Library
A Christmas Carol in Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas
Charles Dickens
Dickens's ghost story of Christmas, first published in 1843 and never out of print since. Ebenezer Scrooge, a miser so cold that Christmas is 'humbug' to him, is visited one night by the chain-bound ghost of his partner Marley and then by three Spirits — of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come — who walk him through the boy he was, the good he might do now, and the unmourned death that awaits him. By morning he is another man. A short book that invented the modern Christmas, and still the best case ever made that it is never too late to change.
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen, trans. R. Farquharson Sharp
Henrik Ibsen's 1879 play, in R. Farquharson Sharp's translation. Nora Helmer runs her husband's household, once saved him from a ruinous illness by forging a signature, and has been paying for it in secret ever since; when the secret falls due she meets her husband's panic rather than his rescue. The door that slams at the end of the third act is the most famous sound in modern theatre, and behind it stands Ibsen's question, still being argued: whether a woman owes her husband and children a self she does not own.
A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
Forster's 1908 comedy of English propriety, and the sunniest of his Italian novels. In a pension in Florence, where one room is wanted by two guests at once, young Lucy Honeychurch witnesses an outburst of feeling that her chaperone attributes to the poor manners of the lower classes — and which the Emersons, a father and son who do not know the rules, seem to acquire effortlessly. Back in Surrey, Lucy becomes engaged to the cultivated Cecil Vyse, and must decide which of two versions of herself she means to live. Light, exact and quietly subversive, it is a defence of honesty.
A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle
The novel that introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world in 1887. Wounded army doctor John Watson returns to London and takes rooms at 221B Baker Street with a mysterious fellow lodger who announces he is a 'consulting detective' — the only one in the world. Their first case together: a body found in an empty house in Brixton, the word RACHE scrawled in blood on the wall, and a wedding ring in the pocket of a man no one can identify. Half detective story, half pioneer epic of Utah, it is where Holmes, Watson, and the entire modern mystery genre begin.
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Dickens's novel of the French Revolution, opening with the most famous sentence in English fiction: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' In 1775 a Parisian doctor is released after eighteen years in the Bastille; in London a dissolute lawyer who resembles him finds a reason to live. As revolution descends into the Terror, and the guillotine begins to demand its daily toll, the fates of the two cities and the two men converge on one self-sacrifice that gives the book its enduring close. A story of resurrection — personal and political — written by a novelist at the height of his powers.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
Hemingway said it plainly: 'All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.' Huck, escaping from his brutal father down the Mississippi on a raft, drifts with Jim, a runaway slave, toward freedom — while the river carries them through con men, feuds, and the comfortable cruelties of the antebellum South. Told in Huck's own vernacular voice, it is the great American novel of conscience: a boy decides, wrongly by the standards he has been taught, to go to hell for his friend.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll's dream-logic classic of 1865, and one of the most quoted books in the English language. Bored young Alice follows a waistcoated White Rabbit down a hole and lands in a world where a pool of tears becomes an ocean, a Caterpillar asks who she is and cannot be answered, and a croquet match is played with a flamingo mallet against the Queen of Hearts, who orders beheadings at the slightest provocation. Nonsense that hides razor-sharp comedy about rules, identity and growing up — it has delighted children and puzzled logicians for over a century and a half.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, trans. Constance Garnett
Tolstoy's great novel of love, family and Russian society, often called the finest ever written. Anna, a brilliant and magnetic woman married to a stiff Petersburg official, falls for the dashing officer Vronsky — and finds that society forgives a man's affairs but destroys a woman's. Interwoven with her story runs Levin's: a landowner searching for meaning in work, marriage, faith and the land, largely a portrait of Tolstoy himself. Two lives, one ruined by passion pursued and one redeemed by it struggled for. This edition uses Constance Garnett's classic translation.
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery
L. M. Montgomery's beloved 1908 novel, the first of the Anne books. Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables asked the orphanage for a boy to help on the Prince Edward Island farm; they got Anne Shirley, a red-haired, talkative girl with an imagination that turns every mishap into an adventure. Against her own best intentions — and often because of them — she wins over the whole of Avonlea. A warm, funny portrait of childhood, belonging and a temper that is never quite conquered, it has never been out of print in over a century.
Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne, trans. George M. Towle
Jules Verne's 1873 journey-novel, in George M. Towle's contemporary English translation. Phileas Fogg, the most punctual man in London, wagers twenty thousand pounds at the Reform Club that he can circle the globe in eighty days. He and his French valet Passepartout race through Suez, India, Hong Kong, Yokohama and across America, pursued the whole way by a detective who suspects Fogg of robbing the Bank of England, and delayed by an elephant, a suttee, a Sioux raid and their own good manners. A comedy of exactitude that ends on the International Date Line.
Behind the Frieze
Ellis Wren
Willa is given a summer on the lake: a house that has stood empty for four years, a baby she cannot hold for more than a few minutes, and a husband who is certain there is nothing wrong with her. Hollis is a doctor, and kind, and he puts a sleep ring on her finger that reports her nights to his phone. Forbidden to work or write, she is left alone with a room whose paper she cannot stop reading — a pattern obeying none of the four rules she was trained on, and hiding a woman behind the bars. Della keeps the house, Nita keeps the baby, and nobody will sit in the chairs that face the north wall. A novel about what it costs to be cared for.
Beowulf
Anonymous, trans. Francis B. Gummere
The oldest surviving epic in English literature, composed around the eighth century in Old English alliterative verse. Beowulf, a young warrior of the Geats, sails to Denmark to rid King Hrothgar's hall of Grendel, the monster that has ravaged it for twelve years; he slays the beast with his bare hands, pursues its vengeful mother to her underwater lair, and, as an old king, meets his final foe in a fire-breathing dragon. A poem suspended between the glory of heroes and the mutability of fate, it is the fountainhead of the Germanic heroic tradition. This edition uses Francis B. Gummere's classic verse translation.