FITZGERALD, F.: Great Gatsby (The) (Abridged)

Tristram Shandy is an ironic masterpiece, a work of extraordinary originality, wit and learning. It is a work of considerable philosophical complexity but at the same time, it is just a piece of film-flam: it has been called the longest shaggy dog story.

A Wild Sheep Chase is one of Murakami's most fantastical novels. An advertising executive, infatuated with a girl who possesses the most perfect ears (an erotic charge for him) uses a picture of a sheep with a star on it's back. This catapults him into a weird adventure to find the mythical sheep up in the wilds of Hokkaido, Japan's northern island. There are strange encounters, a hotel with an extra disappearing floor, and other oddities. A Wild Sheep Chase is an early Murakami work, but it's remarkable and individual voice makes it one of the most thrilling of his books.

Gogol' great Russian classic is the Pickwick Papers of Russian Literature. It takes a sharp but humorous look at life in all it's strata, but especially the devious complexities in the country with it's landowners and serfs. We are introduced to Chichikov.

THACKERAY, W.M.: Vanity Fair (Abridged)

To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf's most accomplished novel, and her most autobiographical. It tells of one summer spent by the Ramsay family and their friends in their holiday home in Scotland. Offshore stands the lighthouse, remote, inaccessible, an eternal presence in a changing world. A projected visit to the lighthouse forms the heart of this extraordinary novel which, through the minds of the various characters, explores the nature of time, memory, transience and eternity. The style has the clarity of a diamond which shimmers in the mind, making to the Lighthouse one o.

Chopin, K.: Awakening (The) (Abridged)

ELIOT, G.: Silas Marner (Abridged)

SUETONIUS: Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Abridged)

AUSTEN, J.: Northanger Abbey (Abridged)

SHAKESPEARE'S LOVERS

WILDE, O.: Lady Windermere' s Fan (Unabridged)

In the grotesque bell-ringer Quasimodo, Victor Hugo created one of the most vivid characters in classic fiction. Quasimodo�s doomed love for the beautiful gypsy girl Esmerelda is an example of the traditional love theme of beauty and the beast. Yet, set against the massive background of Notre Dame de Paris and interwoven with the sacred and secular life of medieval France, it takes on a larger perspective. The characters come to life: the poet Gringoire, the tormented priest Claude Frollo, the upright, fun-loving captain Phoebus and above all Quasimodo and Esmerelda themselves. It is a tale peppered with humor but fuelled by the anguish which unfolds beneath the bells of the great cathedral of Paris.

Here are sixteen tales from one of the great works of the Middle Ages. Ten young people have fled for a while, the terrible effects of the Black Death in Florence and, in an idyllic setting, tell a series of brilliant stories, by turns humorous, bawdy, tragic and provocative. This celebration of physical and sexual vitality is Boccaccio's answer to the sublime other-worldliness of Dante's Divine Comedy.

D. H. Lawrence is valued by many as a significant representative of modernism in English literature, and a visionary thinker. Considered the most widely read novel of the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence’s fiery fifth book continues the loves and lives of The Rainbow’s Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gerald Crich, son of a wealthy colliery owner, captures the heart of Gudrun, while Ursula becomes enamoured with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector- their complex relationship likely modeled on that between Lawrence, his wife Frieda, and John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. Things are far from harmonious, and the discord and conflict leads to many heated and elaborate philosophical discussions about modern society and the nature of love, while tragedy looms large. Lawrence held this to be his best book, and F.R. Leavis regarded it to be his most profound and rewarding.