The Invisible Man

The Penguin English Library edition. Many readers would claim that The Adventure of the Copper Beeches or The Man with the Twisted Lip was their favourite Sherlock Holmes story - but then that would be doing an injustice to The Adventure of the Yellow Face and The Problem of Thor Bridge. It is just as well that in the end we do not have to choose - as if we did then there would be no doubt it shou...

The Penguin English Library edition. As usual with the Sherlock Holmes stories it is very hard to say which are the best - but there are many stories here which would get the vote - ranging from The Boscombe Valley Mystery to the wonderful Adventure of Silver Blaze, from the Adventure of the Norwood Builder to A Case of Identity, but above to the uniquely strange and macabre Adventure of the Engin...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James "I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?" This edition contains two of Henry James's most popular short works. Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma...

'...an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity...' Horror, madness, violence and the dark forces hidden in humanity abound in this collection of Poe's brilliant tales, including - among others - the bloody, brutal and baffling murder of a mother and daughter in Paris in "The Murd...

The gout-ridden and irascible squire Matthew Bramble makes his way across Britain with his family, and finds himself everywhere surrounded by decadents, pimps and con-men, made to bathe in befouled water and to suffer raucousness and degeneracy. And as the group travels it acquires another member: the trusty manservant Humphry Clinker. Smollett's masterpiece is a boisterously funny lambast...

'Life is a pic-nic en costume; one must take a part, assume a character, stand ready in a sensible way to play the fool'. In "The Confidence-Man", Melville's unnerving and hallucinatory satire on the American dream, a slippery trickster and master of disguise comes to swindle his fellow passengers - who themselves may also be con-men - aboard a Mississippi steamboat. "Billy Budd, Sa...

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Nicholas Nickleby" by Charles Dickens. '"I may grow rich!" repeated Nicholas, with a mournful smile, "ay, and I may grow old. But rich or poor, or old or young, we shall ever be the same to each other, and in that our comfort lies"'. The work of a young novelist at the height of his powers, "Nicholas Nickleby" is one of the touchstones of...

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Pamela" by Samuel Richards. "O the deceitfulness of the heart of man! This John, whom I took to be the honestest of men ...this very fellow was all the while a vile hypocrite, and a perfidious wretch, and helping to carry on my ruin". Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, alone in the world, is pursued by her dead mistress' son. Although she is att...

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Five Orange Pips and Other Cases" by Arthur Conan Doyle. "He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson...He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them". Sherlock Holmes, scourge of criminals everywhere, whether they be lurking in London's foggy back...

"Then they proceeded to scan the sky, roving from planet to star, from single stars to double stars, from double to coloured stars..." Hardy's atmospheric, moving story of star-crossed lovers shows human beings at the mercy of forces far beyond their control, setting a tragic drama of human passion and conflict against a background of vast stellar space and scientific discovery. "Two on a Tow...