Hester Prynne is the adulteress, forced by the Puritan community to wear a scarlet letter A on the breast of her gown. Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister and the secret father of her child, Pearl, struggles with the agony of conscience and his own weakness. Roger Chillingworth, Hester's husband, revenges himself on Dimmesdale by calculating assaults on the frail mental state of the conscience-stricken cleric. The result is an American tragedy of stark...

Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in wartorn Kabul, and the losses incurred over the course of thirty years test the limits of their strength and courage.

Arthur's seduction of an innocent, young country girl results in remorse, suffering, and regret. According to The Oxford Companion to English Literature, "the plot is founded on a story told to George Eliot by her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris of the novel, of a confession of child-murder, made to her by a girl in prison." The story's plot follows four characters' rural lives in the fictional community...

Connor Evans, an airline pilot, tries to decide whether or not to accept into his family his young son from a previous affair with a stewardess.

Working-class Jude Fawley longs to be a scholar. But after scheming local girl Arabella Donn traps him in marriage, Jude finds his university dreams drifting away. When his wife abandons him, a window of opportunity opens, and Jude moves to Christminster to work as a stonemason-his eye still on his studies. Then he falls in love with the modern-minded Sue Bridehead, and his descent into scandal, tragedy, and ruin truly begins. Shunned by society and...

A first installment in a Calder series spin-off is set in the late 1800s and follows the experiences of a vengeful cowboy and an aspiring doctor whose respective ambitions are complicated by past demons and an illegitimate child. 1891. Ambition drove Joe Dollarhide. He was determined to have a spread every bit as vast and impressive as that of his employer -- and revenge against Benteen Calder, the cattle boss he used to worship, the man who'd left...

The Sound and the Fury, first published in 1929, is perhaps William Faulkner’s greatest book. It was immediately praised for its innovative narrative technique, and comparisons were made with Joyce and Dostoyevsky, but it did not receive popular acclaim until the late forties, shortly before Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner’s...

"E.M. Forster's most admired novel--the one that gave us his famous injunction, 'Only connect'--revolves around the troubled legacy of an English country house named Howards End. The old house holds significance of differing kinds for the characters whose lives are connected by it: the sweetly frail Ruth Wilcox, who longs to leave Howards End to someone who will love it as she does; her snobbish and materialistic husband and sons, who ignore her dying...

After Rachel's mother dies, she learns that her father is still alive and is an earl with a legitimte family. With the help of a man who promises access to her father, she sets herself up in London under a new identity and is determined to enveil her father's betrayal and bring his and her half sister's world crashing down.

When a mysterious stranger finds his way into her bedchamber and offers his help in landing a husband, Lady Felicity Faircloth agrees to his suspicious terms--on one condition. She's seen enough of the world to believe in passion, and won't accept a marriage without it. The bastard son of a duke and king of London's dark streets, Devil has spent a lifetime wielding power and seizing opportunity, and the spinster wallflower is everything he needs to...