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The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's 1895 comedy, dashed off at Worthing in 1894 and still the wittiest stage play in English. Jack Worthing has invented a wicked brother named Ernest so that he can leave his country estates for London; Algernon Moncrieff has invented an invalid friend named Bunbury, and himself a nephew named Ernest, for the same purpose. Two young women are in love with the name, Lady Bracknell is in love with nothing but "a handbag", and Miss Prism has mislaid a novel and a baby. Farce about nothing, performed with total seriousness.
The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance
H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells's 1897 science-fiction classic. A strange figure in goggles and bandages takes rooms at an inn in a Sussex village, with a trunk of chemical equipment and no explanation. He is Griffin, a brilliant scientist who has made himself invisible — and discovered that invisibility is a curse: without sight, clothes, money or a place in the world, he slides into madness and terrorizes the countryside. A masterpiece of the scientist-outcast tradition: the scientist's discovery that cuts him off from humanity, told with Wells's unflagging momentum.
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, written after seven weeks of research in the Chicago stockyards, and the book that put the meat-packing industry on trial. Jurgis Rudkus arrives from Lithuania with his family and a boundless faith in America; Packingtown answers with piecework, graft, spoiled meat, ruined bodies and a court that fines the injured. Sinclair intended a cry for the working class — "I aimed at the public's heart," he said afterwards, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach" — and the outcry over his inspection chapters helped carry the Pure Food and Drug Act into law in the same year.
The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling
Kipling's 1894 collection of stories set in India, best known for the Mowgli tales: the boy raised by wolves in the Seeonee jungle, tutored by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, hunted by the tiger Shere Khan, and caught between the law of the jungle and the world of men. Alongside them are 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi', the mongoose's battle with the cobras, and other animal tales written with deep knowledge and love of India. Beloved as children's adventure, sharper than they seem as fables of law, belonging and exile.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving
Washington Irving's 1820 classic, the first great American short story. In the drowsy Hudson Valley village of Sleepy Hollow, the superstitious schoolmaster Ichabod Crane courts the lovely Katrina Van Tassel — and competes for her with the local braggart Brom Bones. One dark autumn night, walking home from a ghost story party, Ichabod meets a headless horseman carrying his own head on the saddle. Whether ghost, hoax or runaway schoolmaster, the tale has haunted the American imagination ever since.
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Defoe's 1719 novel, often called the first English novel: the fictional memoir of a man who, against his father's advice, goes to sea, is shipwrecked, and survives twenty-eight years alone on a Caribbean island. Building shelter, growing barley, taming goats, rescuing the mutinous Friday — Crusoe's practical ingenuity made the book an instant, lasting success, and made 'Robinson Crusoe' a byword for self-reliance. A story of survival that is also, quietly, a spiritual autobiography of sin, Providence and repentance.
The Lost World
Arthur Conan Doyle
Doyle's 1912 adventure, the first outing for Professor Challenger and the ancestor of every dinosaur story since. Ed Malone, a young reporter eager to prove himself, talks his way onto an expedition to a plateau in the South American interior where Challenger claims extinct creatures still live. With him go a sceptical professor, a big-game hunter and a half-Indian guide; what they find is pterodactyls, a lake of monsters, and a war between ape-men and a lost race of humans. Years after killing off Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle made himself another immortal character — and invented the adventure-into-the-unknown template.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy
At a country fair in Wessex, a drunken hay-trusser named Michael Henchard sells his wife Susan and their baby daughter to a sailor for five guineas. When he sobers up and realizes what he has done, he is too proud to chase after them. Instead he swears an oath before God: for the next twenty-one years he will not touch a drop of liquor. The oath is the first of many grand gestures by which Henchard tries to bargain with fate, and the novel follows him for the whole span of that vow. Henchard rises. Through tireless work and an unforgiving temper he becomes the richest grain merchant and the mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy's imagined market town built on the wool trade and old customs. But his character is his own worst enemy: headlong, jealous, quick to take offense and slow to forgive. Susan returns years later with a grown daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, believing herself a widow, and Henchard remarries her, only for new and old secrets to begin unraveling his position. Into the town comes Donald Farfrae, a young Scotsman with modern methods and an easy charm. Henchard hires him, then quarrels with him, then spends his remaining years competing with the man who out-sells him in grain, out-manages him as mayor, and, without ever meaning to, wins the love of nearly everyone Henchard cares about. As his fortunes turn, Henchard pays in kind for every rash act, and Hardy lets the bill come due with almost biblical patience. First published in 1886, The Mayor of Casterbridge carries the subtitle The Life and Death of a Man of Character, and it is one of the great tragic novels of English literature: a study of a self-made man undone by the very qualities that made him.
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot
Maggie Tulliver is bright, passionate and hungry for more than her provincial world will allow a girl, and her adored brother Tom is dutiful, stubborn and unforgiving in proportion. Eliot drew directly on her own Midlands childhood for the mill at Dorlcote and the river Floss that gives the book its ending. The bitter feud over a lawsuit drags the siblings apart; Stephen Guest's elopement attempt nearly destroys Maggie's reputation; and the novel closes with one of the most famous floods in English fiction, in which brother and sister are reconciled in death as they never quite managed in life.
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
T. S. Eliot called it 'the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels'. On her eighteenth birthday, Rachel Verinder is given a great yellow diamond looted from an Indian shrine; by morning it has vanished from her bedroom. The tale is told by turns — by the old house-steward Betteredge and his beloved Robinson Crusoe, by a pious spinster, by a dying physician, by the policeman Sergeant Cuff — as suspicion travels through the household and back across the sea to India. Collins, Dickens's friend and collaborator, assembled here the whole machinery of the detective story: the chain of clues, the professional sleuth, and a puzzle the reader is invited to solve.
The Nursery
Ellis Wren
Marine ecologist Owen Marsh is lost at sea when a storm sinks the borrowed cutter Pintail off the California coast. Rescued by a private workboat, the Meridian, he is taken to Palisade Island, an uncharted company property run by Dr. Roland Voss, a disgraced geneticist. Behind the island's double fence, Voss has been surgically reshaping animals into humanoid beings, the Kindred, who keep themselves upright by reciting a Code: stay off all fours, eat no flesh, keep inside the fence, obey the Warden. Marsh meets the Shambler, the woman with the muzzle, and her small deer-made daughter, and hears the screaming from the shed where Voss works. When the Brindle breaks the Code, Voss hunts and unmakes him. Marsh flees across the inner fence into the island's deep interior, where the unfinished revert to beasts, and is brought back by Voss, who explains his creed: humanity is an accident, and pain is the pen that writes the second word into flesh. The woman with the muzzle sends Marsh to the inner side to save him from the table; he returns a witness. When the Ravener tastes blood and is taken to the shed, he breaks free, kills Voss, and the island collapses. Kato, Voss's first creation, opens both fences and lets the island revert, then walks into the deep scrub and is never seen again. The Ravener kills Corbett on the dock while Marsh escapes in the launch. Back on the mainland, the company's lawyers offer him a story without an island; he refuses to sign, and the diagnosis and the unsigned files follow him anyway. Haunted, he sees the beast in every face and withdraws to a cliff cabin, where he keeps the Code with the Whistle, a dog-shaped Kindred, at his door.
The Odyssey
Homer, trans. Samuel Butler
Homer's second great epic: the ten-year voyage home of Odysseus from Troy. The Cyclops Polyphemus, Circe the enchantress, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the underworld, the island of Calypso — while at home his wife Penelope outwits a hall full of suitors and his son Telemachus goes searching for news. The original story of the journey home, and of the cunning that survives it; the fountainhead of Western narrative. This edition uses Samuel Butler's classic prose translation.