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Category: Books

  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

    Huck Finn, last seen in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is living uneasily with the Widow Douglas, who wants to civilise him, when his drunken, violent father reappears to claim the money Huck found. Huck fakes his own death to escape and hides on an island in the Mississippi, where he meets Jim, an enslaved man who has run away after learning he is to be sold downriver.

    The two set off on a raft, hoping to reach the free states. Along the river they meet feuding families, a lynch mob, and two swindlers who call themselves the Duke and the King and drag them into scams in riverside towns. Throughout, Huck wrestles with what his society has taught him about right and wrong as his friendship with Jim deepens.

    Told in Huck's vernacular voice, the novel transformed American prose; Hemingway said modern American literature came from it. It is a satire of racism and moral hypocrisy, yet its frequent use of racial slurs and depiction of Jim have made it one of the most debated and challenged books in American schools.

    Book details

    AuthorMark Twain
    First published1884
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)366
    SettingMississippi River valley, 1830s-1840s

    Themes

    • Slavery and freedom
    • Conscience
    • Friendship
    • Hypocrisy
    • Coming of age

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in American literature, satire and the history of race in the United States.

  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    This collection gathers the first twelve Sherlock Holmes short stories, originally published in The Strand Magazine in 1891 and 1892. They made Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective a sensation and established the format of the detective short story: a visitor arrives at Baker Street with a puzzle, Holmes reads their life from small physical details, and an investigation follows.

    The cases range widely. A king fears exposure by a former lover in A Scandal in Bohemia, which introduces Irene Adler. A pawnbroker is paid to copy out an encyclopaedia in The Red-Headed League. Other stories involve a deadly speckled band in a Surrey manor house, a blue gemstone found in a Christmas goose, a vanished bridegroom and an engineer who loses his thumb.

    Narrated by the loyal Dr John Watson, the stories mix logical deduction with Victorian atmosphere: fog, gaslight, hansom cabs and country houses. Not every case ends with an arrest, and Holmes is sometimes outwitted, which keeps the collection lively. It remains the ideal starting point for new Holmes readers.

    Book details

    AuthorArthur Conan Doyle
    First published1892
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)307
    SettingLondon and the English countryside, 1880s-1890s

    Themes

    • Deduction
    • Justice
    • Friendship
    • Disguise
    • Victorian society

    Who should read it

    Mystery lovers and newcomers to Sherlock Holmes who want short, self-contained cases to read one at a time.

  • The Hound of the Baskervilles

    Dr James Mortimer arrives at Baker Street with an old manuscript describing a curse on the Baskerville family: a gigantic, hellish hound said to have hunted down a wicked ancestor in the seventeenth century. Sir Charles Baskerville has just been found dead in the grounds of his Devon estate, with the footprints of an enormous dog nearby, and the new heir, Sir Henry, is on his way from Canada.

    Holmes, claiming other business, sends Watson to Dartmoor to guard Sir Henry and report back. Watson finds a landscape of mists, ancient stone huts and treacherous bogs, an escaped convict at large, a butler and his wife behaving suspiciously, a naturalist and his sister living nearby, and an unexplained light on the moor at night.

    Serialised in 1901 and 1902, the novel brought Holmes back after Conan Doyle had killed him off, though it is set before his apparent death. It balances rational detection against an atmosphere of supernatural dread and is often considered the finest Holmes novel.

    Book details

    AuthorArthur Conan Doyle
    First published1902
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)256
    SettingDartmoor, Devon, and London, 1880s

    Themes

    • Reason versus superstition
    • Inheritance
    • Deception
    • Landscape
    • Family curse

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a full-length Sherlock Holmes mystery with a gothic atmosphere and a moorland setting.

  • War and Peace

    War and Peace opens in a St Petersburg salon in 1805, where the talk is of Napoleon, and follows several aristocratic families over the following years: the warm, chaotic Rostovs, the proud Bolkonskys and the scheming Kuragins. At its centre are three figures: Pierre Bezukhov, an awkward illegitimate son who unexpectedly inherits a fortune; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, an ambitious, disillusioned officer; and Natasha Rostova, whose vitality lights up the book.

    Tolstoy alternates between ballrooms, country estates and battlefields, including Austerlitz and Borodino, and the French occupation and burning of Moscow in 1812. Historical figures such as Napoleon and the Russian commander Kutuzov appear beside the fictional characters. Pierre's search for meaning takes him through Freemasonry, a disastrous marriage and captivity.

    Lengthy essays argue that history is shaped by countless individual actions rather than by great men. Huge in cast and scope yet intimate in its psychological detail, the novel is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever written. Readers often worry about its length, but its short chapters and vivid scenes carry the story forward.

    Book details

    AuthorLeo Tolstoy
    First published1869
    Original languageRussian
    Translated byLouise and Aylmer Maude
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)1225
    SettingRussia and Austria, 1805-1820

    Themes

    • War
    • History and free will
    • Love and marriage
    • Meaning of life
    • Russian society

    Who should read it

    Ambitious readers ready for an epic that combines family saga, war story and philosophy of history.

  • Anna Karenina

    Anna Karenina travels to Moscow to patch up the marriage of her brother Stiva Oblonsky, whose infidelity has thrown his household into chaos. At the railway station she meets Count Alexei Vronsky, a dashing officer, and an attraction begins that will upend her marriage to Alexei Karenin, a senior government official, and her position in St Petersburg society.

    Running alongside Anna's story is that of Konstantin Levin, a serious, awkward landowner modelled partly on Tolstoy himself, who loves Stiva's sister-in-law Kitty Shcherbatskaya. Levin's chapters deal with farming, the peasants who work his land, brotherhood, death and a long struggle to find faith and a reason to live.

    Serialised between 1875 and 1877, the novel examines marriage, adultery, hypocrisy, jealousy and the very different rules society applies to men and women. Tolstoy's psychological insight and the realism of his world, from horse races to hayfields, have made it a frequent contender for the title of greatest novel ever written.

    Book details

    AuthorLeo Tolstoy
    First published1878
    Original languageRussian
    Translated byRichard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)864
    SettingMoscow, St Petersburg and the Russian countryside, 1870s

    Themes

    • Adultery
    • Marriage
    • Social hypocrisy
    • Faith
    • Rural life

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a richly detailed psychological novel about love, society and the search for meaning.

  • Crime and Punishment

    Rodion Raskolnikov is a former law student living in a cramped garret in the poorest quarter of St Petersburg. Proud, feverish and penniless, he has persuaded himself that extraordinary people have the right to overstep moral law for a higher purpose, and he plans to prove it by killing an old pawnbroker whom he regards as worthless.

    The murder is revealed early, and the novel's suspense lies in what follows: Raskolnikov's mental unravelling, his cat-and-mouse conversations with the shrewd investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich, and his relationships with his devoted mother and sister, his loyal friend Razumikhin, and Sonya Marmeladova, a gentle young woman driven into prostitution to feed her family. The sinister Svidrigailov offers a dark mirror of Raskolnikov's ideas.

    Published in instalments in 1866, the novel examines guilt, alienation, poverty and the dangers of rationalist ideologies that place an idea above human life. Its feverish interior perspective made it a forerunner of existentialist fiction and one of the most influential works in world literature.

    Book details

    AuthorFyodor Dostoevsky
    First published1866
    Original languageRussian
    Translated byConstance Garnett
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)551
    SettingSt Petersburg, Russia, 1860s

    Themes

    • Guilt
    • Morality
    • Poverty
    • Alienation
    • Redemption

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy intense psychological fiction and big moral questions explored through a gripping story.

  • Wuthering Heights

    In 1801 a new tenant, Mr Lockwood, visits his landlord Heathcliff at the isolated farmhouse of Wuthering Heights and finds a hostile, strange household. Snowbound for the night, he has a terrifying dream at a window, and back at his rented house the housekeeper Nelly Dean begins to tell him the history behind it.

    Years earlier, Mr Earnshaw brought home a dark-skinned orphan boy from the streets of Liverpool and named him Heathcliff. He and Earnshaw's daughter Catherine grew up inseparable on the moors, while her brother Hindley came to hate the newcomer. The neighbouring Linton family of Thrushcross Grange, refined and wealthy, enters their lives and offers Catherine a very different future, setting off a chain of resentment and revenge.

    The layered narration, told mostly through Nelly and Lockwood, and the novel's raw violence and passion puzzled early critics. Emily Bronte died a year after publication. It is now regarded as one of the most original novels in English, a study of obsession, class and the untamed landscape that mirrors its characters.

    Book details

    AuthorEmily Bronte
    First published1847
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)416
    SettingYorkshire moors, England, late 18th century to 1802

    Themes

    • Obsessive love
    • Revenge
    • Class
    • Nature
    • Inheritance

    Who should read it

    Readers drawn to dark, intense love stories and unconventional storytelling rather than tidy romance.

  • Great Expectations

    Pip is an orphan raised by his harsh older sister and her kind husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery, in the Kent marshes. One evening in the churchyard he is seized by an escaped convict and forced to steal food for him, an encounter that will echo through his life. Soon afterwards he is summoned to Satis House to play with Estella, the cold, beautiful ward of the jilted Miss Havisham, who still wears her wedding dress and has stopped every clock.

    Ashamed of his common origins, Pip longs to be worthy of Estella. When a lawyer announces that an unnamed benefactor has given him great expectations of fortune, he moves to London to be educated as a gentleman and assumes Miss Havisham is responsible. City life brings friendship with Herbert Pocket, snobbery and debt, and growing coldness towards Joe.

    Narrated by an older Pip looking back on his younger self, the novel is one of Dickens's most tightly constructed works, mixing comedy, mystery and moral reckoning about class, ambition, loyalty and guilt. Characters such as the lawyer Jaggers, his clerk Wemmick with his castle in Walworth, and the decaying Miss Havisham are among the most vivid Dickens ever created.

    Book details

    AuthorCharles Dickens
    First published1861
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)505
    SettingKent and London, England, early 19th century

    Themes

    • Social class
    • Ambition
    • Guilt
    • Loyalty
    • Self-improvement

    Who should read it

    Readers who want Dickens at his most compact and personal, with memorable characters and a gripping mystery.

  • A Tale of Two Cities

    The novel opens in 1775 as Doctor Manette is released after eighteen years of secret imprisonment in the Bastille, his mind damaged so badly that he obsessively makes shoes. His daughter Lucie, raised in England believing him dead, brings him to London, where they are drawn into the treason trial of Charles Darnay, a French emigre who has renounced his aristocratic family.

    Darnay is saved partly thanks to the dissolute barrister Sydney Carton, who looks strikingly like him and who quietly loves Lucie. Meanwhile in the Paris suburb of Saint Antoine, the wine-shop keeper Defarge and his implacable wife knit and plot as resentment against the nobility, embodied by the cruel Marquis St. Evremonde, builds towards revolution and the Terror.

    Shorter and more plot-driven than many Dickens novels, it was serialised in his weekly magazine All the Year Round in 1859. It contrasts the two cities and explores sacrifice, resurrection, mob violence and the cycle of oppression and vengeance. It is often cited as one of the best-selling novels ever published.

    Book details

    AuthorCharles Dickens
    First published1859
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)448
    SettingLondon and Paris, 1775-1793

    Themes

    • Revolution
    • Sacrifice
    • Resurrection
    • Injustice
    • Doubles

    Who should read it

    Readers who like historical drama and want a Dickens novel driven by suspense and the French Revolution.

  • Oliver Twist

    Oliver Twist is born in a provincial workhouse, where his mother dies at once, and grows up under the brutal regime of the Poor Law. After famously asking for more gruel, he is sold as an apprentice to an undertaker, mistreated, and finally runs away on foot to London.

    On the road he meets the Artful Dodger, a swaggering young pickpocket who takes him to Fagin, an old receiver of stolen goods who trains boys to steal. Oliver's innocence is tested when he is caught up in a robbery, rescued by the kindly Mr Brownlow, and pulled back into the underworld by the violent housebreaker Bill Sikes and his partner Nancy, whose conscience becomes central to the plot. A mysterious figure named Monks seems strangely interested in Oliver's fate.

    Serialised in 1837 to 1839, the novel was an attack on the New Poor Law of 1834 and on the treatment of poor children. Its melodrama and caricatures, including a portrayal of Fagin now criticised as antisemitic, sit alongside vivid scenes of London's slums that shocked readers into paying attention.

    Book details

    AuthorCharles Dickens
    First published1838
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)554
    SettingLondon and provincial England, 1830s

    Themes

    • Poverty
    • Child exploitation
    • Crime
    • Innocence
    • Social reform

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in Victorian social history and a fast-moving story of an orphan in the London underworld.