Hanrahan is an hedge schoolmaster: with his little inkpot hanging from his neck by a chain, and his big Virgil and his primer in the skirt of his coat, he goes walking through the...

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Thus memorably begins Jane Austen’s Pride...

Alexei Ivanovich, a tutor working for a Russian family living in a suite at a German hotel. The patriarch of the family, The General, is indebted to the Frenchman Des Grieux and...

An upper-class Russian woman falls for a Bulgarian revolutionary in the summer of 1853, the eve of the devastating war that set the Russian empire against the Ottoman, British and...

A fictional town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. A mysterious aristocratic...

In the Five Towns human nature is reported to be so hard that you can break stones on it. Yet sometimes it softens, and then we have one of our rare idylls of which we are very...

Ivan Ilyich, a high court judge, becomes seriously ill and faces a long and gruelling battle with death. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is more than a story about death, however. It...

Nunzio Russo’s The Maestrale Voice could be defined as a painting, rather than a novel. The author’s delicate pen gently describes a century of Sicily, specifically...

Bleak House is one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon. The story...

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant ( Margaret Oliphant Wilson) (4 April 1828 – 25 June 1897), was a Scottish novelist and historical writer, who usually wrote as Mrs....