Young Stephen Dedalus yearns to be an artist, but first must struggle against the forces of church, school, and society, which fetter his imagination and stifle his soul.

In the picaresque series of sketches in Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens wrote one of the masterpieces of comic fiction, and presented readers with some of the most colorful and beloved characters of all time. In Dickens' first novel, initially based on a series of illustrations, members of the eponymous club recount their various experiences and encounters as they travel around England. Without the dark themes that dominated so many of his novels,...

Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility is the story of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who struggle to achieve respectability, each in their own way in the face of the strict social conventions of early eighteenth-century England. The carefree childhood of the two young sisters comes to an abrupt end upon their father's death which leaves the family penniless and pushed out of the estate upon which they grew up. They move to a modest cottage...

The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed, and is based on her experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842. Told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, the only male narrator that she used, the work questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society.

Jim Harrison's vivid, tender, and deeply felt fictions have won him acclaim as an American master of the novella. His latest highly acclaimed volume of novellas, The Summer He Didn't Die, is a sparkling and exuberant collection about love, the senses, and family, no matter how untraditional. In the title novella, The Summer He Didn't Die, Brown Dog, a hapless Michigan Indian, is trying to parent his two stepchildren and take care of his family's health...

A stirring, straightforward work written near the end of her luminous career, Virginia Woolf's The Years is a portrait of the Pargiters, a staid London family presided over by Colonel Abel Pargiter. In some ways, "portrait" is not an entirely appropriate word, because Woolf's subject in this novel (and an abiding concern in all of her works) is fluidity and flux: the movement of the seasons and years, the experience of maturing and growing old,...

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"A must-read about modern Britain and womanhood . . . An impressive, fierce novel about the lives of black British families, their struggles, pains, laughter, longings and loves . . . Her style is passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humor. There is never a single moment of dullness in this book and the pace does not allow you to turn away from its momentum."

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"When Dr. Croft takes in orphan Eleanor Beady, he doesn't realize that he's gained an apprentice. Raised amidst Croft's experiments, "Nora" becomes his most trusted assistant-an unthinkable and unlawful pursuit for a woman. Nora helps Croft's groundbreaking research and his clinic gain recognition, and she finds she doesn't mind working in the background, as long as she can continue to hone her skills. But the arrival of a new surgical resident threatens...

An extraordinary novel set in China before, during and after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Madeleine Thien's new novel takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations - those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution in the mid-twentieth century; and the children of the survivors, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in one of the most important political moments...