As the headstrong Maggie Tulliver grows into womanhood, the deep love which she has for her brother Tom turns into conflict, because she cannot reconcile his bourgeois standards with her own lively intelligence. This story shows the ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian age.

Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith.

Introduces us to a group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. This book involves the reader in the labyrinthine creation of a purported autobiography. It anticipates modernism and postmodernism.

George Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a scathing satire of the Soviet Union under Stalin. Today, it remains a powerful fable about the nature of tyranny and corruption which applies for all ages.

Orwell's subjects in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier are the political and social upheavals of his time. He focusses on the sense of profound injustice, incipient violence, and malign betrayal that were ubiquitous in Europe in the 1930s.

The Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother - '1984' itself: these terms have moved from the world of fiction into our everyday lives. They are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression; yet they were created by George Orwell in 1949 as he conjured his dystopian vision of a world where totalitarian power is absolute.

Written during her time as the inaugural fellow in the Beckett archive last year, Eimear McBride's three short, characteristically brilliant plays - collected in one work, Mouthpieces. Each play depicts a fragment of female experience, all of them told in in Eimear's vivid, original and sharp-witted style.

The victim of a miscarriage of justice, Edmund Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and empowered by a stroke of providence. In his campaign of vengeance, he becomes an anonymous agent of fate.

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.

A tale of horror, set in the Congo during the period of rapid colonial expansion in the 19th century. The story deals with the highly disturbing effects of economic, social and political exploitation of European and African societies and the cataclysmic behaviour this induced in some individuals.

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The heroine, Fanny Price, has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her feelings while enduring the amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

This perennially popular book was cited by Karl Marx in Das Kapital to illustrate economic theory, but it is readers of all ages over the last 280 years who have given "Robinson Crusoe" its abiding position as a classic tale of adventure.

This novel tells the story of Kimball O'Hara (Kim), who is the orphaned son of a soldier in the Irish regiment stationed in India during the British Raj. It describes Kim's life and adventures from street vagabond, to his adoption by his father's regiment and recruitment into espionage.

Tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this novel, revolutionary in its Modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W B Yeats, T S Eliot and Ernest Hemingway.

Follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the north. This book uses a love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a industrial society. It traces the origins of problems and possibilities which are still challenging a hundred and fifty years later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics.

As he stood up, he suddenly felt aroused by Mrs Shaw's large breasts, boy's haircut, and little-girl sneakers. Gopal wanted to put his hands on her waist and pull her toward him. But when his neighbour comes to borrow his lawnmower, Gopal thinks he might find something similar right here in New Jersey.

The government has cleaned up Harare for the Queen of England's visit. 'The townships are too full of people, they said, gather them up and put them in the places the Queen will not see.' Four waves of people have settled on Easterly Farm since then, living on the margins in homes that will soon be destroyed. Among them is Martha Mupengo.

'On the whole, it was easier than I had expected. Only once did I feel myself at risk. Took her away from you some people might say. Didn't you feel any grievance?" I had been expecting this question. I knew exactly what I would say.' The late, great P. James takes us inside the mind of a murderer.

Sonny Liston gave Kid Dynamite the slightest hint of a smile and winked. In the build-up to a fight, Kid Dynamite's head swirls - with thoughts of his estranged father, his difficult relationship with his stepfather, the time he met his hero, and the sense that his own life is reaching a moment of change.