Library
Nightwater
Ellis Wren
Amos Whitlock settles estates in Columbus, Ohio, and one of the estates belongs to a saint. Adrian Voss founded the Meridian Institute, cured what everyone said could not be cured, and left his fortune to a young man the family has never met. Then a story reaches Amos: a small man knocking a girl off her bicycle on Fourth Street, paying for the damage with a check in Voss's own hand, and walking on without changing his face. That year Voss grows warmer in public while a stranger in a dark coat watches him from the edge of every room, and a retired judge is beaten to death with a cane bearing Voss's name. What is left is two documents.
North and South
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
When the parson's daughter Margaret Hale moves from the Hampshire village of Helstone to the smoky manufacturing town of Milton-Northern, she meets a world of cotton, strikes and class war, and the mill-owner John Thornton, who quotes physics while she quotes poetry and each disdains what the other stands for. Gaskell, herself the wife of a Manchester minister, wrote industrial conflict from the inside: the strike chapters give the workers' case real force, and the slow thaw between pride and prejudice on both sides gives the romance its heat. Mrs. Gaskell's migration novel of the North.
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen
Jane Austen's first completed novel, written in her mid-twenties and published after her death. Catherine Morland, a naive young heroine weaned on Gothic novels, is taken to Bath and invited to Northanger Abbey, where she expects mystery, manuscripts and probably a murdered wife. What she finds instead is real life — real friends, a real, soft-hearted villain in John Thorpe, and a lesson in the difference between fiction and fact that is also Austen's wittiest defence of fiction itself. Delightful, lighter than her masterworks, and funny about books and their readers.
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. Constance Garnett
Dostoevsky's 1864 novella, the first great anti-hero of modern literature. An unnamed retired civil servant in St Petersburg delivers a two-part monologue: first a bitter assault on rationalism and utopianism — man, he insists, will choose suffering just to prove he is not a piano key — then the humiliating 'Apropos of the Wet Snow', the memory that shows his theory of himself is a lie. Feverish, self-lacerating and darkly funny, it is the seed from which all his great novels grew, and the wellspring of existentialist literature. This edition uses Constance Garnett's translation.
Notre-Dame de Paris
Victor Hugo, trans. Isabel Florence Hapgood
Victor Hugo's 1831 novel, in Isabel F. Hapgood's translation, written in part to save a cathedral. In the Paris of 1482 the hunchback bell-ringer Quasimodo, the archdeacon Frollo and the half-civilised poet Gringoire circle the gypsy dancer Esmeralda, who is undone by the law, by superstition and by two men's desires. Hugo built the book around the Greek word ANANKE — Fate — graven on a tower wall, and around a buried argument: that the printed book will kill the building. The cathedral is the true protagonist, and the novel made Gothic Paris a national possession.
Of Human Bondage
W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham's 1915 autobiographical masterpiece, the novel he considered his best. Philip Carey, born with a club foot, orphaned young, tries to escape his wound — through Heidelberg, through Paris as an art student, through a medical career — and above all through his catastrophic, degrading passion for the cold, empty waitress Mildred Rogers, who ruins him systematically while he cannot stop loving her. A long, clear-eyed portrait of how a man builds a self out of limitation and failure, and one of the great novels of growing up.
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
Dickens's second novel, published 1837-39 — the one that scandalized England with its workhouse. 'Please, sir, I want some more.' Orphan Oliver runs away from cruelty in the workhouse to London, falls among thieves — Fagin, the Artful Dodger, brutal Bill Sikes — and is fought over by the criminal underworld and a handful of decent people who see his true nature. The first English novel with a child at its centre and a criminal world in full view, it turned Dickens into a national force and the book into a permanent part of the language.
Paradise Lost
John Milton
John Milton's blank-verse epic of 1667, dictated in darkness after blindness took his sight, and the first great poem in English to take the Fall of Man for its argument. Satan and his rebel angels are thrown out of Heaven, build Pandemonium, and plot the ruin of the new creature; Adam and Eve are placed in Eden, warned, tempted, and expelled — "They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way." The twelve-book arrangement printed here is the one Milton settled on in 1674, and it gives the devil the best speeches in the language.
Persuasion
Jane Austen
Jane Austen's last completed novel, published posthumously in 1818 — her autumnal, most quietly moving book. Eight years ago, Anne Elliot was persuaded to refuse Captain Wentworth as poor and unpromising. He returns rich and famous, and cool; she must live on, unnoticed in her vain family, watching him court another woman. A story of second chances, written with a tenderness and regret Austen never risked before, and containing in its letters one of the most passionate resolutions in English fiction.
Peter Pan
J. M. Barrie
J. M. Barrie's story of the boy who wouldn't grow up, in the 1911 novel form. Peter Pan flies through the nursery window of the Darling household to teach Wendy, John and Michael to fly, and carries them off to Neverland — mermaids, redskins, the lost boys, and Captain Hook with his crocodile that has swallowed a clock. Magical, funny, and shot through with something darker: a story about the cost of never growing up, written by an author who understood exactly what childhood is and what leaving it means.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Jane Austen's 1813 masterpiece and perhaps the most beloved novel in the English language. Elizabeth Bennet, witty and self-assured, and Mr Darcy, proud and socially graceless, take an instant dislike to each other — and spend the rest of the book learning, painfully and delightfully, how wrong they both were. Around them dance the Bennet family's marriage market: silly mother, ironic father, four sisters, and a fortune-hunting rake. One of the great comic constructions in fiction, and the source of every love story built on misunderstanding and second sight.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Jane Austen's first published novel, 1811. Elinor Dashwood, nineteen, has sense: she governs her feelings, even when her family is disinherited and the man she loves proves false. Her sister Marianne has sensibility: she feels everything at full volume, and falls dangerously for the charming Willoughby. Between prudence and passion — which should govern a life, and what does each cost? — Austen builds her first great comedy of money, manners and heartbreak, already in complete command of her ironic art.