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  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • War and Peace
    • Madame Bovary
    • Crime and Punishment

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • Anna Karenina
    • Les Miserables
    • The Brothers Karamazov

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
    • The Moonstone
    • And Then There Were None

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Hound of the Baskervilles
    • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
    • The Moonstone

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    • To Kill a Mockingbird
    • Moby-Dick

  • Moby-Dick

    The narrator, who asks to be called Ishmael, goes to sea to cure his restlessness and signs on to the whaler Pequod out of Nantucket together with Queequeg, a tattooed Polynesian harpooner he befriends in a New Bedford inn. Once at sea, the reclusive Captain Ahab finally appears on deck, his missing leg replaced by one made of whalebone, and reveals the true purpose of the voyage.

    Ahab is consumed by the desire to kill Moby Dick, the great white sperm whale that maimed him, and he binds the crew to his quest. The first mate Starbuck, a cautious Quaker, questions it; the second and third mates and harpooners from around the world follow. As the ship crosses oceans, encounters with other vessels bring news and omens of the whale.

    Melville interrupts the story with chapters on whale anatomy, the history of whaling, the meaning of whiteness and the workings of the ship, alongside soliloquies written like stage drama. A commercial failure in 1851, the book was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is now considered a cornerstone of American literature.

    Book details

    AuthorHerman Melville
    First published1851
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)635
    SettingNantucket and the oceans of the world, 1840s

    Themes

    • Obsession
    • Fate
    • Man versus nature
    • Good and evil
    • Friendship

    Who should read it

    Patient readers who want an ambitious, digressive American epic about obsession and the sea.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Old Man and the Sea
    • Heart of Darkness
    • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray

    In a London studio the painter Basil Hallward completes a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man of extraordinary beauty whom he idolises. Basil's friend Lord Henry Wotton, a languid aristocrat with a talent for scandalous epigrams, tells Dorian that youth is the only thing worth having. Seized by the thought of growing old, Dorian wishes the picture could age instead of him.

    The wish seems to come true. As Dorian follows Lord Henry's philosophy of pleasure and new sensations, his face remains unlined while the canvas, locked away in an old schoolroom, begins to change with every cruel act. His romance with a young actress, Sibyl Vane, is the first sign of what he is becoming, and rumours of his corrupting influence spread through London society.

    First published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890 and expanded as a book the following year, the novel was attacked as immoral and later used against Wilde at his trials. It combines Gothic fable with sparkling dialogue and explores aestheticism, vanity, hidden lives and the relationship between art and morality.

    Book details

    AuthorOscar Wilde
    First published1890
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)254
    SettingLondon, late 19th century

    Themes

    • Vanity
    • Aestheticism
    • Corruption
    • Double life
    • Art and morality

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy witty dialogue and Gothic morality tales about beauty, influence and secret sin.

    If you liked this, try

    • The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
    • Dracula
    • Frankenstein

  • Dracula

    Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to the Carpathian Mountains to help Count Dracula complete the purchase of an estate near London. His host is courteous but strange, and Harker gradually realises he is a prisoner in a castle where the Count crawls down walls and three spectral women haunt the rooms.

    The story then moves to England, where Harker's fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy Westenra become entangled in a series of disturbing events after a ship runs aground at Whitby with its crew dead. Lucy's suitors, the asylum doctor John Seward, the American Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood, call in the Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing, whose knowledge of folklore and science may be their only defence.

    Told through diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings and phonograph records, the novel creates suspense from fragments that the characters must piece together. It drew on Eastern European vampire legend and Victorian anxieties about sexuality, disease, immigration and modern technology, and its count became the template for the vampire in popular culture.

    Book details

    AuthorBram Stoker
    First published1897
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHorror
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)418
    SettingTransylvania, Whitby and London, 1890s

    Themes

    • Good and evil
    • Sexuality
    • Fear of the foreign
    • Science versus superstition
    • Modernity

    Who should read it

    Horror fans who want the original vampire novel and readers who enjoy stories pieced together from documents.

    If you liked this, try

    • Frankenstein
    • Carmilla
    • The Picture of Dorian Gray

  • Frankenstein

    Mary Shelley began the story at eighteen during the wet summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, when Lord Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories. Published anonymously in 1818 and revised in 1831, the novel is framed by the letters of Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer who rescues an exhausted traveller from the ice.

    The traveller is Victor Frankenstein, a gifted young man from Geneva who, as a student at Ingolstadt, becomes obsessed with discovering the secret of life. He assembles a body and succeeds in animating it, but recoils in horror from the being he has made and flees. The creature, left alone, educates himself by secretly watching a cottage family and reading Milton, Plutarch and Goethe, and in the novel's central section tells his own eloquent story of rejection.

    Far from the grunting monster of film, Shelley's creature is articulate and sympathetic, and the book asks who the real monster is. It explores scientific ambition, responsibility for what we create, isolation and the need for companionship, themes that still frame debates about technology.

    Book details

    AuthorMary Shelley
    First published1818
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreScience fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)280
    SettingGeneva, Ingolstadt, the Alps and the Arctic, 18th century

    Themes

    • Scientific ambition
    • Creation and responsibility
    • Isolation
    • Revenge
    • Nature of humanity

    Who should read it

    Readers curious about the origins of science fiction and horror, and anyone interested in the ethics of creation.

    If you liked this, try

    • Dracula
    • The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
    • Never Let Me Go

  • 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.

    If you liked this, try

    • Great Expectations
    • Les Miserables
    • David Copperfield