Tells the story of Kimball O' Hara (Kim), who is the orphaned son of a soldier in the Irish regiment stationed in India during the British Raj. It describes Kim's life and adventures from street vagabond, to his adoption by his father's regiment and recruitment into espionage. 256pp. Paperback.

Tom Sawyer, a shrewd and adventurous boy, is as much at home in the respectable world of his Aunt Polly as in the self-reliant and parentless world of his friend Huck Finn. The two enjoy a series of adventures, accidentally witnessing a murder, establishing the innocence of the man wrongly accused, as well as being hunted by Injun Joe, the true murderer, eventually escaping and finding the treasure that Joe had buried. Huckleberry Finn recounts the further adventures of Huck, who runs away from a drunken and brutal father, and meets up with the escaped slave Jim. They float down the Mississippi on a raft, participating in the lives of the characters they meet, witnessing corruption, moral decay and intellectual impoverishment. 396pp Paperback

Call of the Wild (1903) describes the adventures of a dog who escapes civilisation to lead a wolf pack. White Fang (1906) is a moving account of a ferocious wolf who is tamed as he learns to love and trust his ultimate master. Jack London uses some of the most influential scientific thinkers of his day in his ripping yarns. Timelessly appealing. With an Introduction by Susan Ward. 256pp in paperback reprint.

The House of the Dead is a stark account of Dostoyevsky's own experience of penal servitude in Siberia. In graphic detail he describes the suffering of the convicts - their squalor and degradation, their terror and resignation, from the rampages of a pyschopath to the brief serenity of Christmas Day. We see a young intellectual forced to live, eat and sleep with men from a background of cruelty, coarseness and brutality. The Gambler is set in a spa town with its casino and international clientèle. Alexey Ivanovitch is a young tutor in the household of a general. He is both observer and actor in the tempest which surrounds his impoverished employer, as he envies and mocks the airs and pretensions of his supposed superiors. Everyone is waiting for the death of Granny, the general's rich aunt, but so far from dying, she turns up alive and well, and makes her way to the casino. 454 page paperback.

This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen's manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Freindship [sic], and The History of England. Paperback, 359pp.

From its first publication in 1719, 'Robinson Crusoe' has been printed in over 700 editions. It has inspired almost every conceivable kind of imitation and variation, and been the subject of plays, opera, cartoons, and computer games. The character of Crusoe has entered the consciousness of each suceeding generation as readers add their own interpretation to the adventures so thrillingly 'recorded' by Defoe. Praised by iminent figures such as Coleridge, Rousseau and Wordsworth, this perennially popular book was cited by Karl Marx in 'Das Kapital' to illustrate economic theory. However, it is readers of all ages over the last 280 years who have given 'Robinson Crusoe' its abiding position as a classic tale of adventure. 272pp. Paperback.

Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density. Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at the novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels, of destiny, death, human relationships and the irreconcilable contradictions of existence. It ends tragically, and there is much that evokes despair, yet set beside this is an abounding joy in life's many ephemeral pleasures, and a profusion of comic relief. 832pp. Paperback.

Uncle Tom's Cabin has earned the title of not only the first bestseller, but also the first protest novel to have a direct impact on political events. The story follows the life and vicissitudes of Uncle Tom, a noble, high-minded African American, and portrays the humanity of an enslaved black people and the moral evil of their enslavement. Uncle Tom remains a loveable almost saintly figure from the opening chapters when he is 'sold down the river' to pay off gambling debts until the climactic ending when the brutal Simon Legree has Uncle Tom flogged to the point of death. The inspirational quality of the writing has moved succeeding generations of readers to agree with Frederick Douglass, who called it a flash to "light a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery". 432pp. Paperback.

"I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot", Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, The Waves. Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. Six children - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis - meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore. The subsequent continuity of these six main characters, as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions, is interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature. 304pp.Paperback.

Edited and introduced by Linden Peach, Professor and Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of Wales, Cardiff. This volume brings together Virginia Woolf's last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer preceding the Second World War which successfully interweaves comedy, satire and disturbing observation. Rewriting the traditional family saga and the pageant, these unsettling novels provide extraordinary critiques of Englishness and English identity while pursuing themes such as the nature of time, memory, personal relationships and sexual desire. Their tightly constructed narratives enable the reader to experience the fragmented lives of their characters and the difficulties that they have in communicating with each other and even understanding themselves. Complete and unabridged, these novels of 1937 and 1941 have not received the same degree of critical attention as her Orlando or The Waves. Between the Acts reflects the shifting mood of the late 1930s and early 40s and the nature of Englishness and British identity given mass unemployment and the rise of Fascism and prospect of war. New Wordsworth paperback, 413pp.