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A shocking rendering of poverty, tragedy, and desperation in the American North.

This shocking depiction of the lives of impoverished Welsh miners in the American North was one of the first novels to expose the brutal realities facing the nation’s poor. Rebecca Harding Davis casts an unflinching gaze into the lives of the destitute, drunk, and desperate in a work that was controversial for its honesty, but popular for its adept storytelling.
 
The story follows Hugh Wolfe, a proud and educated yet desperately poor laborer in an iron mill, and his cousin Deborah, who breaks the law for a chance at a better life for Hugh. If they keep the ill-gotten money, the pair could transcend their hardship, and Hugh could become the talented artist he was born to be; however, keeping the money would mean sacrificing the morals they’ve so stridently adhered to all their lives.

Thomas Hardy’s classic tale of a woman brave enough to defy convention: Now a major motion picture starring Carey Mulligan.

Spirited, impulsive, and beautiful, Bathsheba Everdene arrives in Wessex to live with her aunt. She strikes up a friendship with a neighbor, Gabriel Oak, and even saves the young shepherd’s life. But when he responds by asking for her hand in marriage, she refuses. She cannot sacrifice her independence for a man she does not love.

Years later, misfortune has bankrupted Gabriel, while Bathsheba has inherited her uncle’s estate and is now a wealthy woman. She hires Gabriel as a shepherd but is interested in William Boldwood, a prosperous farmer whose reticence inspires her to playfully send him a valentine. William, like Gabriel before him, quickly falls in love with Bathsheba and proposes. But it is the dashing Sergeant Francis Troy who finally wins her heart. Despite the warnings of her first two suitors, Bathsheba accepts his proposal—a decision that brings long-buried secrets to the fore and leaves everything for which she has fought so hard hanging in the balance.

Published a century and a half ago, Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy’s first major success and introduced the themes he would continue to explore for the rest of his life. A love story wrapped in the cloak of tragedy, it is widely considered to be one of the finest novels of the nineteenth century.

The timeless tale of survival and adventure that set the standard for the English novel.

Robinson Crusoe is the only man still alive when his ship is destroyed in a terrible storm. Washing up on a deserted island, he realizes that he is stranded, with no immediate hope of rescue. Displaying remarkable ingenuity, Crusoe builds a crude home, raises crops, and keeps track of the passing days with a rudimentary calendar. Loneliness is his greatest adversary until a tribe of cannibals arrives with their intended victims. When one of the prisoners escapes, Crusoe rescues him. The shipwrecked sailor and his newfound companion, Friday—named for the day of the week on which Crusoe first meets him—band together to vanquish the cannibals and leave the Island of Despair forever.

Based on the true accounts of eighteenth-century castaways, Robinson Crusoe popularized the then-new art form known as the novel. Nearly three hundred years after it was first published, it is still the rare classic with the power to thrill and edify in equal measure.

The thrilling debut of the Four Just Men, the world’s most sophisticated vigilantes.

In a time of turmoil and intrigue, with governments around the world buffeted by the winds of radical change, four men vow to do whatever it takes to ensure that justice prevails. They kill without remorse, their victims powerful men and women guilty of the vilest of crimes: rape, embezzlement, extortion, murder. Now the British foreign secretary finds himself in the crosshairs of Manfred, Gonsalez, Poiccart, and Thery—the newest member of the four and a man with a very special skill.

Sir Philip Ramon’s Aliens Political Offences Bill threatens to expel honest revolutionaries from the safety of England and return them to their corrupt native lands, where torture and death await. The Four Just Men publicly ask Ramon to withdraw the bill. When he refuses, they put their ingenious plan into action.

Edgar Wallace self-published The Four Just Men and bankrupted himself promoting it. One century later, it stands as one of the most innovative and influential thrillers ever written.