Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and...

"Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought the evils of slavery to the consciences and hearts of the American people by its moving portrayal of slave experience. Harriet Beecher Stowe shows us in scenes of great dramatic power the human effects of a system in which slaves were property: the break up of families, the struggles for freedom, and the horrors of plantation labour. She brings into fiction the different voices of the emerging American nation; the...

"A novel 'with a double plot interest. The heroine, Dorothea Brooke, longs to devote herself to some great cause and, for a time, expects to find it in her marriage to Rev. Mr. Casaubon, an aging scholar. Mr. Casaubon lives only eighteen months after their marriage, a sufficient period to disillusion her completely. He leaves her his estate, with the ill-intentioned proviso that she will forfeit if she marries his young cousin Will Ladislaw, whom...

A translation of nineteenth-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel in which the four sons of Fyodor Karamazov, a man of immoral character, must contend with a criminal investigation and with their own inner questions about justice and the existence of God after they are involved in their father's murder.

"Marisol, who has a big imagination and likes to name inanimate objects, has a tree in her backyard named Peppina...but she's way too scared to climb it. Will Marisol find the courage to climb Peppina? Maybe"--

North and South tells the story of Margaret Hale, a southerner newly settled in the northern industrial town of Milton, whose ready sympathy with the discontented millworkers sits uneasily with her growing attraction to the charismatic mill owner, John Thornton. The novel poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience, ranging from religious crises of conscience to the ethics of naval mutiny and industrial action. Margaret's...

The life of a simple country girl in nineteenth-century England is destroyed by her father's determination to use her in order to regain the family's former social standing.

Lacey Walker talks constantly, but when she loses her voice one day she learns that being quiet and listening can be good too.

Little Bear feels the world around him. He feels the floor shake when someone stomps to get his attention - but something is missing. Little Bear is not sure what is happening. All around him he hears the familiar refrain: "Can bears ski?" Then Dad Bear takes him to see an audiologist and they learn that Little Bear has been experiencing deafness. With new hearing aids, he discovers that "Can bears ski?" is actually "Can you hear me?" His new world...

Little Nell and her grandfather are left destitute when the evil Quilp seizes their Old Curiosity Shop in payment for their overdue debts.