Fiction

In Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a j...

Rated among the most excellent works of American fiction, Mark Twain’s classic The Adventures of Tom Sawyer paints an unforgettable picture of Mississippi frontier life, combining picaresque adventure with challenging satire and great innovative p...

Rudyard Kipling’s works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep”; “Three and An Extra”; “On Greenhow Hill”; “The Limitations of Pambé Serang”; “The Disturber of Traffic”; “The...

Kipling's allegory, The Jungle Books, set in India and filled with high adventure and extraordinary characters that touch both our intellect and our emotions, is an unforgettable mythic tale of a boy Mowgli, the fearless man-cub, looking for where...

Animal Farm is a dystopian allegorical novella. It reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, being a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and was against Moscow-directed Stalinism. The nove...

Rated among the most excellent works of American fiction, Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn paints an unforgettable picture of Mississippi frontier life, combining picaresque adventure with challenging satire and great innova...

Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel, To the Lighthouse, was widely praised and has remained the most popular of all her novels. It is considered among the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century. There is minimal action. The novel works t...

Around the World in Eighty Days is a classic adventure novel by Jules Verne. It is the story of a rich English gentleman living a life of modesty and solitude. Phileas Fogg accepts a challenge from his fellow members at the Reform Club and sets of...

Marco Polo is one of the most adventurous travellers in human history. His travels are recorded in Livres des Merveilles du Monde, a book which is said to have introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China. It is one of the first great travel boo...

Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, is a humorous account of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of loca...

A great dramatist, literary critic, an eminent showman, intellectual and a satirist, George Bernard Shaw was a leading theatre personality of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Pygmalion is one of his masterpi...

The Merchant of Venice is a 16th century play written by Shakespeare between 1596-1598 in which a merchant in Venice must default on a large loan provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock. It is usually classified as a romantic comedy though its d...

A thrilling, interactive journey through crime, mystery, and forbidden passions. Narrated by characters who have either been killed or taken their own lives, each chapter unveils a new perspective, revealing the dark connections between murder, su...

The Prince contains a number of maxims concerning politics. It states that in order to retain power, the hereditary prince must carefully maintain the socio-political institutions which the people are accustomed to, whereas a new prince must first...

A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Shelley's argument for poetry is written within the context of Romanticism. The book showcases Shelley's aesthetic p...

The book contains the best short stories written by Hector Hugh Munro under his pen name, Saki. "Reginald" was written after he had given up foreign reporting and settled in London. It features three short stories "Reginald at the Theater"; "Regin...

The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, or simply Othello, is a tragedy written in approximately 1603. One of Shakespeare's most tightly woven works, it explores themes of racism, betrayal, love, revenge, and forgiveness, and has spawned multi...

Kim, a picaresque novel by Rudyard Kipling, was published serially in McClure’s Magazine, before being published in book form in 1901. The story is set in India in the backdrop of the political conflict between Russia and Britain, after the end of...

In Persuasion, Jane Austen’s last completed novel, unpublished until her death, satire and ridicule become milder and the tone is more grave and tender. This novel depicts her most memorable heroine – Anne Elliot, a young woman of perfect breeding...

Journey to the Centre of the Earth published in 1864 in French as Voyage au centre de la Terre is the second book in Verne's popular science-fiction series Voyages Extraordinaires (1863-1910). The story involves German professor Otto Lidenbrock wh...

Man and Superman, a four-Act drama, was written in 1903 as a response to those who had questioned Shaw as to why he had never written a play based on the Don Juan theme. It deserves the position of Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece. The plot revolves aro...

Scrooge, an old miser, hates Christmas, calling it "humbug". On a Christmas eve, he refuses his nephew Fred's dinner invitation, and rudely turns away two gentlemen who seek a donation from him to provide a Christmas dinner for the poor. At home t...

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title given by Edward FitzGerald to his translation of a selection of quatrains, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), a Persian poet, mathematician an...

This nightmarish tale by H.G. Wells contains all the suspense and adventure of science fiction at its best. It begins with a quiet country inn and a mysterious stranger, his features masked by gloves, dark glasses, and bandages that completely cov...

Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has remained one of the best-known and most read of English novels. It gained popularity among children and adults alike. The adventure story became one of the classics of English literature (like Gulliver’s Trav...

Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway, marks an important stage in her development as a writer. In this novel she finally departs from the form of the traditional English novel, establishing herself as a writer of genius. Her stream of consc...

The Return of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of thirteen very interesting Sherlock Holmes stories that were published in 1903-04 in the Strand Magazine in UK and Collier’s in the United States. The first story, “The Adventure of the Empty House”,...

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his most famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The individual stories had been serialized in The Strand Magazine between June 1891 and...

The Importance of Being Earnest is a farcical comedy in three Acts. The protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligation. John Worthing, a carefree young gentleman, invents a fictitious brother, Ernest, whose wicked...

Two Treatises of Government is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in 1689 by John Locke. The First Treatise is a scathing criticism of patriarchalism and presents a forceful refutation of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha. Locke proceed...

Just So Stories is a collection of 12 interesting stories with eccentric myths created by Rudyard Kipling. Most of the stories are fanciful revelations of how certain animals came to possess their distinguishing features. The characters are humoro...

The Great Gatsby is generally considered to be the finest novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Written in an easy style, without complex literary experiment, at the height of the author’s maturity, it is now an undisputed classic of American lite...

When Frankenstein, a young idealist Genevan student of natural philosophy at the University of Ingolstadt, stumbled into the secret of infusing life into matter, and created a living thing out of an assemblage of bones from charnel houses, little ...

King Solomon’s Mines, the first English adventure novel set in Africa describes a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party. The novel is Allan Quatermai...

Aesop’s Fables is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a storyteller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BCE. The stories are of diverse origins and have descended to modern times through a number of sources. It is b...

Dracula, published in 1897, is the most famous of all tales of vampirism. Presented in diaries, letters and news items, this story of the bloodsucking vampire who preys on the living and can be repelled by garlic, crucifix and a wooden stake is bo...

The Republic is a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BC regarding the definition of justice, the order and character of the just city-state and the just man. It has been widely acknowledged as one of the world’s most influential works ...

It is a fantasy novel published in 1928. It traces the career of the androgynous Orlando through four centuries from the late sixteenth century. It contains a great many well-observed literary and historical insights into the ages through which it...

Milton’s magnum opus, Paradise Lost, an epic poem in blank verse, was composed during the period 1658 to 1664. The first version, published in 1667, comprised ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. The second edition published in 1674 is...

Sense and Sensibility, the first of Austen’s novels to be published, remains as fresh as ever it was. The basic theme of the novel is concerned with the personalities of the two sisters of contrasting temperaments who share comparable experiences ...

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, originally published in 1894 by Arthur Conan Doyle. In the American edition there are eleven stories, while in others there are twelve. All these stories appeared in the St...

Rated among the most excellent works of American fiction, Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn paints an unforgettable picture of Mississippi frontier life, combining picaresque adventure with challenging satire and great innova...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - "[A] torrent of endlessly inventive prose, by turns comic and enraged, embracing life in all its contradictions. In this spectacular novel, verbal pyrotechnics barely outshine its psychological truths."--Newsday Winn...

The Essays, first published in 1597, contains essays written in a wide range of styles—from the plain and unadorned—to the epigrammatic and concise. The essays became immediately popular because they presented a contrast to the discursive and orna...

Arms and the Man, one of Shaw’s most glittering comedies, was first produced on 21st April, 1894 at the Avenue Theatre and published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s Plays Pleasant volume, which also included Candida, You Never Can Tell, and The Man of D...

Northanger Abbey, written during the same period as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, represents Jane Austen's genius at its freshest and most enchanting. It grew out of her distaste for the absurdities of the novels of her time and i...

Once considered scandalizingly immoral, Flaubert’s exquisite debut novel unsparingly depicts a woman’s gradual corruption and the human mind in search of transcendence. Unhappily married to a devoted, clumsy local doctor, Emma fulfils her epicurea...

Heart of Darkness is the finest of all Conrad's tales, showing him at the height of his powers as a writer of great vividness, intensity, and sophistication. The story has come to be regarded as classic of the twentieth century. Its ambiguity has ...

Mansfield Park is a unique novel in its moral design, with a heroine remarkably different from the author’s previous creations. This young lady, Miss Fanny Price, the eldest daughter of a large improvident family, is brought to live at Mansfield P...

Antony and Cleopatra is a well-known tragedy by William Shakespeare. Its first known appearance in print came in the First Folio of 1623. The plot is based on Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives, and follows the relationship between Cle...

Wuthering Heights is a classic tale of possessive and thwarted passion, one of the forerunners of today's soap operas and romance novels. The tempestuous and mythic story of Catherine Earnshaw, the precocious daughter of the house, and the ruggedl...

The Return of the Native, both powerful and sombre, is considered to be the most representative of Hardy’s novels. It is set in Egdon Heath whose lowering, titanic presence dominates the men and women who live on it, and whose menace and beauty Ha...

Collection of (1) Oliver Twist : The only token of identity left by Dicken's dying mother to Oliver Twist – born in the workhouse, and orphaned at birth – is stolen. Spending his early childhood in neglect and near starvation Oliver joins the work...

Candida, a classic comedy, was written in 1894. Set in London’s East End during the Victorian era, the play is about the domestic turmoil that ensues when an impetuous young poet comes between a progressive-minded clergyman and his charismatic wif...

As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 and first published in the First Folio in 1623. The play's first performance is uncertain, though a performance at Wilton House in 1603 has been sugge...

During the year 1866, some ships spot a mysterious sea monster. The US government assembles an expedition in New York City to find and destroy the monster. Professor Pierre Aronnax, a French marine biologist and narrator of the story, receives an ...

Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Age of Innocence is a social satire, a bitter-sweet romance, bringing to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of the stuffy upper crust of 1870s New York. Rich, intriguing and beautifully written,...

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