Gems of English Literature
Great Expectations
Philip Pirrip ('Pip') is a small village boy being brought up by the blacksmith Joe Gargery. He is told to go and visit the house of Miss Havisham, whose mind had...
A High Wind in Jamaica
In the mid-Nineteenth Century, a family of five slightly wild children are on their way to England by boat, having been sent by their parents from Jamaica to attend...
A Man For All Seasons
While King Henry VIII maintained that there were no definitions for marriage, his Chancellor Sir Thomas More declared than no human law could change the institution....
A Study in Scarlet
First book of who would be one of the most famous detectives of all time, prototype of those who came next. The novels starring Sherlock Holmes are set in a police...
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Alice dreams that she chases a white rabbit down a rabbit hole and finds a world of the Duchess, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the King and Queen...
Animal Farm
The animals of Mr. Jones' farm led by the pigs, revolt and drive him out. Napoleon is the leader and, corrupted by this power, sets up a new tyranny under the slogan...
As You Like It
When Frederick usurps his brother's dukedom, the brother has to live in Arden forest. His daughter Rosalind is a friend of Frederick's daughter Celia and they watch...
Cry, the Beloved Country
The Reverend Stephen Kumalo leaves Natal in South Africa for Johannesburg in search of his sister, Gertrude, and his son Absalom. Absalom fled after murdering the son...
The Citadel
A young doctor begins his first practice in a small South Wales mining village, all idealistic and keen to improve the lives of his patients. Yet he soon comes to...
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Dr Jekyll is fascinated by the good and evil in the nature of man and he wondered if he could give each its own personality. The doctor discovered the way to do so,...
Far From the Madding Crowd
This is one of the Wessex tales centring on the romantic dalliances of four people. The shepherd Gabriel Oak is generous in his love, Bathsheba Everdene is innocent...
Lost Horizon
Flying out of India, a small aircraft is hijacked and flown into Tibet. The passengers end up in a remote valley known as Shangri-La. Have they been kidnapped? Can...
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Tom Sawyer lives with his brother Sid and Aunt Polly in St Petersburg, Missouri. He is a great friend of Huckleberry Finn and this is an account of their adventures....
Jane Eyre
A novel about the life of Jane, an English girl and an orphan, who is admitted into an orphanage until she starts work as a governess. She falls in love with the...
Loss and Gain
This is a novel that paints a vivid picture of religion in Oxford at the time of the Oxford Movement. Charles Reding is the son of a clergyman and is an undergraduate...
Moby Dick
The young narrator, Ismael, decides to go to sea on the whaler Pequod, which was ultimately doomed. Here we are introduced to the harpooner Queequeg, the first-mate...
Space Trilogy 1: Out of the Silent Planet
This is the first of the author's science fiction trilogy with a strong Christian didactic message. Life has been found on Mars and it only goes to show up the...
Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked and this is the story of his efforts to cope with solitude and making a tolerable existence with infinite ingenuity. He describes the...
The Lord of the Rings
The world created by Tolkien can already be considered among the classics of the 20th century. After celebrating his birthday, Bilbo disappears again. His nephew...
The Kon-Tiki Expedition
The narrator is struck by how Polynesian culture could trace its roots to pre-Inca inhabitants of Peru and so sets out on an adventure to prove his hypothesis. He...
The Jungle Books
Mogli, a child lost in the Indian jungle, wanders into a pack of wolves, who welcome and take care of him. With them, the boy will learn many tricks and laws of the...
The Old Man and the Sea
The American writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) wrote his last and possibly most famous novel "The Old Man and the Sea", for which he won the Pulitzer Prize (1953)....
The Nine Tailors
Set in the flood plains on the Fenlands and centered on bell ringing (campanology), the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey goes about solving a murder mystery....
The Turn of the Screw
A short story about haunting told by a young governess sent to a country house called Bly. She is engaged by the uncle of two orphaned children. She becomes embroiled...
The Wind in the Willows
Rat, Mole, Badger and Toad take part in their shared adventures with life on the river. Kenneth Grahame was born in 1859 in Edinburgh, was educated in Oxford, worked...
The Woman in White
The story is related by a series of characters involved in the intrigue of Walter Hartright's meeting of an agitated woman on a lonely road at midnight. She was...
And Then There Were None
The premise is simple: ten people, all of them murderers, are in a hotel on on an isolated island. One by one, they all die – who is the murderer?
Dame Agatha...
Three Men in a Boat
A summery story of three young men and their dog taking a leisurely rowing holiday down the Thames. It lasted two weeks, starting from Kingston upon Thames and ending...
Tom's midnight garden
When his brother Peter gets the measles, Tom has to move in with his aunt and uncle, who have a small apartment with no garden. One night, bored, he starts counting...
Wuthering Heights
The Heathcliff Linton house called Wuthering Heights is one of violence and incident, with the story told by the neighbour Lockwood, a tenant at the Grange. It is the...
Emma
Emma was the daughter of Mr. Woodhouse and Harriet, a pretty orphan who is resolved to scheme her advancement in society, oversees her education. Harriet rejects the...
The Innocence of Father Brown
With his round face, pipe and umbrella, the shambling, bespectacled priest Father Brown is an unlikely detective - yet his innocent air hides a razor-sharp...
Gulliver's Travels
The novel is a satire to expose contemporary politics. Lemuel Gulliver is a ship's surgeon who is shipwrecked on Lilliput. Everything was on a scale of one inch...
Ivanhoe
It is the time of wars between the Normans and Saxons. The Saxon Wilfred of Ivanhoe loves Rowena but is banished, as his father wants her to enter a politically...
Le Morte d'Arthur
Although Malory organised the Arthurian legends into eight books, Caxton printed them in twenty-one books. It covers the tales of King Arthur and Lucius, Sir Lancelot...
Lord Jim
Jim is the chief mate on a ship called Patna, full of pilgrims at sea in Eastern waters. He is young, idealistic and a bit of a dreamer. The narrator Marlow tells the...
The Mill on the Floss
Tom and Maggie are the children of the simple, ignorant miller Tulliver, working at Dorlcote Mill on the river Floss. Tom is more like his father and is unimaginative...