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At the court of Chancery, the interminable law suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce rolls on and on, encompassing so many diverse characters in its thrall like the fog that smothers the great city of London, including Esther Summerson, the heroine of the novel and one of Dickens' more feisty and characterful leading ladies. We are drawn in and fascinated by the complex set of relationships at all levels of society, from Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock, cocooned in their stately home in Lincolnshire, to Jo, the crossing sweeper in the hell hole known as Tom-All-Alone's. In none of Charles Dickens' other novels is the canvas broader, the sweep more inclusive, the linguistic texture richer and the gallery of comic grotesques more extraordinary. While Bleak House is a condemnation of the corruption at the heart of English society, it is also a love story and a murder mystery. And, it is wonderful entertainment.

Heart of Darkness is a short and vividly brutal account of colonial enterprise that has as much in common with the jaded Evelyn Waugh of Black Mischief as it does with any of Conrad's direct contemporaries in late 19th and early 20th century. It has managed to retain the fascination of readers and scholars to a far greater extent than his other fine works, such as the more conventionally novelistic tale of South American political chicanery and greed in Nostromo and the substantially more page-turning thriller The Secret Agent. It is accompanied in this volume by the tales with which it has been published since 1902: the autobiographical short story Youth, and the less personal but more substantial tale of an old man's fall from fortune, The End of the Tether. Though these stories differ considerably in style and content from his later novels, much of his reputation rests upon the words contained in this volume.

Wilkie Collins' classic story, The Woman in White, is one of the great mystery thrillers of the nineteenth century and beyond. It is a wonderful combination of rich characterisation and cunning melodrama which ensnares the reader from its opening pages. The novel features one of the strongest heroines of the Victorian Age, Marian Halcombe, who was a revelation for the readers of the time. Although not conventionally attractive, she is a tough, determined and feisty soul, well equipped to travel down the dark and dangerous pathway fate has decreed for her. Also featured is one of the great villains of all literature, the sly, smooth and corpulent Count Fosco, whose eccentric habits both chill and amuse. Since its publication, The Woman in White has never been out of print and has been the subject of numerous theatrical, film and television adaptations, including most recently a musical version by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Containing an afterword, each volume in the Collector's Library series includes a biography of the author, and a further reading list.

Each volume in the Collector's Library series has a specially commissioned Afterword, biography of the author, and a further reading list.

Dubliners was first published in 1914. The book depicts middle-class Catholic life in Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. The topics related in the opening stories include the disappointments of childhood, the frustrations of adolescence, and the importance of sexual awakening. Joyce was 25 years old when he wrote this miscellaneous collection of short stories, among which The Dead is probably the most famous. Considered at the time as a literary experiment, they are refreshingly original and as surprising at the beginning of this century as they were at the beginning of the last.

Connie's unhappy marriage to Clifford Chatterley is one scarred by mutual frustration and alienation. Crippled from wartime action, Clifford is confined to a wheelchair, while Connie's solitary, sterile existence is contained within the narrow parameters of the Chatterley ancestral home, Wragby. She seizes her chance at happiness and freedom when she embarks on a passionate affair with the estate's gamekeeper, Mellors, discovering a world of sexual opportunity and pleasure she'd thought lost to her. The explosive passion of Connie and Mellors' relationship — and the searing candour with which it is described — marked a watershed in twentieth century fiction, garnering Lady Chatterley's Lover a wide and enduring readership and lasting notoriety.

This is one of the most significant literary works of the 20th century, and one of the most innovative. Young Irish Catholic, Stephen Dedalus, rejects religion and national ties to develop unfettered as an artist. Strongly autobiographical, the novel is one of the founding texts of Modernism and the precursor of Ulysses. Its originality shocked contemporary readers on its publication in 1916, who found its treating of the minutiae of daily life indecorous, and its central character unappealing.

The boxed set contains the following volumes: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear; The Return of Sherlock Holmes and his Last Bow; A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.

A Study in Scarlet introduced the great scientific detective Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, his friend and chronicler, to the reading public. This novel, a cornerstone in the annals of crime fiction, tells of their first meeting and how they set up in rooms together in Baker Street. It is not long before the charismatic sleuth and his faithful companion are plunged into a dramatic mystery which starts with the discovery of a corpse in a deserted house and the letters RACHE scrawled on the wall in blood. The Sign of the Four, the second Holmes novel, presents the detective with one of his greatest challenges — solving the theft of the great Agra treasure in India. In these two classic novels you have the foundation of the Sherlock Holmes legend. As well as his witty and illuminating Afterword to this edition, David Stuart Davies, the illustrious editor of Sherlock magazine, has provided a fascinating chronology of the Sherlock Holmes Stories.

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends, George and Harris, decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a T. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian clerking classes, it hilariously captured the spirit of its age.

Around the World in Eighty Days (Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours) is a classic. The story starts in London on 2 October 1872. Phileas Fogg is a wealthy, solitary man with regular habits, who fires his former butler for getting wrong the temperature of his shaving water. He hires Passepartout as a replacement. Later that day he gets involved in an argument over an article in the Daily Telegraph, stating that with the opening of a new railway in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in eighty days. The exciting, if now dated, adventure of Fogg and Passepartout will entertain modern readers as much as it did the Victorians.

This anthology of Kiplings greatest short stories contains some of the most memorable and popular examples of the genre of which he was an undisputed master. The Man who would be King is a classic tale of adventure as the opportunistic, renegade and vagabond pair of Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan attempt to establish themselves as god and king of the primitive mountain kingdom of Kafiristan. Other stories included are The Phantom Rickshaw, The Finest Story in the World, With the Night Mail, As Easy as ABC, Cold Iron, The House Surgeon, Wee Willie Winkie and The Recrudescence of Imray.

This is a selection of the finest Hardy stories, including from Lifes Little Ironies The Sons Veto, A Tragedy of Two Ambitions, To Please His Wife and The Fiddler of the Reels; from Wessex Tales An Imaginative Woman, The Melancholy Hussar and The Distracted Preacher; and from A Group of Noble Dames The First Countess of Wessex. Hardys wonderfully evocative tales tell of a rural world that is lost, but whose verities still engage the reader today.

Sherlock Holmes is back on the case in this collection of sparkling short stories. Not only does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brilliant detective investigate a fascinating series of crimes and misdemeanours in The Memoirs, but we also learn about Holmes' early days as a sleuth hound and encounter the detective's brilliant brother, Mycroft, who is a member of the Diogenes Club, one of the strangest establishments in London. And, of course, in The Final Problem Holmes come face to face with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, The Napoleon of Crime. Their struggle, seemingly to the death, was to leave many readers desolate at the loss of Holmes, but was also to lead to his immortality as a literary figure. As well as his witty and illuminating Afterword to this edition, David Stuart Davies, the illustrious editor of Sherlock magazine, has provided a fascinating chronology of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair. Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be a simple tale proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. This new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a monstrous town, a place of idiocy, madness, criminality and butchery.

The Waves traces the lives and interactions of seven friends in an exploratory and sensuous narrative. The Waves was conceived and written during a highly political phase in Woolfs career, when she was speaking on issues of gender and of class. This was also the period when her love affair with Vita Sackville-West was at its most intense. The work is often described as if it were the product of a secluded, disembodied sensibility. Yet its writing is supremely engaged and engaging, providing an experience which the reader is unlikely to forget.

Forced by the death of her parents to seek her furtune in London, Fanny Hill is duped into prostitution by an old procuress. In Mrs Brown's bawdy-house the naive young woman begins her sexual initiation and soon embarks on her own path in pursuit of pleasure, until she at last finds true love.

Combining humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism, this is an unsentimental, yet affectionate portrait of rural life. Its protagonist, a man wrongly accused and exiled is given a chance to achieve true happiness through his care of an orphaned girl.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the greatest collection of detective short stories ever written. From his residence at 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes solves a series of baffling and bizarre cases using his inimitable deductive powers, recounted to us by the faithful though sometimes bemused Dr Watson.

Virgil's epic tale tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero, who abandons his city after its fall, taking with him his father Anchises and his little son Ascanius, for Aeneas is destined to found Rome and father the Roman race. On his journey Aeneas must prove his worth and attain the maturity necessary for such an illustrious task. He battles terrifying storms, encounters the fearsome Cyclops, falls in love with the beautiful Dido, Queen of Carthage, travels to the Underworld and fights a war in Italy. It is a story that has been inspirational for generations of artists, writers and musicians, including Dante, Milton, Purcell and Turner.

As the scion of one of New York's leading families, Newland Archer has been born into a life of sumptuous privilege and strict duty. Sensitive and intelligent, he respects the rigid social codes of his class, and is thankful that his forthcoming marriage to May Welland is to 'one of his own kind'. But the arrival of the Countess Olenska, a free spirit who breathes clouds of European sophistication, makes him question the path on which his upbringing has set him. As his fascination with her grows he discovers how difficult it is to escape the bounds of the society that has shaped him. Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is at once a poignant story of frustrated love and an extraordinarily vivid, delightfully satirical portrait of a vanished world.

Presented together in one volume, here are two of the greatest and most popular animal stories ever written. Even to designate them 'animal stories' seems to undervalue them since these tremendous works are so much more than mere children's tales. The Call of the Wild tells how Buck, a domestic dog, is kidnapped from California to pull sleds in the Arctic wastes. In the second story, White Fang, three-quarter wolf and one-quarter dog, endures considerable suffering in the Arctic before being taken to live in California. The two narratives are remarkable for the vividness of their descriptions and the success with which London imagines life from a non-human perspective.

A Christmas Carol was an overnight success when first published in 1843, and was followed by two further Christmas books, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, also included in this volume. But A Christmas Carols Ebenezer Scooge is one of Dickenss most unforgettable characters, a miserable skinflint without equal. Even he, however, can be redeemed by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future.