A young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. This book describes the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed.

Shirley is a woman of independent means; her friend Caroline is not. Both struggle with what a woman's role is and can be. Their male counterparts - Louis, the powerless tutor, and Robert, his cloth-manufacturing brother - also stand at odds to society's expectations.

The Professor is Charlotte Bronte's first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth

Outrageously pretentious, hypocritical and snobbish, Queen Lucia, 'as by right divine' rules over the toy kingdom of 'Riseholme' based on the Cotswold village of Broadway. Her long-suffering husband Pepino is 'her prince-consort', the outrageously camp Georgie is her 'gentleman-in-waiting', and the village green is her 'parliament'.

These three wonderful comic novels drolly record the battle between Lucia and Elisabeth Mapp for social and cultural supremacy in the village of Tilling (based on Rye).

A Room of One's Own has become a classic feminist essay; The Voyage Out is highly significant as her first novel.

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel depicts the great clashes between capital and labour, which arose from rapid industrialisation and problems of trade in the mid-19th century. Mary Barton was published in 1848, at a time of great social ferment in Europe, and it reflects its revolutionary moment through an English lens.

A novel built out of a series of dramatic scenes that illuminate eternal conflicts at the heart of human existence: most especially our desire for self-expression and self-fulfilment, as against the constraints of morality and human laws.

Widely censured at the time of its publication in 1899, Kate Chopin's The Awakening is an evocative story of self-discovery and female emancipation that has since become one of the most popular classics in the American canon.

Here are all five of the adventures featuring Richard Hannay, the hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps.

A collection of 100 of author's finest stories; it describes life south of the Rio Grande and chronicles the activities and concerns of 'the four million' ordinary citizens who inhabited turn-of-the-century New York.

War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters.

Under Milk Wood is Dylan Thomas's best-known and best-loved work, his radio play completed in 1953 at the very end of his life. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog is his first collection of short stories. These works show us his creative brilliance at the start and at the end of a highly productive writing life.

Set before the First World War, this title tells the tale of two wealthy and sophisticated couples, one English, one American, as they travel, socialise, and take the waters in the spa towns of Europe.

Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. Kafka deals in dark and quirkily humorous terms with the insoluble dilemmas of a world which offers no reassurance, and no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.

A thriller brimming with incident rendered in mesmerizing prose by of one of our sharpest, most original contemporary British writers.

The sixth psychological thriller in Tania Carver's award-nominated, internationally bestselling Phil Brennan and Marina Esposito series.

'Booker's fast paced, twisting thrillers are a must-read for anyone who loves a good page turner' Simon Kernick'A must-read' Mark BillinghamKarl Savage is dead.

THE GRIPPING FIRST DCI BILLY McCARTNEY THRILLERDCI Billy McCartney discovers the body of a key informant near Liverpool Docks - a killer setback as he closes the net on a major drug smuggling scheme.

'Thinking Betty was in the bath Graham was watching a late-night programme on Channel 4 called Footballers with Their Shirts Off when she unexpectedly came in on the trail of the hairdryer. "I didn't know you were interested in football," said Betty.' No one must ever find out that Graham is 'not the marrying sort'.

My name is Hanna. I am 15. I am Latvian. I live with my mother and grandmother. My father is missing, taken by the Russians. I have a boyfriend and I'm training to be a dancer. But none of that is important any more. Because the Nazis have arrived, and I am a Jew. And as far as they are concerned, that is all that matters. This is my story.