Spring 1905, England.When Helen Schlegel goes to stay at Howards End - the country home of the Wilcox family, her own life, along with that of her sister Margaret, is changed forever. This is the tale of three families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes, the gentle, idealistic Schlegels and the lower-middle class Basts.Frequently cited as E. M. Forster's finest work, Howards End brilliantly explores class warfare, conflict...

A wonderfully perceptive BBC Radio 4 comedy of manners and international relations written by David Nobbs (writer of 'The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin' and 'A Bit of a Do'). Originally broadcast as the ‘Afternoon Play’ on 24 September 2010. It is a quiet Saturday morning in the Hinchcliffe home. Tony and Sal, tired after a week of work, have time on their hands. But not for each other. Middle-aged and middle class, they haven't had kids and they still feel that emotional vacuum. The do...

Penguin Audio presents E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, adapted for listening and now available as a digital audiobook as part of the Penguin English Library series. This abridged version is read by Stephen Fry.'I had got an idea that everyone here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for objects they didn't care for, to please people they didn't love; that they never learned to be sincere - and, what's as bad, never learned how to e...

Published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room is Virginia Woolf’s own modernist manifesto. Ostensibly a study of a young man’s life on the eve of the Great War, it is really a bomb thrown into the world of the conventional novel, as she attempts to capture the richness and randomness of life’s encounters. Jacob Flanders is a mere point of contact between a crowd of people, appearing and disappearing in a tableau in which all is flux, without certainty and wit...

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny, and bitterness.Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence, and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.

As relevant now as when it was first published, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South skillfully weaves a compelling love story into a clash between the pursuit of profit and humanitarian ideals. When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the North of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the po...

What Galsworthy did for Edwardian England, Wharton did for turn-of-the-century New York, and she did it to perfection in The House of Mirth. Hackles bristle discreetly, lips curl ever-so politely, and every breach of good taste is carefully recorded, as social aspirant Lily Bart launches a desperate bid for a place on the city's elite social register.

In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë created a strong, modern heroine who challenged the prevailing morals and politics of the Victorian era. When Helen Graham shut her bedroom door on her abusive, drunken husband, it was a door-slam heard around the world. Escaping to Wildfell Hall after a loveless marriage, Helen, the mysterious tenant, lives in quiet seclusion, but her reclusive nature quickly becomes the subject of local gossip. Gilbert Markham, a young farmer, becomes intrigued...

Three men and a dog in a boat on one of the prettiest waterways in the world-the Thames-in summer. Idyllic, wouldn't you say? Perhaps, if George hadn't insisted on camping, and if someone had remembered the can-opener, and if . well, maybe not idyllic, but certainly hilarious, as you'll discover when you take the trip yourself with three men and their dog.

Elegant, enigmatic Jay Gatsby yearns for his old love, the beautiful Daisy. But she is married to the insensitive if hugely successful Tom Buchanan, who won’t let her go despite having a mistress himself. In their wealthy haven, these beguiling lives are brought together by the innocent and entranced narrator, Nick until their decadent deceits spill into violence and tragedy. Part morality tale, part fairy tale, The Great Gatsby is the consummate novel of the Jazz Age. Its tenderness and p...

Hard Times Audiobook is the most “Victorian” novel among the others by great Charles Dickens. It is the novel where under an external sentimentality there is rough furiousness of the realist writer, to whom imperfection of a human nature and darkness of a human soul are not the news, but still provoke rejection. Friendship and betrayal, love and hate, opposition of the children of the fortune and forgotten men are just some plot lines of the novel. Hard Times is a truly all embracing epoch...

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of the evergreen classic novel by Louisa May Alcott.With their father away fighting in the American Civil War, the four March girls are facing a lean Christmas with their mother. But the sisters’ close bond and determination to make the best of things enables them to find happiness despite their poverty.As the years go by we follow their fortunes as they journey into womanhood. Meg the beauty, Jo the tomboy, shy Beth and precocious Amy ...