Ambrogio Smythe, a hypochodriacal British nobleman, is obsessed by childhood memories of Gypsies. Ambrogio leaves his ancestral estate and makes his way to Florence, always aware of the lurking menace of the hated Napoleon Bonaparte. In Tuscany, Ambrogio meets a wondering storyteller, hears a magical yarn about a Gypsy babe kidnapped by a demon, buys a shred of parchment as evidence, and begins to write his own version of the saga, vowing one day...

Title essays reveals the abuse Orwell experienced as a child at an expensive and snobbish boarding school and other essays.

Trying to forget his past and live an honest life, escaped convict Jean Valjean risks his freedom to take care of a motherless young girl during a period of political unrest in Paris.

Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who...

We owe The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) to Arthur Conan Doyle's good friend Fletcher "Bobbles" Robinson, who took him to visit some scary English moors and prehistoric ruins, and told him marvelous local legends about escaped prisoners and a 17th-century aristocrat who fell afoul of the family dog. Doyle transmogrified the legend: generations ago, a hound of hell tore out the throat of devilish Hugo Baskerville on the moonlit moor. Poor, accursed...

The violent lives of three sons are exposed when their father is murdered and each one attempts to come to terms with his guilt.

Orphaned and penniless, David Balfour sets out to find his last living relative, miserly and reclusive Uncle Ebenezer. But Ebenezer is far from welcoming, and David narrowly escapes being murdered before he is kidnapped and imprisoned on a ship bound for the Carolinas. When the ship is wrecked, David, along with the fiery rebel Alan Breck, makes his way back across the treacherous Highland terrain on a quest for justice. Through his powerful depiction...

Father Brown is the most unlikely detective - a short, round-faced priest who is modest and kind. However, he has an astonishing insight into the criminal mind.

Sharpe's mission has seemed simple: capture a small unguarded French coastal fort, cripple Napoleon's supply lines, and retreat across the sea. But behind the lines, Sharpe's old enemy, Pierre Ducos, awaits Sharpe's arrival with a battalion of French soldiers and a vicious commanding general who keeps the scalps of his dead enemies as trophies.
Outmaneuvered by Ducos's treachery and abandoned by his own navy, Sharpe has only two choices: to escape...

Les Miserables is the great epic masterpiece of the mid-nineteenth century. Begun in 1845, the year Louis Philippe conferred a peerage and a lifetime seat in the Senate upon Victor Hugo, it was completed when the author was living in exile in the Channel Islands. Les Miserables is a product as well as a document of the political, social, and religious upheaval that followed the Napoleonic Wars and Europe's great democratic revolutions....