
Maurice Bendrix, a writer in Clapham during the Blitz, develops an acquaintance with Sarah Miles, the bored, beautiful wife of a dull civil servant named Henry. Maurice claims it’s to divine a character for his novel-in-progress. That’s the first deception....

Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. This is Barbara Pym's world at its funniest. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those excellent women, the smart, supportive, repressed women whom men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors-anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and...