The Diary of a Chambermaid was written as a satire of Parisian society in the wake of the Drey-fus Affair. Octave Mirbeau brings a journalist’s analytical eye to Celestine’s adventures as she loses her innocence and becomes as corrupt and depraved as the men who exploited her. Since its publication in 1900 it has never ceased to shock and fascinate its readers and has been made into a film by Jean Renoir in 1946 and Luis Bunuel in 1964.

The Last of the Legions and other Tales of long ago is a volume collecting 13 short stories written by Artur Conan Doyle, first published in 1922 by John Murray. The stories covers various centuries from Antiquity to first millenary. Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (1859-1930) was a Scottish author. He is most no-ted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Cha...

Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean old man with no friends or family to love him - he’s just so miserable and bitter! One freezing cold Christmas Eve, Marley’s Ghost pays Scrooge a visit and an eerie night-time journey begins. The Christmas spirits are here to show Scrooge the error if his nasty ways. By visiting his past, present and future, will Scrooge learn to love Christmas and the others around him?

Years and years have passed. Everything that I loved is now dead. Everything that I knew has taken on a new appearance. The church has been rebuilt. It now has an embellished doorway, arched windows, fancy gutter-spouts representing flaming mouths of demons; its new brick belf-ry laughs gaily into the blue; in place of the old house there now rises an elaborate Swiss cottage built by the new proprietor who, in the enclosure, has increased the number of colored glass balls, small cascades and...

Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress, Charles Dickens’s second novel, was published as a serial from 1837 to 1839, and as a three-volume book in 1838. Born in a workhouse, the orphan Oliver Twist is sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets the “Artful Dodger”, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin.

Oliver Twist unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes th...

“Th is is an account of the wanderings of a spiritualist, geographical and speculative. Should the reader have no interest in psychic things if indeed any human being can be so foolish as not to be interested in his own nature and fate, then this is the place to put the book down. It were better also to end the matter now if you have no patience with a go-as-you-please style of narrative, which founds itself upon the conviction that thought may be as interesting as action, and which is boun...

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 his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend James Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble, yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora Spenlow; and the magnificent...