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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

Ulysses

James Joyce’s most celebrated novel, and one of the most highly regarded novels in the English language, records the events of one day—Thursday the 16th of June, 1904—in the city of Dublin. The reader is first reintroduced to Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s previous novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is now living in a rented Martello tower and working at a school, having completed his B.A.

James Joyce · Drama · 40 ch

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is Flaubert’s first novel, and considered to be both his masterpiece and one of the most influential works in literary history, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise. The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin.

Gustave Flaubert · Drama · 36 ch

The Invisible Man

Griffin, a scientist, has devoted his life to the study of optics. As his work progresses, he invents a method of making a person invisible. After testing the experiment on himself, he comes to realize that while the experiment was a complete success, he has no way of reversing his invisibility.

H. G. Wells · Sci Fi · 29 ch

A Study in Scarlet

A Study in Scarlet is the novel which first introduced Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic characters Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It was published in 1887 in a popular magazine, Beeton’s Christmas Annual. It attracted little public attention at the time, but interest in Holmes continued to build with the subsequent series of short stories Doyle wrote featuring the austere, analytical detective—now one of the most well-known characters in all of English literature.

Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch

The Wind in the Willows

The Wind in the Willows, the story of four animals and their adventures in the idyllic English countryside, started out as bedtime stories Grahame would tell his son. He eventually started writing them down, and finally produced this much-loved childrens classic. In continuous print since 1908, The Wind in the Willows has been illustrated countless times and adapted to stage, radio, and screen.

Kenneth Grahame · Fantasy · 12 ch

Persuasion

Anne Elliot is the under-valued daughter of a vain and improvident English baronet, Sir Walter Elliot. Some years previously, at the urging of a family friend, Anne had rejected a marriage proposal from a young but impoverished naval captain. When she unexpectedly encounters him again, she is filled with regrets.

Jane Austen · Romance · 24 ch

Mrs. Dalloway

Probably Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel, Mrs. Dalloway, originally published in 1925, is a glorious, ground-breaking text. On the surface, it follows Clarissa Dalloway, an Englishwoman in her fifties, minute by minute through the June day on which she is having a party. At a deeper level, however, the novel demonstrates, through an effortless stream of consciousness, the connections formed in human interaction—whether these interactions are fleeting, or persist through decades.

Virginia Woolf · Drama · 11 ch

David Copperfield

Like many of Dickens’ works, David Copperfield was published serially, then as a complete novel for the first time in 1850. Dickens himself thought of it as his favorite novel, writing in the preface that of all his works Copperfield was his favorite child. This isn’t surprising, considering that many of the events in the novel are semi-autobiographical accounts from Dickens’ own life.

Charles Dickens · Drama · 66 ch

Notre-Dame de Paris

Esmeralda is a breathtaking beauty and attracts the attention of men all around her, including an actor, a captain, and an archdeacon, to whom she is of course forbidden. But because of a kindness she paid to him, there is one whose love for her is pure: the archdeacon’s bellringer. The actions of the archdeacon, who cannot control his lust for the young woman, ultimately draws all four men into her orbit, and his, with tragic consequences.

Victor Hugo · Historical · 61 ch

Journey to the Center of the Earth

A classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne, this work is one of the most well-known subterranean fictions to this day. It inspired many similar works and adaptations. First published in 1864 in French as Voyage au centre de la Terre, it was quickly translated to English by several different publishers in the 1870s.

Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 45 ch

The Turn of the Screw

One of the most famous ghost stories in literature, The Turn of the Screw earned its place in the annals of influential English novellas not for its qualities as a gothic ghost story, but rather for the many complex and subtle ways the reader can come to opposing conclusions as to tale’s very nature. Are the ghosts the governess sees real, or are they figments of her quiet insanity? The Turn of the Screw was originally published as a serial, and later went through many revisions by James himself.

Henry James · Horror · 25 ch

Black Beauty

The best-selling novel Black Beauty by Anna Sewell was published in 1877. The story is a first person narrative told from the perspective of the horse Black Beauty. This unique narrative perspective enables readers to empathize with the lives of working horses and to reflect upon the cruel treatment that has been inflicted upon them.

Anna Sewell · Drama · 49 ch

The Last of the Mohicans

The Last of the Mohicans is one of the most famous tales of pioneer American adventure. Set during the French and Indian War, Mohicans tells the tale of the journey of two daughters to meet their father, a colonel, at Fort William Henry. The road is long and dangerous, and they, along with their American and Native guides, encounter adventure at each step.

James Fenimore Cooper · Adventure · 34 ch

Middlemarch

“ George Eliot” was the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans, one of the greatest of English novelists of the Victorian era. Her long novel Middlemarch, subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, is generally considered to be her finest work. Published in eight installments between 1871 and 1872, Middlemarch tells the intertwined stories of a variety of people living in the vicinity of the (fictional) midlands town of Middlemarch during the early 1830s, the time of the great Reform Act.

George Eliot · Drama · 88 ch

To the Lighthouse

Set on an island off the Scottish coast, To the Lighthouse minutely examines the fleeting impressions of a large cast of family, friends, lovers, and hangers-on. Who can we be, Virginia Woolf invites us to ask, if no one can ever know our hearts—if they’re unknowable even to ourselves? To the Lighthouse remains one of the most important Modernist novels, exquisitely composed by one of the most gifted writers of the Modernist movement.

Virginia Woolf · Drama · 42 ch