H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine offers a dystopian vision of humanity’s future. A scientist builds a time machine and travels to future. He finds that humanity has devolved into two races: the childlike Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks. His machine disappears, so he explores the future world.

Persuasion tells the story of a second chance, the reawakening of love between Anne Elliot and Captain Frederick Wentworth, whom eight years earlier she had been persuaded not to marry. Wentworth returns from the Napoleonic Wars with prize money and the social acceptability of naval rank

The novel follows the story of Jane, a seemingly plain and simple girl as she battles through life’s struggles. Jane has many obstacles in her life – her cruel and abusive Aunt Reed, the grim conditions at Lowood school, her love for Rochester and Rochester’s marriage to Bertha.

Presented in a new translation by Stephen Pimenoff, ‘The Looking Glass’ is accompanied in this volume by thirty-four other short stories by Chekhov, some of them never translated before into English.

Arguably the greatest dystopian novel of all time and the most influential post-war work of fiction – which enriched the English language with words such as “Newspeak”, “doublethink” and “thoughtcrime” – Nineteen Eighty-Four is a riveting read and a groundbreaking exploration of mass surveillance, censorship and mind control, which has a deep resonance with the world we live in.

Between 1892 and 1895, Oscar Wilde’s drawing-room comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest made his name as a playwright who fearlessly mocked the hypocrisy and snobbery of Victorian society and took gleeful delight in appearing to trivialize its most sacred institutions

‘The power of Dickens is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive’ WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Gustave Flaubert’s daring portrait of adultery caused a national scandal when Madame Bovary was first published, and this masterpiece of realist literature has lost none of its impact today.