Books published by publisher Wordsworth Editions

Selected, Edited and Introduced by David Stuart Davies. The Best of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twenty of the very best tales from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fifty-six short stories featuring the arch sleuth. Basing his selection around the author's own twelve personal favourites, David Stuart Davies has added a further eight sparkling stories to Conan Doyle's 'Baker Street Dozen', creating a unique volume which distils the pure essence of the world's most famous detective. Within these pages the reader will encounter the greatest collection of villains and the weirdest and most puzzling mysteries ever seen in print. And there at the centre, in a London swathed in eddies of fog and illuminated by gaslight, is to be found the remarkable character of Sherlock Holmes and his staunch companion, Doctor John H. Watson. Few will be able to resist this invitation to step aboard the waiting hansom cab and rattle off along cobbled streets into unimagined dangers and intrigues.

Melville's short stories are masterpieces. The best are to be appreciated on more than one level and those presented here are rich with symbolism and spiritual depth. Set in 1797, Billy Budd, Foretopman exploits the tension of this period during the war between England and France to create a tale of satanic treachery, tragedy and great pathos that explores human relationships and the inherently ambiguous nature of man-made justice. Tales such as Bartleby, Benito Cereno, The Lightning Rod Man, The Tartarus of Maids or I and My Chimney, show the timeless poetic power of Melville's writing as he consciously uses the disguise of allegory in various ways and to various ends.

A Christmas Carol is the most famous, heart-warming and chilling festive story of them all. In these pages we meet Ebenezer Scrooge, whose name is synonymous with greed and parsimony: 'Every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart'. This attitude is soon challenged when the ghost of his old partner, Jacob Marley, returns from the grave to haunt him on Christmas Eve. Scrooge is then visited in turn by three spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future, each one revealing the error of his ways and gradually melting the frozen heart of this old miser, leading him towards his redemption. On the journey we take with Scrooge we encounter a rich array of Dickensian characters including the poor Cratchit family with the ailing Tiny Tim and the generous and jolly Fezziwig.When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843 he fashioned an enduring gift to the world, capturing the essence of the love, kindness and generosity of the Christmas season. It is a timeless classic and the story's uplifting magic remains as potent today as when it was first published.About our Collector's Editions: These new compact hardbacks will be cloth-bound, with matching coloured end papers, embossed gold and coloured blocking to enhance their beautiful, bespoke cover illustrations. The trim page size is 178 x 129mm.

This is the third of Trollope's Pallister novels and one of his most compelling works. The plot centres on the fabulous necklace owned by the Eustace family, which the beautiful but ruthless opportunist Lizzie, claims as her own after she marries Sir Florian Eustace for his money and becomes his widow after only a few months. Lizzie plots to keep the necklace, while at the same time she spreads her net over several prospective new suitors, in order to entrap another husband to keep her in the manner to which she has so rapidly become accustomed.This novel is both a gripping detective story and a fascinating study of moral duplicity.

When the Cuthberts send to an orphanage for a boy to help them at Green Gables, their farm in Canada, they are astonished when a talkative little girl steps off the train. Anne, red-headed, pugnacious and incurably romantic, causes chaos at Green Gables and in the village, but her wit and good nature delight the fictional community of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and ensure that Anne of Green Gables continues to be a firm favourite with readers worldwide.Anne of Avonlea continues Anne's story. Now half-past sixteen but as strong-headed and romantic as ever, Anne becomes a teacher at her old school and dreams of its improvement. But her responsible position and mature ambitions do not prevent her entanglement in the scrapes that still seem to beset her in spite of her best intentions.Thoroughly charming and amusing, with a supporting cast of colourful and endearing characters, both books will enchant and entertain readers, guaranteeing that Anne's adventures capture their affections as well as their imaginations.

Max Carrados is one of the most unusual detectives in all fiction. He is blind – and yet he has developed his other faculties to such an amazing degree that they more than compensate for his lack of sight.‘Lose one sense and the others, touch, taste, smell, hearing improve…with a little dedicated training.’ Carrados can read a newspaper headline with the touch of his fingers, detect a man wearing a false moustache because ‘he carries a five yard aura of spirit gum’ and shoot a villain by aiming at the sound of his beating heart.Assisted by his sharp-eyed manservant, Parker, Carrados is the mystery-solver par excellence. Here is a collection of the best of Max Carrados, a set of stories featuring a series of baffling puzzles to challenge the greatest of detectives. They are written by Ernest Bramah with great wit, style and panache. This is vintage crime fiction at its best.

With an Introduction and Notes by Hugh Epstein, Secretary of the Joseph Conrad Society of Great Britain 'Then the vision of an enormous town prented itself, of a monstrous town...a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.' Conrad's 'monstrous town' is London, and his story of espionage and counter-espionage, anarchists and embassies, is a detective story that becomes the story of Winnie Verloc's tenacity in maintaining her devotion to her peculiar and simple-minded brother, Stevie, as they pursue their very ordinary lives above a rather dubious shop in the back streets of Soho.

Its eyes were on long horns like a snail's eyes... it had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick, soft fur... and it had hands and feet like a monkey's. 'It' was the Psammead, the grumpy sand-fairy that could, if in the mood, grant a wish a day. When the five children befriend him they find that each wish granted often has a sting in its tail. Golden guineas are too difficult to spend, wings let them down in a most inconvenient way, and when they wish for Red Indians, the children forget that they can sometimes be a little warlike.

With an Introduction by Roger Clark, University of Kent at Canterbury Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist's meticulous account of provincial matters. For the writer, subject matter was subordinate to his anguished quest for aesthetic perfection. For his twentieth-century successors the formal experiments that underpin Madame Bovary look forward to the innovations of contemporary fiction. Flaubert s protagonist in particular has never ceased to fascinate. Romantic heroine or middle-class neurotic, flawed wife and mother or passionate protester against the conventions of bourgeois society, simultaneously the subject of Flaubert s admiration and the butt of his irony - Emma Bovary remains one of the most enigmatic of fictional creations. Flaubert's meticulous approach to the craft of fiction, his portrayal of contemporary reality, his representation of an unforgettable cast of characters make Madame Bovary one of the major landmarks of modern fiction.

Translated by Thomas Common. With an Introduction by Nicholas Davey.This astonishing series of aphorisms, put into the mouth of the Persian sage Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, contains the kernel of Nietzsche’s thought. ‘God is dead’, he tells us. Christianity is decadent, leading mankind into a slave morality concerned not with this life, but with the next. Nietzsche emphasises the Übermensch, or Superman, whose will to power makes him the creator of a new heroic mentality. The intensely felt ideas are expressed in prose-poetry of indefinable beauty.Though misused by the German National Socialist party as a spurious justification of their creed, the book also had a profound influence on early twentieth-century writers such as Shaw, Mann, Gide, Lawrence and Sartre.

The beautiful Scheherazade's royal husband threatens to kill her, so each night she diverts him by weaving wonderful tales of fantastic adventure, leaving each story unfinished so that he spares her life to hear the ending the next night. This is the background to the Arabian Nights. In this selection made by that master of folklore and fairy-tale Andrew Lang, the reader meets Aladdin with his wonderful lamp, the Enchanted Horse, the Princess Badoura, Sinbad the Sailor, and the great Caliph of Bagdad, Haroun-al-Raschid.