At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant...

"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" is the coming-of-age story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet fromative years in the turn-of-the-century Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn. This poignant and moving classic of American literature is filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and incident.

Oliver Goldsmith's 18th century novel "The Vicar of Wakefield" was so popular in Victorian times that it is mentioned in many classics of that era including George Eliot's "Middlemarch," Jane Austen's "Emma," Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", amongst others. It is the story of Dr. Charles Primrose, the titular Vicar, his wife Deborah and their six children who live an idyllic life in a country parish. The Vicar...

Times are tough around the little brown house! The widowed Mrs. Pepper has to sew all day long just to earn enough to pay the rent and to feed the five growing Peppers. But she faces poverty and trouble with a stout heart, a smiling face, and the help of her jolly brood: blue-eyed Ben, the eldest and the man of the house at the age of 11; pretty Polly, so eager to cook for the family and make everyone happy and comfortable; and the three littlest...

"First published in 1932, this classic satirical novel tells the story of sensible Flora Poste, who is orphaned at age 19. Leaving the city to go live with relatives in deepest Sussex at the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the gloomy and eccentric Starkadder family, headed by reclusive Aunt Ada Doom. Flora's penchant for practicality and organization soon shakes things up. -- Description by Dawn Towery."--from NoveList.

West's semi-autobiographical novel introduces the multi-talented Aubrey family as they strive to find their place in the world. Papa Aubrey's wife and twin daughters, Mary and Rose, are piano prodigies, his young son Richard Quin is a lively boy, and his eldest daughter Cordelia is a beautiful and driven young woman with musical aspirations. But the talented and eccentric Aubrey family rarely enjoys a moment of harmony, as its members struggle to...

"Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous love stories in the English language. It is also one of the most potent revenge narratives. The intense and unbreakable bond between the fiery Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff has startled and fascinated readers since its first publication in 1847. Of uncertain parentage and ethnicity, Heathcliff comes to Wuthering Heights as a child when Catherine's father finds him wandering alone through...

In late seventeenth-century England, young John Ridd returns home to Exmoor and forms a forbidden but enduring friendship with Lorna Doone, the granddaughter of the head of the outlaw Doone clan responsible for the death of John's father.

John Ridd, an unsophisticated farmer, falls in love with the beautiful and aristocratic Lorna Doone, kidnapped as a child by the outlaw Doones on Exmoor. Ridd's rivalry with the villainous Carver Doone reaches a dramatic climax that will determine Lorna's future happiness. First published in 1869, Lorna Doone was praised by R. L. Stevenson and Thomas Hardy and has remained constantly in print. The novel has many aspects: it is a romance; a historical...

In 1962 and 1963, Thornton Wilder spent twenty months in hibernation, away from family and friends, in the Rio Grande border town of Douglas, Arizona. While there, he launched "The Eighth Day," a tale set in a mining town in southern Illinois about two families blasted apart by the apparent murder of one father by the other. The miraculous escape of the accused killer, John Ashley, on the eve of his execution and his flight to freedom triggers a powerful...