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Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina is certainly somewhat unhappy in her life, but presents a strong and vivacious character when called in to smooth over a major crack that’s appeared in her brother’s marriage. Unfortunately, the very visit designed to help her brother introduces her to Count Alexei Vronsky and sets in motion a chain of events that will ripple through families and the unforgiving society of wealthy Moscow and St. Petersburg. Initially serialized over five years in The Russian Messenger, Anna Karenina was first published as a two-volume novel in 1878.

Leo Tolstoy · Drama · 239 ch

Don Quixote

An aging gentleman, drunk on romances of chivalry, renames himself Don Quixote and rides out with his neighbor Sancho Panza to right wrongs across Spain. Their misadventures pit heroic fantasy against everyday life in what is often called the first modern novel.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · Comedy · 139 ch

Les Misérables

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo has been described as one of literature’s greatest novels. The first two volumes were published in French in March 1862 and translated into English later the same year. Since then it has been translated by numerous others and has been adapted for film, television, radio, animation and the stage.

Victor Hugo · Historical · 371 ch

Peter Pan

Peter Pan, a young boy who refuses to grow up, takes Wendy to the lost boys on the fantasy island of the Neverland to be their mother. Wendy’s two brothers, John and Michael, accompany them on their many adventures, including skirmishes with the Native Americans who reside there, and battles with pirates, led by Pan’s nemesis Captain Hook, who is said to be feared even by Captain Flint and Long John Silver. Peter and Wendy, J.

J. M. Barrie · Fantasy · 17 ch

The War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells’ classic tale of alien invasion has to this day never been out of print.

H. G. Wells · Sci Fi · 27 ch

The Hound of the Baskervilles

It would be hard to nominate a more well-known character in English literature than that of the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 1880s. Holmes, alongside his friend and biographer Dr. John Watson, appeared in two initial novels and dozens of short stories serialized in popular magazines, attracting a devoted, almost fanatical following which continues to this day. The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized in 1901–1902, was the third novel featuring Holmes and Watson.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch

The Three Musketeers

The Three Musketeers is the first of three adventure novels written by Alexandre Dumas featuring the character of d’Artagnan. The young d’Artagnan leaves home in Gascony for Paris to join the King’s Musketeers. On his way to Paris, the letter which will introduce him to the commander of the Musketeers is stolen by a mysterious man in the town of Meung.

Alexandre Dumas · Adventure · 69 ch

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy’s Progress was Charles Dickens’ second novel, following The Pickwick Papers, and was published as a serial in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany between 1837 and 1839. It details the misadventures of its eponymous character, Oliver Twist, born in a Victorian-era workhouse, his mother dying within minutes of his birth. He is raised in miserable conditions, half-starved, and then sent out as an apprentice to an undertaker.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 53 ch

The Secret Garden

Mary’s parents fall ill and die, forcing her to be transplanted from India to the English countryside. She arrives at a strange and foreign country manor, where she discovers a long-neglected garden and hears strange sobbing noises at night. Thus begins The Secret Garden, a children’s book with an unusually dense collection of themes, symbols, and motifs.

Frances Hodgson Burnett · Drama · 27 ch

The Jungle Book

The Jungle Book is a short collection of stories published by Kipling in various magazines between 1893 and 1894. Kipling spent both his early years and his late teenage years in India, and that upbringing is front and center in these stories—despite them being written while he was living in Vermont, in the United States. The stories are fable-like, with most of them centering on the lives of anthropomorphised jungle animals and a few focused on human characters in India.

Rudyard Kipling · Fantasy · 7 ch

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is one of the most popular books ever written in the English language, published in innumerable editions and translated into almost every language of the world, not to mention the many versions created in film, television and even radio. First published in 1719, it can also claim to be one of the first novels ever written in English. Written in the form of an autobiography, it describes the life of the eponymous narrator Robinson Crusoe.

Daniel Defoe · Adventure · 20 ch

Gulliver’s Travels

Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726 and is probably the most famous work by Jonathan Swift. It was an instant hit—selling out within a week—and has never been out of print, as well as having been adapted many times. Lemuel Gulliver, an English surgeon on the Antelope, is shipwrecked and washed up on the island of Lilliput, where the inhabitants are less than six inches tall.

Jonathan Swift · Comedy · 41 ch

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The irrepressible Tom Sawyer drives his Aunt Polly to distraction; she can’t decide whether to cry or laugh at his antics. He fights, falls in love, and finds adventure with two of his friends, one of whom will later become famous in his own right. Along the way he attends his own funeral, wins the girl by falsely confessing to something she did, and, most famously, convinces most of the boys in town to pay him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence.

Mark Twain · Adventure · 37 ch

The Call of the Wild

Jack London spent nearly a year in Alaska and the Klondike, mining for gold and braving the Alaskan winter. There he was inspired to write what would become The Call of the Wild, one of his most famous novels. The Call of the Wild tells the tale of a domesticated dog stolen from his California family and sold to sledders in Alaska.

Jack London · Adventure · 7 ch

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850; it was one of the first books to be mass-produced in America, which helped ensure its immediate popularity and ubiquitous presence on contemporary shelves. Its first printing of 2,500 books sold out in ten days. The novel is set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony between the years 1642 and 1649.

Nathaniel Hawthorne · Historical · 26 ch

The Brothers Karamazov

Dmitri Karamazov and his father Fyodor are at war over both Dmitri’s inheritance and the affections of the beautiful Grushenka. Into this feud arrive the middle brother Ivan, recently returned from Moscow, and the youngest sibling Alyosha, who has been released into the wider world from the local monastery by the elder monk Zossima. Through a series of accidents of fate and wilful misunderstandings the Karamazovs edge closer to tragedy, while the local townspeople watch on.

Fyodor Dostoevsky · Psychological · 96 ch

Heart of Darkness

A steamboat captain journeys up the Congo in search of a celebrated ivory trader whose reputation has curdled into rumor. Told by a sailor waiting out the tide on the Thames, it is a story about what empire does to the men who carry it out.

Joseph Conrad · Adventure · 3 ch

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

A celebrated naturalist joins an expedition to hunt a sea monster and discovers a captain, a crew, and a machine beyond anything he imagined. An undersea voyage through wonders, wrecks, and the limits of freedom.

Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 46 ch

Around the World in Eighty Days

Jules Verne’s most-acclaimed novel remains a cultural cornerstone to this day. The story of Phileas Fogg’s spectacular journey by then-novel technologies is a fast-paced, colorful, and thoroughly enjoyable portrait of the British empire at the height of its power. Originally published as a serial so believable that readers at the time placed bets on whether Fogg would succeed or not, Verne’s adventure epic continues to inspire travelers and adventurers even in modern times.

Jules Verne · Adventure · 37 ch

The Phantom of the Opera

“When I die and am in Heaven,” Christine Daaé’s father said, “I will send the Angel of Music to you.” It is with these words still in her ears years later that Christine accepts the disembodied voice that speaks to her to claim that divine title, and to give her singing lessons within her dressing room at the Paris Opera, as the fulfillment of her beloved father’s promise. And when those lessons lead her to a performance that astonishes the whole city, who could doubt but that the Angel had indeed come? Yet there is another, more sinister presence stalking about the Opéra Garnier: the Opera Ghost.

Gaston Leroux · Mystery · 28 ch