Library
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 masterpiece, the first great American novel. In Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne, condemned for adultery, is set on the scaffold with the scarlet letter A on her breast — and refuses to name the child's father. Her lover's secret guilt slowly destroys him, while her estranged husband devotes his life to uncovering him; her daughter Pearl, meanwhile, is both sin's emblem and her one wild redemption. A profound study of sin, secrecy, hypocrisy and the possibility of moral rebirth in a world that does not forgive.
The Scarlet Pimpernel
Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Paris, 1792: aristocrats are guillotined daily, yet a handful escape every time, spirited away by a masked Englishman who leaves behind a scribbled little red flower as his signature. Marguerite Blakeney, the cleverest woman in Europe, despises her foppish English husband Sir Percy - never suspecting that the dandy who cannot string two sentences together is the Pimpernel himself - until Chauvelin, the French agent, blackmails her into betraying him. Orczy's novel, rejected by a dozen publishers, became one of the great bestsellers of the century and the ancestor of every secret-identity hero.
The Second Key
Ellis Wren
Elias Corbin, a methodical Austin lawyer, prides himself on asking no questions. Then his friend Dr. Roland Vane, a celebrated pharmacologist with a shadowed private life, quietly executes a trust that hands everything to a sinister stranger, Silas Rook, if Vane should disappear for three months. Corbin has glimpsed Rook once, through a door on Cherry Lane: small, deformed, and radiating a kind of evil that makes grown men faint. When a respected senator is beaten to death on a riverside trail and the police identify Rook, Corbin's patient hunt begins to circle back to Vane himself, who is oddly at ease and swears he has done with the dangerous preparation of his laboratory. Piece by piece the truth assembles: the handwriting expert Dana Reyes identifies a forged note; Vane's aide Marcus Dodd describes a master he no longer recognizes; and the dying testimony of their old friend Dr. Emilio Salazar reveals that Salazar saw Rook transform, before his own eyes, into Vane. Rook and Vane are one man, two natures housed in one body, freed and separated by a drug Vane synthesized from a contaminant in his own supply. On the last night, Dodd and Corbin break into the laboratory to find Rook dead by his own hand, his face fixed in a mask of Vane's features. Vane's full written statement closes the book: the experiment, the impurity that made his dark half strong, the pleasures and terrors of the double life, and the slow triumph of the worse self. Corbin is left holding the evidence of a brilliant man's destruction, and the knowledge that the second self was not a visitor but the truer one.
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Burnett's 1911 classic, and the best-loved garden in children's literature. Mary Lennox, a sour and spoiled child raised in India and left orphaned by cholera, is sent to a great Yorkshire house where she is told nothing and allowed nothing. Wandering the grounds, she finds a walled garden locked and abandoned for ten years, a local boy who talks to robins, and a cousin hidden in a bedroom who believes he is dying. Together they bring the garden back to life, and are brought back to life with it. A book about neglect, growth, and the difference a living thing to tend can make.
The Sign of the Four
Arthur Conan Doyle
The second Sherlock Holmes novel, from 1890. It opens with Holmes's cocaine and Watson's disapproval, before a lost treasure, a one-legged man, a wooden-legged convict's escape across the Thames, and the ill-fated Agra treasure of 1857. A young woman receives a pearl every year on the same date; her father vanished a decade ago. Peril, pursuit and the famous Baker Street Irregulars — and the love story that gets Watson out of Baker Street.
The Song of Roland
Anonymous
The oldest great epic of French literature, taking shape in the late eleventh century out of a real episode in Charlemagne's Spanish campaign. Count Roland, commanding the rear-guard in the pass of Roncevaux, refuses again and again to sound his horn for aid — out of pride — until his twenty thousand men are wiped out and the last blast is finally blown. A poem that pushes loyalty, honour and feudal valor to their utmost, and the wellspring of the European chanson de geste tradition.
The Still Hour
Ellis Wren
At seven, Cal Pryor steals a pie and a sawblade for a man who crawled out of a culvert in West Virginia coal country, and the man repays him the only way he has: by taking the blame out loud, before the hollow. Years later an anonymous benefactor pays to turn the boy into a gentleman in New York, and Cal, who spent Sundays in a shuttered mansion called Stillhour watching a jilted heiress keep one stopped hour of her life, is sure he knows who is paying. He is wrong about almost everything. The truth comes from the last place he would look, and asks the question he has carried since he was seven: what does a gift cost the person who takes it.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella of the divided self, written in a fever in a few days and an instant sensation. respectable Dr Jekyll has discovered a drug that releases the coarse, violent Mr Hyde — the pleasures he suppresses given their own body. But the transformations begin without the drug, and the experiment turns into a war for one skin. Told through the baffled eyes of his friend Mr Utterson, this is the original modern horror story of the beast within, and the reason 'Jekyll and Hyde' is now part of the language.
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan
Richard Hannay, a bored mining engineer just back from South Africa, takes in a nervous American neighbour who is murdered days later - and finds himself the chief suspect, with a notebook of cipher, a black book of aircraft secrets at stake, and forty-eight hours before war starts. What follows is the original chase thriller: Hannay across the Scottish moors with his enemies certain of his face, impersonating a road mender, a political candidate and a gold-laced RAF pilot, decoding Scudder's memorized notebook in a lodging house. Buchan's 1915 novel fixed the pattern for every man-on-the-run story since.
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas' 1844 romance, the most famous adventure novel ever written. The young Gascon d'Artagnan rides to Paris to join the king's musketeers and within a day has made an enemy of Cardinal Richelieu's agent and a friend of three of the finest swordsmen in France — Athos, Porthos and Aramis, all for one and one for all. Their business becomes the queen's diamond studs, the siege of La Rochelle and the beautiful, poison-armed Milady de Winter. Serialised to the taste of Paris and then copied all over the world, it turned the historical novel into an industry and a national myth.
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells's 1895 novella that invented time travel as we know it — the phrase, and the machine, are his. A Victorian scientist demonstrates a machine that travels through time, then voyages to the year 802,701, where he finds the gentle Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks — the human species divided into lords and food — and beyond that, the death of the earth itself. A dazzling idea wrapped around a sharp social fable about class in industrial England, and the founding text of science fiction's most enduring device.
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
Mark Twain
David Wilson comes to Dawson's Landing with a hobby of collecting fingerprints and a joke nobody gets, and is pinned with the label that blights his law career: Pudd'nhead. Two boys, one free-born and one a thirty-second part black, are swapped in the cradle by Roxana, the slave mother who cannot bear to see her son sold down the river - and the changeling grows up heir to the town's finest name while the true heir grows up a slave. Twain's darkest comedy, built around an early forensic use of fingerprinting and a trial scene that remains one of his best set pieces.