Library
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
Henry James's 1898 ghost story — the most celebrated ambiguity in English fiction. A young governess takes charge of two angelic children at a remote country house, and soon sees the figures of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, former servants, both dead, who seem to be corrupting the children. Are they real ghosts, or is the governess imagining it all and destroying the children herself? James supplies every evidence and withholds the answer. Written with unbroken formal elegance, it remains the finest ghost story ever written.
The Vanishing Point
Ellis Wren
Bellhaven, Oregon, has been dying since the mill shut in October, so when a bandaged stranger takes two rooms at the Wayfarer Inn in February, paying seven hundred a week in cash, Vera Pell counts him twice and lets him in. The man is Ivo Brandt, a research chemist who made himself invisible in a January experiment and cannot reverse it: not a ghost, not a metaphor, but a man in a coat with nothing under it, wearing bandages to hold the shape people expect. Word moves through town — the glove salesman, the delivery men, the boy who saw the snow moving on its own — and the stranger grows careless, then dangerous. When the First Baptist rectory is robbed of eleven thousand four hundred in new twenties, the county begins to look, and the man with no face begins to run. He hides with Dale Sedgwick, a bankrupt dairy farmer who wants what the invisible man can give him; he kills a man in the dark; he comes at last to Nathan Sayre, the physicist who once taught him, demanding help to make himself visible again. Sayre keeps him in the garage for nine days while the county cordon tightens and a letter drops in a sheriff's-office mailbox. The siege begins — until a Sunday dog, a padlocked door, and one night of fire bring the invisible man to a yard where forty people have gathered, and the mud, diesel and sawdust that hide him also make him, for the first time in four weeks, visible enough to hit. The man who could disappear is buried. The money comes back. And the three notebooks and the locked drawer of the Wayfarer Inn wait for whoever sits at the end of the bar on a Tuesday in February.
The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells's 1898 invasion classic, the original alien-invasion novel. Martians, fleeing their dying planet, land in the Surrey countryside — and their machines rise on articulated legs, armed with heat-rays and poison gas, to walk on London. Told with documentary realism through one unnamed narrator's flight and ordeal, it flipped the colonial invasion story onto the colonizing English and created the template for a century of science fiction. Nothing to do with Orson Welles's panic broadcast — except that it caused it.
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith
Adam Smith's 1776 Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the founding text of economics. Division of labour and the pin factory, the invisible hand, free trade and mercantilism's follies, the role of the state: Smith built from observed detail a general account of how nations become rich — and why some stay poor. Written to be read by anyone, it remains astonishingly current: most debates in economic policy since are arguments with this book. This edition uses the complete fifth edition text.
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
Kenneth Grahame's 1908 classic of the river bank. Mole abandons his spring cleaning for the river and the friendship of Rat; together they visit the hospitable Badger in the Wild Wood and struggle with Mr Toad of Toad Hall — rich, reckless, obsessed with motorcars, and permanently one step from disaster. Equal parts pastoral idyll and comic adventure, written with perfect prose and a bottomless love of home. A book children love for the animals and adults love for everything else.
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
On a moonlit road to London a young drawing master, Walter Hartright, is stopped by a woman dressed all in white, who has just escaped from an asylum. Weeks later he arrives at Limmeridge House to teach drawing to two half-sisters — and finds that his new pupil's face is the face of the woman on the road. Around her closes a conspiracy of forged registers, a secret marriage and a stolen fortune, engineered by the most urbane villain in Victorian fiction, Count Fosco. Told in sworn testimonies like a legal brief, Collins's sensation novel of 1859 made nervous dread fashionable and gave England a new phrase for it.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
L. Frank Baum's 1900 classic, the original American fairy tale. A cyclone carries Dorothy and her dog Toto from grey Kansas to the marvellous land of Oz, where she must follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City — gathering the Scarecrow who wants brains, the Tin Woodman who wants a heart, and the Cowardly Lion who wants courage — to ask the Wizard to send her home. Sharp, funny and strangely modern, it quietly argues that everything the travellers seek they already have.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 story, written after a nerve specialist prescribed her a "rest cure" and told her to live as domestic a life as possible — and never to touch pen, brush or pencil again. Its narrator is a young wife taken to a colonial mansion for the summer by her physician husband and shut into an upstairs nursery papered in an ugly yellow pattern she cannot stop studying. Her journal, kept against orders, records the pattern's slow takeover. A founding text of feminist fiction, and one of the great American horror stories.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Thomas Common
Nietzsche's most famous and most literary book, 1883-85: the philosophical novel in which the prophet Zarathustra descends from his mountain to teach the Übermensch, the will to power and eternal recurrence — and, failing to find followers, speaks to the few who can hear. 'God is dead' is only the beginning of its argument with mankind. Written in biblical-poetic German, part gospel, part parable, part polemic, it is the book Nietzsche thought his greatest — and the essential document of his attempt to found a new valuation of life. This edition uses Thomas Common's translation.
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 novel, the original pirate story from which all the others descend. Young Jim Hawkins finds a treasure map in a dead sailor's sea chest and sails with Squire Trelawney and Dr Livesey for the island — aboard a crew that includes Long John Silver, the one-legged ship's cook, the most charming villain in English fiction. Murders, mutiny, the black spot, 'Fifteen men on the dead man's chest': every pirate trope you know was invented here, in a book written for a stepson and loved by the world.
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
Jules Verne
Jules Verne's 1870 classic of undersea adventure. A mysterious sea monster is sinking ships; Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil and harpooner Ned Land join the hunt — and discover that the monster is the Nautilus, a submarine commanded by the enigmatic Captain Nemo, who has renounced the world of men and taken his vengeance to the sea. From the lost city of Atlantis to the South Pole, from giant squid to coral graveyards, Verne's science-fantasy holds the whole ocean. This edition uses Lewis Mercier Lewis's classic translation.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, the book that made American slavery impossible to ignore: its first printing sold out in two days, and something like three hundred thousand copies were gone within a year. Tom, a pious Kentucky slave, is sold away from his family; Eliza carries her son north across the ice of the Ohio; Little Eva and her father buy and free whom they can; Simon Legree, the driver in the swamp, buys Tom for cotton and for cruelty. Sentimental, sermonising and enormously effective, it remains the great American protest novel.