Upon arriving home in Normandy, Frederick catches his first glimpse of Marie Arnoux, a mysterious and beautiful woman who leaves a lasting impression on him. Eventually they make each other's acquaintance and Marie becomes a symbol of unattainable perfection for Frederick, whose unrequited infatuation leaves him bouncing from one passion to another, falling in and out of love, money and society.

A predecessor to such monumental works such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Notes From Underground represents a turning point in Dostoyevsky's writing towards the more political side.

In this work, we follow the unnamed narrator of the story, who, disillusioned by the oppression and corruption of the society in which he lives, withdraws from that society into the underground.

In Madame Bovary, one of the great novels of 19th-century France, Flaubert draws a deeply felt and sympathetic portrait of a woman who, having married a country doctor and found herself unhappy with a rural, genteel existence, longs for love and excitement. However, her aspirations and her desires to escape only bring her further disappointment and eventually lead to unexpected, painful consequences. Flaubert’s critical portrait of bourgeois provincial life remains as powerful as ever

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment, and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857.

In 1913, the Viennese aristocracy is gathering to celebrate the 17th jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef, even as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is collapsing and the rest of Vienna is showing signs of rebellion. At the centre of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: a veteran, a seducer and a scientist, yet also a man 'without qualities' and therefore a brilliant and detached observer of his changing world.

The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It caused the fall of six French governments, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict, and as many European settlers were driven into exile. From the perspective of half a century, it looks less like the last colonial war than the first postmodern one.

Set in the turbulent years following the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, George Eliot's fourth novel, Romola, moves the stage from the English countryside of the 19th century to an Italy four centuries before her time. It tells the tale of a young Florentine woman, Romola de' Bardi, and her coming of age through her troubled marriage to the suave and self-absorbed Greek Tito. Slowly Tito's true character begins to unfurl, and his lies and treachery push Romola toward a more spiritual path, where she transcends into a majestic, Madonna-like role.

With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defense of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell’s essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move, and entertain.

Growth of the Soil, Hamsun's Nobel Prize winning novel, is a classic of Scandinavian literature. The farmer Isak scarcely acknowledges the values of modern living. Illiterate but capable of carrying out the business of running a farm, he has physical strength and works with his hands. Although initially amazed by Isak's prowess - his wife Inger, who came into contact with modern society when imprisoned for killing her infant due to its birth defect, return to the home much less impressed by the country life.

First published in 1900, when Thomas Mann was 25, Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family - a work so true to life that it scandalized the author’s former neighbours in his native Lübeck.

The central core of the stories concerns a Persian king and his new bride. The king has a brother who is a vizier in faraway Samarcand, and he invites him to come to the palace for a visit. Just before his departure, the vizier is shocked to discover his wife's infidelity. Enraged, he kills her. Full of pain and grief, the vizier continues on to the court of his brother, the king. But, once arrived at his brother's palace, the vizier soon discovers the king's wife is also involved in an even more flagrant infidelity.

From his 1935 debut with "The Universal History of Iniquity", through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language.

When The Centurions was first published in 1960, readers were riveted by the thrilling account of soldiers fighting for survival in hostile environments. They were equally transfixed by the chilling moral question the novel posed: how to fight when the "age of heroics is over". As relevant today as it was half a century ago, The Centurions is a gripping military adventure, an extended symposium on waging war in a new global order, and an essential investigation of the ethics of counterinsurgency.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) was the first major text by Adam Smith who, seven years later, was to publish what was to become one of the major economic classics, The Wealth of Nations (1776). However, Smith regarded The Theory of Moral Sentiments as his most important work because in it he identified the profound human instinct to act not necessarily in self-interest but through, as he phrased it, a ‘mutual sympathy of sentiments’.

Taita is a humble slave, an expert in art, poetry, medicine and engineering as well as keeping important secrets. He is the most treasured possession of Lord Intef. Yet when Intef's beautiful daughter, Lostris, is married to the Pharaoh, Taita is commanded to follow her and swiftly finds himself deeper than he ever could have imagined in a world of deception and treachery. But outside the palace, the great kingdom of Egypt is divided and in even greater danger. Enemies threaten on all sides, and only Taita holds the power to save them all....