From an award-winning author, Fingersmith is an extraordinary, ingenious tale of fraud, insanity and secrets

From the author of acclaimed national bestseller The Four Winds comes a haunting, heartbreakingly beautiful novel that illuminates the intricate mother–daughter bond and explores the enduring links between past and present.

The Black Cat, short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in The Saturday Evening Post in August 1843 and included in the collection Tales by Edgar Allen Poe (1845). The story’s narrator is an animal lover who, as he descends into alcoholism and perverse violence, begins mistreating his wife and his black cat Pluto.

When Pluto attacks him in self-defense one night, he seizes the cat in a fury, cuts out one of its eyes, and hangs it. That night a fire destroys his house, leaving him in ...

They say life is all about choices; that our choices, whether easy or difficult, shape the journey ahead. But what if for every path we choose, another possibility unfolds in a parallel universe?

Roya is a work of historical fiction, telling the story of a young Iranian woman living in a parallel universe, one in which the Iranian Revolution of 1979 did not happen and the Islamic Republic was not established. In this alternate reality, the ayatollahs never rose to power and Iran follows a dif...

Anna Karenina is a novel, first published in book form in 1878, by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy called it his first true novel. It was initially released in serial installments from 1875 to 1877, all but the last part appearing in the periodical The Russian Messenger. By the time he was finishing up the last installments, Tolstoy was in an anguished state of mind having come to hate it but finished it unwillingly.

The novel deals with themes of betrayal, faith, family, marriage, Im...

'Matilda of Argyll is a bold and dramatic adventure, a magnificent historical novel, an abundance of riches, ripped from the pages of Medieval History, seen through the eyes and told from the heart of those who lived through this epic period. Historian Sarah Chloe Burns reaches back in time to recap the blending of French and English royalty following William the Conqueror’s victory at the Battle of Hastings (1036 A.D.). Chapter one begins with a conversation which might have occurred bet...

Willa Cather’s best-loved novel, and the final book in the Great Plains trilogy, is a beautiful portrayal of friendship, longing and growing up in frontier Nebraska. When young orphan Jim Burden is sent to live with his grandparents in Nebraska, he finds himself growing up alongside Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. Their childhoods are full of shared adventures but as they grow their paths diverge, spurred on by the dire poverty of the Shimerda family.

Yet Jim will never forget Ántoni...

Great Expectations is Charles Dickens's thirteenth novel. It is his second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. Great Expectations is abildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel, and it is a classic work of Victorian literature. It depicts the growth and personal development of an orphan named Pip. The novel was first published in serial form in Dickens' weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Ha...

Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners commonly known as simply Madame Bovary, is the début novel of French writer Gustave Flaubert, originally published in 1856 and 1857. The eponymous character, Emma Bovary, lives beyond her means in order to escape the ennui of provincial life.

When the novel was first serialised in Revue de Paris between 1 October and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity. The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious. Following ...