When the chance discovery of an ancient cryptogram reveals a path to the Underworld, the adventurous Professor Otto Liedenbrock sets off to Iceland, determined to reach the centre of the earth. But nothing can prepare him and his nephew Axel for what they will find beneath the ground; measureless caverns and vast subterranean seas reveal all of the earth's known history and more, while dinosaurs do battle, giant men herd mastodons and danger and excitement...

The adventures of an orphaned young man in Victorian England who is given a great deal of money by an unknown benefactor to enable him to live as a gentleman, pursuing a good education and fulfilling great expectations.

While going through the possessions of a deceased guest who owed them money, the mistress of the inn and her son find a treasure map that leads to a pirate fortune as well as great danger.

A nineteenth-century science fiction tale of an electric submarine, its eccentric captain, and undersea world, which anticipated many of the scientific achievements of the twentieth century.

Hilton's bestselling classic about a man who stumbles on the world's last great hope for peace: Shangri-La Hugh Conway saw humanity at its worst while fighting in the trenches of the First World War. Now, more than a decade later, Conway is a British diplomat serving in Afghanistan and facing war yet again-this time, a civil conflict forces him to flee the country by plane. When his plane crashes high in the Himalaya mountains, Conway and the other...

Possession of Christ's robe has a strange influence on the pagan Roman soldier, Marcellus, who wins it in a dice game following the Crucifixion, when he embarks on a quest to uncover the truth about Jesus and his teachings.

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

Of all Jane Austen's books, Pride and Prejudice has earned a special place in the hearts of the reading public as her best-loved and most intimately known novel. From its famous opening sentence the story of the Bennet family and of the novel's two protagonists, Elizabeth and Darcy, told with a wit that its author feared might prove 'rather too light and bright, and sparkling', delights its most familiar readers as thoroughly as it does those who...

Though written in the 1850s, 'The Scarlet Letter' is a story fit for our modern times, with its exploration of female independence in a restrictive society where the concept of sin is used as a repressive instrument of control, particularly of women. A clear inspiration for Margaret Atwood's dystopian powerhouse, 'The Handmaid's Tale,' Hawthorne artfully highlights the hypocricy of Hester Prynne's humiliation, and charts her struggle to assert her...

Orphaned as a teenager, Jim Burden comes to live with his stern grandparents on their isolated farm. His pain and loneliness ease when he meets the beautiful Antonia, the high spirited daugher of neighboring immigrant farmers. Antonia's lust for life in her new country endears the young woman to Jim, but not his grandparents, who want bigger and better things for their grandson