"On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that...

The Last Trail celebrates the victory of the frontiermen by the wisdom of Lewis Wetzel and Jonathan Zane dealing with the outlaws and Indians in that region.

In the last of Dickens' completed novels, a bitter love triangle, a mysterious inheritance, and power of money motivates, frustrates and activates the characters to a bitter end. Our Mutual Friend is a witty indictment of a society fallen prey to the dawning age of commercialism.

In this classic satire of small-town America, beautiful young Carol Kennicott comes to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, with dreams of transforming the provincial old town into a place of beauty and culture. But she runs into a wall of bigotry, hypocrisy and complacency. The first popular bestseller to attack conventional ideas about marriage, gender roles, and small town life, Main Street established Lewis as a major American novelist.

The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies...

The greed of his family has led wealthy old Martin Chuzzlewit to become suspicious and misanthropic, leaving his grandson and namesake to make his own way in the world. And so young Martin sets out from the Wiltshire home of his supposed champion, the scheming architect Pecksniff, to seek his fortune in America. In depicting Martin's journey - an experience that teaches him to question his inherited self-interest and egotism - Dickens created many...

"If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?" - CANDIDE Candide is a French satire first published in 1759 by Voltaire, a philosopher of the Age of Enlightenment. It is the absurdly melodramatic story of a young man, Candide, living a sheltered life who clings desperately to "the best of all possible worlds," one which is abruptly interrupted by a series of painfully disillusioning events that set him off on a wide-ranging journey....

First published in 1877, and dramatised by James himself 11 years later, the novel is concerned with the contrast between American and European social codes.The central protagonist is a wealthy American who falls in love with a widow of noble birth while on a trip to Paris. He supports her brother, but the rest of the family discourage his courtship of Claire but he persists until his proposal is accepted; unfortunately this only marks the beginning...

Lambert is sent by his wealthy fiancee, Mrs Newsome, to Paris to bring home her son Chad who is needed to take charge of the family business. When Lambert arrives he discovers the young man much changed by his relations with the Countess de Vionette.

Jo's Boys (1886) is a novel by American author Louis May Alcott. Written while Alcott was living in the historic Thoreau-Alcott House in Concord, Massachusetts, Jo's Boys picks up ten years after the events of Little Men, which followed the young sons of Jo Bhaer (née March) and Professor Friedrich Bhaer at their newly established Plumfield Estate School. As with the rest of the series, Jo's Boys was inspired by the educational reforms theorized...