Library
Grimms' Fairy Tales
Jacob Grimm / Wilhelm Grimm, trans. Edgar Taylor / Marian Edwardes
The household tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in early nineteenth-century Germany — the sourcebook of Western folklore. Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin: nearly every fairy tale everyone knows is here, in versions sharper, stranger and darker than their later nursery polish. First published as Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812, the collection was an act of cultural rescue that preserved the oral imagination of Europe. This edition uses Edgar Taylor's pioneering English translation of 1823.
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift's masterpiece of satire, disguised as a traveller's tale and sharp as a blade. Shipwrecked surgeon Lemuel Gulliver is cast successively among the miniature Lilliputians, the giants of Brobdingnag, the flying island of Laputa, and the country of the rational Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos. Each voyage holds a mirror to European politics, science and human vanity — and two and a half centuries on, Swift's mockery of pride and pettiness has lost none of its edge.
Half-Life
Ellis Wren
Adrian Vale, San Francisco's most admired neuroscientist, has split himself in two with a self-made compound: by night a thin, stooped stranger called Silas Crow walks the city and does what respectability cannot. When a retired judge is beaten to death with Vale's inherited cane, estate lawyer Martin Wells follows a will that leaves everything to a man nobody has met — into a vanished suspect, a colleague's sealed letter, and a locked room where a housekeeper has been feeding a voice that is not her master's. The compound never made the violence; it only quarantined it. And the half-life is running out.
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Conrad's 1899 novella, based on his own journey up the Congo, and one of the most contested masterpieces in English. Marlow, a steamboat captain for a Belgian trading company, travels into the interior in search of Mr Kurtz — the company's brilliant agent, who has gone native deep in the jungle and become something between a god and a tyrant. What Marlow finds there is the 'horror, the horror' at the heart of the colonial enterprise — and of the human heart itself. The seed of Apocalypse Now, and still an essential, troubling read.
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet A. Jacobs
Harriet Jacobs's memoir, published in 1861 under the pen name Linda Brent, doubted for decades and only in the twentieth century proved to be her own. Born in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs is fifteen when her master begins his pursuit; she hides for seven years in a crawlspace above her grandmother's store, within sight of her children and within hearing of the auctions, before escaping by boat to the free North. Lydia Maria Child edited the book, and it is remarkable for what it says out loud about the sexual injury of slavery and about a mother's love used as strategy.
Ironwood
Ellis Wren
Above Ashford, New York, the Arden family works forty acres of apples that have been losing money for thirty years. The land sits in a trust that will pass to a cousin in White Plains who sells annuities, and not to Gil Arden's five daughters: Sylvie, Hollis, Petra, Tessa and Roxy. When a young man from the city rents the neighbouring estate, Faye Arden sees five sons-in-law. At a town dance Julian Reyes singles out Sylvie, while his friend Roman Ashcroft says, within Hollis's hearing, that she is tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt him. She tells it as a joke for a year and locks a door in her chest. Then she meets Dexter Cray, a guardsman who says Ashcroft robbed him of the promised position; she believes him at once. Julian leaves for the winter and does not return. Preston Pell arrives to claim the trust, proposes to Hollis, is refused, and marries her friend Corinne instead. In Connecticut, under the eye of Constance Wray, who announces at her own table that Roman is meant for her daughter Odette, Roman asks Hollis to marry him and asks badly: he has struggled against her family and his own judgment, and overcome both. She refuses him and accuses him of ruining Cray and of parting Julian from Sylvie. A letter forces her to reread everything. Cray took cash instead of the position and gambled it, and last summer nearly ran away with Roman's nineteen-year-old sister; Julian's withdrawal was Roman's misjudgement. At Ironwood a housekeeper describes a landlord Hollis does not recognise. Then Roxy runs off with Cray, unmarried, and Roman finds them and pays what has to be paid. Constance demands that Hollis promise never to accept him; she refuses. Julian comes back and marries Sylvie. On a wet footbridge Roman asks again, and this time Hollis says yes.
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography
Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel, revolutionary in its time for telling the story in a plain, passionate first-person voice — 'Reader, I married him.' Orphaned Jane Eyre survives a cruel charity school to become governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her brooding employer Mr Rochester and discovers the secret locked in his attic. A landmark of English fiction that insisted a plain, poor, powerless young woman had an inner life of full intensity, and the right to demand equality — moral, emotional and spiritual — from the world.
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
Hardy's 1895 novel, his last, and the one that drove him out of fiction. Jude Fawley is a village stonemason who teaches himself Latin and Greek in hope of Christminster and its university, which will not admit a man of his class; he is entangled first with Arabella, who traps him, and then with his cousin Sue Bridehead, brilliant and terrified of the flesh. Their unmarried union, the children, and the horror that follows drew reviews calling it Jude the Obscene. Hardy answered by never writing another novel.
Kim
Rudyard Kipling
Kipling's novel of India, published in 1901 and the book he wanted to be remembered for. Kimball O'Hara, an orphaned street boy in Lahore, is taken up as a chela, or disciple, by a Buddhist lama searching for a legendary river. But Kim is also a British soldier's son, and the secret service — the Great Game of intelligence played against Russia — has uses for a boy who can pass as anything and go anywhere. Between the lama's road to deliverance and the spy's road to power, Kipling builds a portrait of India at its most various: bazaars, railways, monasteries, hill roads and all its tangled faiths.
King Solomon's Mines
H. Rider Haggard
Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good hire the elephant hunter Allan Quatermain and set off across the desert and over the mountains of Kukuanaland to find Sir Henry's brother and the lost diamond mines of Solomon. Haggard's first bestseller, written on a bet in a few months, invented the modern 'lost world' adventure: the witch Gagool, the three thousand-year-old ascendancy of the white kings, the battle of the Kukuana regiments, and charted wonders from Solomon's Great Road to the cave of the dead kings. Quatermain, the reluctant, chronically sick, quietly brave narrator, became the template for a century of imperial adventure heroes.
Le Morte d'Arthur
Thomas Malory
Sir Thomas Malory's complete retelling of the Arthurian legend, printed by William Caxton in 1485 and still the most influential version in English. From Uther Pendragon and the founding of the Round Table, through Lancelot and Guinevere's forbidden love and the quest for the Holy Grail, to Mordred's rebellion, the battle of Camlann and Arthur's final fate, the whole pageant of chivalric romance is gathered here — the common source from which centuries of fantasy literature have flowed.
Learning to Swim
Ellis Wren
Marin Trahan has everything a woman in New Orleans is supposed to want: a commodities trader for a husband, two loud affectionate boys, a house on Esplanade, and a place in the Carnival season that has been reserved for her since she was nineteen. Then, in the July she turns thirty-two, a boy on an island teaches her to swim, and a shut-door pianist plays something that goes past her eyes and into her body, and the arrangement quietly comes apart. She takes up painting, refuses the ball, moves into four rooms behind a bigger house, and discovers that waking up costs everything and buys nothing. A novel about what happens after a woman stops consenting - and about the sea, which has been talking for a very long time and does not require an answer.