Ten-year-old Sarah Crue lives life like a princess until tragedy strikes, taking away her fine clothes and privileges. Without her velvet and silk and French maids, she's no longer the envy of all the girls at Miss Minchin's London boarding school, and even has to live in the school's attic, working for the students who were once her friends. Will Sarah's spirit remain unbowed? Follow her through her trials and triumphs in this unforgettable tale beloved by children the world over.

Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American multimillionaire marries an impoverished English baronet and goes to live in England. She all but loses contact with her family in America. Years later her younger sister Bettina, beautiful, intelligent and extremely rich, goes to England to find what has happened to her sister. She finds Rosalie shabby and dispirited, cowed by her husband's ill-treatment. Bettina sets about to rectify matters.

Edgar Allen Poe's masterful poem, The Raven, is a strange and haunting story of lost love. It tells of a distraught young man who, while lamenting the loss of his lover, Lenore, is visited by a talking raven, adding a supernatural element to an already mysterious experience. The story traces the man's slow, sorrowful descent into madness. This edition of The Raven includes historical information about the author and the story.

Out of the Silent Planet is the first novel of the Cosmic Trilogy, considered to be C.S. Lewis' chief contribution to the science fiction genre.

To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

The Hours, brings the impressionistic prose of this classic to vibrant life.

A pilot stranded in the desert awakes one morning to see, standing before him, the most extraordinary little fellow. "Please," asks the stranger, "draw me a sheep." And the pilot realizes that when life's events are too difficult to understand, there is no choice but to succumb to their mysteries. He pulls out pencil and paper... And thus begins this wise and enchanting fable that, in teaching the secret of what is really important in life, has changed forever the world for its readers.

Field Notes completes Barry Lopez's trilogy that includes Desert Notes and River Notes. In these fictional stories, Lopez's characters must rediscover the wisdom and spiritual strength found in nature. Many of Lopez's vignettes are mystical and magical - a reckless desert sojourner is saved by birds; a botanist is led back to his family by wildflowers; a hunter is given a trapping lesson by wolverines.

If you don't know Melville's letters to Hawthorne, you don't know Melville. These letters are full of passion, humor, doubt, and spiritual yearning, and offer an intimate view of Melville's personality. Lyrical and effusive, they are literary works in themselves. This correspondence has been out of print for decades, and even when it was in print it appeared in scholarly volumes of Melville's complete correspondence, aimed at the academy.

Indoors are servants, meals, and furniture. There, too, is The Man of Wrath, her upright Teutonic husband, inspiring in Elizabeth a mixture of irritation, affection, and irreverence. But outside she can escape domestic routine, read favorite books, play with her three babies and garden to her heart's content. Through Elizabeth's eyes we watch the seasons, from May's "oasis of bird-cherries and greenery" to the time when "snow carpets her Pomeranian wilderness".

Set on Egdon Heath, a fictional barren moor in Wessex, Eustacia Vye longs for the excitement of city life but is cut off from the world in her grandfather's lonely cottage. Clym Yeobright who has returned to the area to become a schoolmaster seems to offer everything she dreams of: passion, excitement and the opportunity to escape. However, Clym's ambitions are quite different, and marriage only increases Eustacia's destructive restlessness, drawing others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.

As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas.

Swann’s Way is the first of seven volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It sets the scene with the narrator’s memories being famously provoked by the taste of that little cake, the madeleine, accompanied by a cup of lime-flowered tea. It is an unmatched portrait of fin-de-siècle France.

Very few people know that Mark Twain wrote a major work on Joan of Arc. Still fewer know that he considered it not only his most important, but also his best work. He spent 12 years in research and many months in France doing archival work, and then made several attempts until he felt he finally had the story he wanted to tell.

As a 2-year-old, Helen Keller was stricken with a mysterious illness which left her blind and deaf. It wasn't until she was 6, and a teacher, Miss Sullivan, entered her life, that she was able to communicate with her family. In her unforgettable autobiography, Helen shares her struggle with, and ultimate triumph over, her disability. When it was first published in 1902, her story gained the attention of some of the most famous people of her day and it was later popularized by stage play and movie.

An unprecedented historical and literary event, this tale written in the 1850s is the only known novel by a female African American slave, and quite possibly the first novel written by a black woman anywhere. A work recently uncovered by renowned scholar and professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is a stirring tale of "passing" and the adventures of a young slave as she makes her way to freedom.

Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth is a Bildungsroman by Hermann Hesse, first published in 1919; a prologue was added in 1960. Demian was first published under the pseudonym "Emil Sinclair", the name of the narrator of the story, but Hesse was later revealed to be the author.

The passionate account of a young man's growing awareness of his own identity, of his involvement in the secret and dangerous world of petty crime, and how, influenced by a precocious schoolmate, he rebels against convention and discovers not only the great joy of independence, but his own new powers for good and evil.

Adam had a fine life. He had all the food he wanted, a fine garden to live in, and miles and miles of peace and quiet. Until one day, a woman entered his life. And amongst her other garrulous qualities, she says that his beautiful garden doesn't really look like a garden at all. She thinks it looks more like a park.

Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American multimillionaire marries an impoverished English baronet and goes to live in England. She all but loses contact with her family in America. Years later her younger sister Bettina, beautiful, intelligent and extremely rich, goes to England to find what has happened to her sister. She finds Rosalie shabby and dispirited, cowed by her husband's ill-treatment. Bettina sets about to rectify matters.

This is a journey of both escape and discovery for four exquisitely different women, a month of bliss and privacy for four weary souls. Their refuge on the Italian Riviera provides the perfect backdrop for a story about the search for spiritual harmony within and without.

Machen's novella The Great God Pan is often cited as one of Lovecraft's most notable influences. In it, Dr. Raymond's ultimate goal is to devise a way to open the mind of man so that he may experience all the world has to offer. He calls this "seeing the great god Pan". After much study of the human mind, he devises an experiment that involves minor brain surgery. He performs this experiment on a young woman named Mary, but when she awakens she is terrified and mentally crippled.

Tolkien's acclaimed modern classic 'fairie' tale, read by Derek Jacobi. Smith of Wootton Major journeys to the Land of Faery thanks to the magical ingredients of the Great Cake of the Feast of Good Children.

Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? When she strikes up an intimate friendship with an urbane young Italian, her flat refusal to observe the codes of respectable behaviour leave her perilously exposed.

In the remote wildness of Egdon Heath, the crossed love affairs and marriages of a small group of people are played out against the background of nature’s beauty and indifference to mankind. Through a series of vivid incidents and encounters, The Return of the Native moves in a relentless drive towards tragedy, as the plans and dreams of the lovers miscarry, defeated by chance, or destiny or self-deception. In their unhappy stories, Hardy gives us a powerful dramatization of his bleak philosophy, his belief in man’s helplessness before the malevolence of the universe.

Set on Egdon Heath, a fictional barren moor in Wessex, Eustacia Vye longs for the excitement of city life but is cut off from the world in her grandfather's lonely cottage. Clym Yeobright who has returned to the area to become a schoolmaster seems to offer everything she dreams of: passion, excitement and the opportunity to escape. However, Clym's ambitions are quite different, and marriage only increases Eustacia's destructive restlessness, drawing others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.

This classic novel by the brilliant G. K. Chesterton tells the rollicking tale of Innocent Smith, a man who may be crazy - or possibly the most sane man of all. Arriving at a dreary London boarding house accompanied by a windstorm, Smith is an exuberant, eccentric, and sweet-natured man. Smith has a positive effect on the house - he creates his own court, brings a few couples together, and falls in love with a paid companion next door. All seems to be well with the world.

Intra Muros ('Between the Walls'), or My Dream of Heaven, was written in 1898. It was a vision given to the author during a severe illness. On reflection, she came to understand the short book as a series of basic truths about heaven, offering readers both confidence that God had prepared a place for them and that awaiting them there was a wonderful reunion with loved ones who had gone before.

They look alike, but they live in very different worlds. Tom Canty, impoverished and abused by his father, is fascinated with royalty. Edward Tudor, heir to the throne of England, is kind and generous but wants to run free and play in the river - just once. How insubstantial their differences truly are becomes clear when a chance encounter leads to an exchange of clothing - and roles. The pauper finds himself caught up in the pomp and folly of the royal court, and the prince wanders horror-stricken through the lower strata of English society.

Like Anne, Emily Starr is a quick-witted and imaginative orphan who is sent to live with her two maiden aunts at New Moon Farm after her father dies. Though initially disheartened by her strict and conventional Aunt Elizabeth, Emily slowly grows to love her new family and New Moon Farm. There she makes friends with Ilse Burnley, a tomboy with a blazing temper; quiet, artistic Teddy Kent; and Perry Miller, the hired boy, who Aunt Elizabeth looks down upon because he was born in the impoverished “Stovepipe Town”.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was the greatest writer ever to come from Brazil and one of the masters of nineteenth-century fiction. Susan Sontag calls him "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America", surpassing even Borges. Harold Bloom says that Machado is "the supreme black literary artist to date". And Allen Ginsburg calls him "another Kafka". And The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is his masterpiece, a dazzling, tragic, and profound novel that belongs next to the greatest works of his contemporaries Melville and Dostoevsky.