Social and romantic misunderstandings combine against the Bennet sisters in their pursuit of suitable romantic attachments.

The orphan, Pip, and the convict, Magwitch, the beautiful Estella, and her guardian, the embittered and vengeful Miss Havisham, the ambitious lawyer, Mr. Jaggers -- all have a part to play in the mystery. Dickens supplied two endings to his great novel, both are recorded leaving the listener to judge.

Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune-in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest. In this affecting narrative, Wallace Stegner portrays over three decades in the life of the Mason family as they struggle...

"The Transit of Venus tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in postwar England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves"--

"Written by one of the greatest Iranian writers of the twentieth century, Blind Owl tells a three-part story of a pen-case painter, an isolated narrator with a fragile relationship with time and reality. In part one, he relates his own story in the first person, in a string of hazy, dreamlike recollections fueled by opium and alcohol. He spends time painting the covers of pen cases only to paint the exact same scene: an old man wearing a cape and...

Nietzsche's sustained and often vitriolic attack on the morality and beliefs of his time, in particular those of Hegel, Kant and Schopenhauer. Twilight of the idols is a "grand declaration of war" on reason, psychology and theology that combines highly charged personal attacks on his contemporaries with a lightening tour of his own philosophy. It also paves the way for The Anti-Christ, Nietzche's final assault on institutional Christianity.