Books in Penguin English Library El75 series

Charles Dickens's last completed novel tells the story of a young man who must marry a stranger in order to win his inheritance. Wanting to learn the lady's nature, John Harmon fakes his own death and takes on a new identity. As the complexities of the deceit are revealed, Dickens gives us his most profoundly cynical, yet brilliantly funny, insight into the corruption of wealth on human nature. 40 illustrations.

No one description will fit this strange, eccentric, endlessly complex masterpiece. It is a fiction about fiction-writing in which the invented world is as much infused with wit and genius as the theme of inventing it. It is a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction, and a wry demonstration of its limitations. This Penguin Classic contains Christopher Ricks's introductory essay, itself a classic of English literary criticism, together with a new introduction on the recent critical history and influence of Tristram Shandy by Melvyn New. The text and notes are based on the acclaimed Florida Edition, making the scholarship of the Florida editors readily available for the first time.

Mass market paperback reprint edition (of a work first published in 1859), Penguin, NY. 648 pages. Includes a Notes section and knowledgeable introduction by Symons, a known critic of British detective stories. Collins was a friend of Dickens and wrote many novels, including The Moonstone and The Woman in White "probably still the greatest mystery thriller in the language." Collins died in 1889 and his many works of fiction are still read in college lit classes today.

The Penguin English Library Edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll '"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). "Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Goodbye, feet!"' 'I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole ... without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,' wrote Lewis Carroll, describing how Alice was conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. His dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig, time is abandoned at a disorderly tea-party and a chaotic game of chess makes a seven-year-old girl a Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling word play, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for lost childhood. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

The story opens dramatically with the repercussions of the murder of the Archbishop of St.Andrews by a group of "Covenanting Whigs" and spans ten years of tumult: from the defeat of John Graham of Claverhouse by the covenanters at Drumclog, and the victory of the Duke of Monmouth over the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge, to the aftermath of the batle at Killiecrankie in 1689.

"I have laid a plan for something new, quite out of the beaten track." The result, A Sentimental Journey is as far from the conventional travel book as Tristram Shandy is from other novels. This volume includes the journal Sterne wrote for Eliza Draper which is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of his comic and satiric genius.