'You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.' Humbert Humbert, a European intellectual adrift in America, is a middle-aged college professor. Haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love, he falls outrageously (and illegally) in lust with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Dolores Haze. Obsessed, he'll do anything, will commit any crime, to possess his Lolita. But once Lolita belongs to Humbert, once he has got what he wants, what next? And what of Lolita? How long is she willing to be possessed?
A young prince meets with his father's ghost, who alleges that his own brother, now married to his widow, murdered him. The prince devises a scheme to test the truth of the ghost's accusation, feigning wild madness while plotting a brutal revenge.
A young woman looks back at her childhood in a harsh orphanage and describes her growing love for the man who employs her as governess.
This text is an updated edition of George Eliot's classic tale. The novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community.
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortunenor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all,it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities.
This new edition of Emily Bronte's classic 1847 novel uses the authoritative Clarendon text. Patsy Stoneman's introduction considers the bewildering variety of critical interpretation to which the novel has been subject, as well as offering some provocative new insights for the modern reader.
Fading southern belle Blanche Dubois depends on the kindness of strangers and is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella's crude, brutish husband Stanley.
À Gooleness, station balnéaire surannée, Annie se demande ce qu'elle a fait de sa vie... En couple avec Duncan, dont la passion pour Tucker Crowe, un ex-chanteur des eighties, commence sérieusement à l'agacer, elle s'apprête à faire sa révolution ! La crise de la quarantaine perçue avec verve et punch, par un Nick Hornby au sommet de son art.
A young man and woman meet by chance and fall instantly in love. But their families are bitter enemies, and in order to be together the two lovers must be prepared to risk everything. Set in a city torn apart by feuds and gang warfare, Romeo and Juliet is a dazzling combination of passion and hatred, bawdy comedy and high tragedy.
In the early eighteenth century, a woman finds herself set adrift from a mutinous ship and cast ashore on a remote desert island. There she finds shelter with its only other inhabitants: a man named Cruso and his tongueless slave Friday. In time, she builds a life for herself as Cruso's companion and, eventually, his lover.
Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories.
Written by a beat movement icon and visionary poet who broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse, this book presents a collection of his famous poems. It includes the apocalyptic "Howl", which became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956.
In nineteenth-century England, two sisters are drawn into unhappy romances despite the cool judgement of one and the emotional intensity of the other.
Professor Higgins succeeds in transforming an unkempt London flower girl into a society belle.
The unusual voyages of Englishman Lemuel Gulliver carry him to such strange locales as Lilliput, where the inhabitants are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land of giants; an island of sorcerers; and a nation ruled by horses.
A young man arrives in the Ukraine with a tattered photograph, a bad translator, a man haunted by memories and an undersexed guide dog - he is looking for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. What they find turns all their worlds upside down.
While going through the possessions of a deceased guest who owed them money, the mistress of the inn and her son find a map that leads them to a pirate's treasure
Pip, a young orphan, receives a fortune from a mysterious benefactor and travels to London in order to become a gentleman.
On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents' TV in the same Birmingham house in which he grew up. He is watching his brother, Paul, now a young New Labour MP who has bought wholeheartedly into the Blairite dream.
Set in the 1970s against a backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension, this novel captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.
In this work for armchair and actual travellers alike, the author records the events of a year in Provence, from foie gras and burst pipes in January, through the Tour de France preparations, the grape "vendange" and the mushroom season, to the Christmas gastronomic splurge.
Contains stories such as: "The Umbrella Man"; "Dip in the Pool"; "The Butler"; "The Hitchhiker"; "Mr Botibol"; "My Lady Love", "My Dove"; "The Way Up to Heaven"; "Parson's Pleasure"; "The Sound Machine"; and "The Wish".
An ageing king makes a capricious decision to divide his realm among his three daughters according to the love they express for him. When the youngest daughter refuses to take part in this charade, she is banished, leaving the king dependent on her manipulative and untrustworthy sisters.