After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up by falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval: Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs...

"Boris Pasternak's widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhnosky, the award-winning translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and to whom the New York Review of Books declared. 'the English-speaking world is indebted.' ... First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy--the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, and Pasternak declined the...

"For two thousand years, the epic tale of Aeneas's dramatic flight from Troy, his doomed love affair with Dido, his descent into the underworld, and the bloody story behind the establishment of Rome has electrified audiences around the world. In Vergil's telling, Aeneas's heroic journey not only gave Romans and Italians a thrilling origin story, it established many of the fundamental themes of Western life and literature-the role of duty and self-sacrifice,...

This is the story of a common field laborer, Michael Henshard, who becomes a leader in a small market town and then through his own failure sinks back miserably to his humble beginnings.

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas' epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it...