French novelist and short story writer, Gustave Flaubert, was considered to be a master of style, obsessively devoted to finding the right word in every piece of literature he produced. As a child he expressed great imagination and took in all the stories he could from his nurse and neighbors, and in doing so, he prepared himself for a life consumed by literature and history. In addition to his "Madame Bovary", his first published novel and the one...

A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr. Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighboring squire--though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. When Tom is banished to make his own fortune and Sophia follows him to London to escape an arranged marriage, the adventure begins. A vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century...

"The author 'shipped out of Boston in 1834 on the "Pilgrim" and sailed around the Horn to California on a hide-trading expedition. The book is based on the journal he kept during the voyage. Horrified by the brutal captain's mistreatment of the sailors, and shocked by their lack of redress, Dana wrote with a burning indignation that did much to rouse the public to the mariners' plight.'" Benet's Reader's Ency of Am Lit.

During the Second Empire, Etienne Lantier experiences the miserable life of the coal miners in northern France and enters the struggle between capital and labor.

"Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers -- struggles whose comic possibilities he exploits to hilarious effect -- actually went to the heart of mid-Victorian English society, and had, in other times and other guises, led to civil war and constitutional upheaval. This awareness heightens the comedy and intensifies the drama in this magnificent novel and it transforms...

First published serially in 1868, Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone" is generally considered the first full length detective novel in the English language. The Moonstone, a large and valuable, yellow diamond, plundered from an Indian temple by Colonel Herncastle during the Siege of Seringapatam, is rumored to bring bad luck to its owner. The Colonel bequeathes the diamond to his niece Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday. At her birthday party,...

Three individuals--nurse Hana, thief Caravaggio, and Kip--are brought together in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II by a nameless and hideously burned English patient.