Emma Woodhouse imagines that she dominates those around her in the small town of Highbury, but her inept matchmaking creates problems for herself and others.

Orphaned Jane Eyre endures an unhappy childhood, hated by her aunt and cousins and then sent to comfortless Lowood School. But life there improves and Jane stays on as a teacher, though she still longs for love and friendship. At Mr Rochester's house, where she goes to work as a governess, she hopes she might have found them.

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained...

What a stunning discovery: an old, coded note that actually contains directions for reaching the Earth's very core! And once he finds it, renowned geologist Professor Liedenbrock can't resist setting out with his 16-year-old nephew to go where only one man has gone before. Jules Verne takes young readers on one of the most incredible journeys ever imagined, from Iceland's frozen tundra far down into fantastic underground prehistoric worlds and back...

Who could forget the pranks, the adventures, the sheer fun of Tom Sawyer? It's something every child should experience and every child will love. From Tom's sly trickery with the whitewashed fence, when he cleverly manipulates everyone so they happily do his work for him, to his and Becky Thatcher's calamities in the Bat Cave, the enjoyment just never ends.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court, which depicts the adventures of Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American who is accidentally returned to sixth-century England, is a powerful analysis of such issues as monarchy versus democracy and free will versus determinism, but it is also one of Twain's finest comic novels, still fresh and funny after more than 100 years.

A war novel by American author Stephen Crane (1871?1900). Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle. Overcome with shame, he longs for a wound?a "red badge of courage"?to counteract his cowardice. When his regiment once again faces the enemy, Henry acts as standard-bearer.

Fraternizing with a horse trader who doubles as an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service, helping a Tibetan lama search for a lost river, touring a mystical, magical land that is the shining jewel in the British crown are all in a day's work for Kimball O'Hara, the sly adventurous waif known as Kim.