Mansfield Park is largely considered to be one of Jane Austen’s most ambitious novels, a darkly satirical glimpse into morality and social mobility within the nineteenth-century British class system.
In Bath, Catherine Morland meets Henry, a suitor and a fellow devotee of Gothic novels who invites her to his family home, Northanger Abbey. Ruins, locked doors, dark corridors… how could she refuse?
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
Notes from Underground & Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky. With an Introduction and Notes by David Rampton, Department of English, University of Ottowa.
“Notes on the Cuff,” a comically autobiographical account of how the tenacious young writer managed to begin his literary career despite famine, typhus, civil war, the wrong political affiliation, and the Byzantine Moscow bureaucracy.
Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez blends the natural with supernatural in Of Love and Other Demons – a novel which explores community, superstition and collective hysteria.
This pessimistic case study of bourgeois society’s ills after the French Revolution tells the intertwined stories of Eugène de Rastignac, an ambitious but penniless young man, and old Goriot, a father who sacrifices everything for his children.
Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.
Oliver Twist is a story of a young orphan. His life in the workhouse is lonely and sad. Oliver becomes an apprentice for an undertaker but runs away after he gets into a fight with another apprentice.
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Introduction and Notes by Dr Ella Westland, University of Exeter Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers.