Story of Egdon Heath and Eustacia Vye in late nineteenth century Wessex, England. Guy Fawkes night, Diggory Venn, a reddleman dyed red from his trade, transports a young woman, Thomasin Yeobright, to her aunt's house on Egdon Heath. Despite Venn's love for the sweet-natured Thomasin, he agrees to secure the man of her choice, the fickle innkeeper Damon Wildeve, who delayed his marriage to Thomasin earlier that day. Wildeve is still enchanted by the...

"Three centuries after Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, this gripping tale of a castaway who spends thirty years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being ultimately rescued, remains a classic of the adventure genre and is widely considered the first great English novel. But the book also has much to teach us, in retrospect, about entrenched attitudes of colonizers toward the colonized...

When ten-year-old Rebecca goes to live with her spinster aunts, her aunts find her to be more of a handful than they bargained for. But even more surprising than the transition of Rebecca into a well-mannered young lady are the effects that Rebecca has on her aunts' humdrum lives.

Retellings of twenty of Shakespeare's best known plays, using the playwright's own words when possible.

1870. Professor Aronnax agrees to join the crew of a ship whose mission is to investigate a series of attacks by a mysterious sea monster. Finally hunting their quarry down, the men discover that it is a large electrically powered submarine, the Nautilus. Aronnax and hot-tempered harpoonist Ned Land are imprisoned on this remarkable vessel, captained by the renegade scientist and misanthropic recluse, Nemo. Among deep-sea volcanoes, sunken ships,...

Drawing on Charles Dickens's own, often difficult childhood, to create a compelling story of personal success, David Copperfield is edited with an introduction and notes by Jeremy Tambling in Penguin Classics. David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are...

"Strange things are going on at the Paris Opera House: a mysterious phantom--a skeleton in dinner dress--is wreaking havoc amongst the singers and the backstage staff. When new managers take over, and dismiss the rumours of the Opera Ghost, the terror really begins. Who is the mysterious figure stalking the stage at night? How can he be everywhere at once, and enter and leave locked rooms at will? And what is his connection to the beautiful and talented...