Tess of the D’Urbervilles tells the story of Tess Durbeyfield, forced by her family’s poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles. Violated by the son, Alec, her hopes of rebuilding her life with the gentle and bookish Angel Clare founder when he learns of her past. Set among the lush pastures and bleak uplands of Hardy’s imagined Wessex, and filled with unforgettable images of tenderness and tragedy, the story examines conventional morality through Tess herself, one of the bes...

H. E. Marshall’s classic children’s chronicle of Britain Our Island Story includes all the best-loved (and most infamous!) stories from history: King Alfred and the cakes; King John and the Magna Carta; Lord Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar; Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada; and many others. This box set contains the complete and unabridged text, released previously in separate volumes. It is read with aplomb by Anna Bentinck and Daniel Philpott.

Subtitled ‘A Story of To-day’, A Laodicean occupies a unique place in the Thomas Hardy canon. Departing from pre-industrial Wessex, Hardy brings his themes of social constraint, fate, chance and miscommunication to the very modern world of the 1880s complete with falsified telegraphs, fake photographs, and perilous train tracks. The story follows the life of Paula Power, heiress of her late father’s railroad fortune and the new owner of the medieval Castle Stancy. With the castle in need o...

Thomas Hardy’s first published novel, Desperate Remedies is a thrilling blend of Gothic mystery and love-triangle romance. After the untimely death of their parents, Cytheria and Owen Graye must go out into the world and fend for themselves. Cytheria’s journey leads her to the dark and mysterious household of Miss Aldclyffe, a capricious and eccentric woman, who steers Cytheria into a love affair with her charismatic steward Aeneous Manston. All is not what it seems, and Cytheria finds her...

An emotionally beautiful wartime novel, perfect for fans of Kristin HannahA secret, a sacrifice, and a scandal...Summer 1939When war breaks out, Sylvie is marooned with her cousin Nell's family in the Chiltern hills and cannot return to her Normandy home.During the early days of rationing, blackouts, and the threat of bombers in the skies, Sylvie and Nell have to grow up quickly. Yet as the war rages around them, it's the competit...

Hardy’s third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, follows the story of Elfride Swancourt. The daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a sparse sea-swept parish in Cornwall, Elfride is caught between two suitors of very different backgrounds: Stephen Smith, a young architect restoring the old parish church, and the respectable, older man of London society, Henry Knight. The blue-eyed and high-spirited protagonist must untangle the conflicting messages of her heart and her mind.

Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour saving machinery to his Yorkshire mill, arousing a ferment of unemployment and discontent among his workers. Robert considers marriage to the wealthy and independent Shirley Keeldar to solve his financial woes, yet his heart lies with his cousin Caroline, who, bored and desperate, lives as a dependent in her uncle's home with no prospect of a career. Shirley, meanwhile, is in love with Robert's brother, an impoverished tutor - a ma...

Here is a tale straight from the fireside. We are compelled to follow the humble and mysterious figure of the linen weaver Silas Marner, on his journey from solitude and exile to the warmth and joy of family life. His path is a strange one; when he loses his hoard of hard-earned coins all seems to be lost, but in place of the golden guineas come the golden curls of a child − and from desolate misery comes triumphant joy.

***Now a major new Netflix series*** Don’t Trust This Book Don’t Trust These People Don’t Trust YourselfLouiseSince her husband walked out, Louise has made her son her world, supporting them both with her part-time job. But all that changes when she meets…DavidYoung, successful and charming – Louise cannot believe a man like him would look at her twice let alone be attracted to her. But that all comes to a grinding halt when...

At long last, the untold story of the mysterious Mrs Brontë. They were from different lands, different worlds almost. The chances of Cornish gentlewoman Maria Branwell even meeting the poor Irish curate Patrick Brontë in Regency England, let alone falling passionately in love, were remote. Yet Maria and Patrick did meet, making a life together in the heartland of the industrial revolution. An unlikely romance and novel wedding were soon followed by the birth of six children. They included ...

This book provides the reader with rich evidence of the very contemporaneity of Karl Abraham, reminding the reader of his unique clinical contributions to such diverse areas of concentration as the psychoses, depression, and the pre-oedipal.

'The Sleeping Nymph': a work of art of magnetic beauty, painted by a young partisan fighter during the last days of the Second World War. A painting carrying a shocking secret hidden in the red pigment on the canvas, made with the blood of a human heart.But whose heart?There is no body, no confession. Only that faint trace of blood. And that's what leads commissioner Teresa Battaglia - herself hiding an unspeakable truth - to the Resia Valley, in the north eastern ...