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One of the world’s most celebrated novels, now a major motion picture starring Mia Wasikowska.

This indelible portrait of a beautiful woman’s aching lust for more—more romance, more glamour, more fun—and her resulting tragic demise, is widely considered one of the finest novels ever written. Flaubert’s refusal to condemn his adulterous heroine, a woman trapped as much by circumstance as by her own boundless desires, scandalized nineteenth-century France and resulted in a trial on charges of obscenity. But it is the beauty of the novel’s prose, the great care it takes with characters major and minor, and the relentless but elegant thrust of its narrative, that puts Madame Bovary in a class by itself.

In the story of a provincial doctor and his wife’s tawdry affairs, Gustave Flaubert found the stuff of great literature. A perfect novel about imperfect people, Madame Bovary is the rare classic that exceeds expectations and feels as fresh now as it did the day it was written.

The astonishing debut of Sherlock Holmes and his partner in detection, Dr. Watson.

Shot in the shoulder and brought to death’s door by typhoid fever, Dr. John Watson is sent home from the second Afghan war with a small income and nothing to do but recover his health. By his own account, he leads a meaningless existence in London until a chance encounter with an old friend brings news of comfortable lodgings on Baker Street. In a hospital laboratory, Watson meets his potential new roommate for the first time. “How are you?” asks Mr. Sherlock Holmes. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

With that remarkable feat of observation, one of literature’s greatest partnerships is born. In their first case, Holmes and Watson set off for an abandoned flat in Lauriston Gardens. An American has been found dead, his body unmarked, a mysterious word—Rache—spelled out in blood on the wall. Scotland Yard thinks the murderer meant to write the name Rachel, but Holmes knows better. When the dead man’s private secretary turns up stabbed through the heart, the same word scrawled nearby, it is up to the world’s only consulting detective and his eager companion to find a killer whose lust for revenge has spanned two continents and dozens of years.

A gunman agrees to do a rich man’s dirty work in this classic Western from one of the genre’s early masters.

Donnegan is not proud of his past. But when words ran dry and matters could only be settled with a gun, he never hesitated to make things right. Now fate has led him to The Corner, a wide-open gold-mining town in the valley where two rivers join. An invalid by the name of Colonel Macon wants Donnegan to settle a long-standing land claim that’s been taken over by outlaws. Charmed by the colonel’s beautiful daughter, the gunman agrees. But nothing is as it seems in The Corner, where the line separating good from evil is so badly blurred it might not be there at all.

A contemporary of Zane Grey and a major influence on Louis L’Amour, Max Brand was a true master of the Western. Gunman’s Reckoning is a fine example of the moral complexity, fluid prose, and nonstop action that defines the best of his work.