Classics

Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel (1811), which, though revised later, was completed in 1797 at the age of twenty-two.

First published in 1814, this is a study of three families - the Bertrams, the Crawfords and the Prices - in which Jane Austen uses the unlikely heroine, Fanny Price, to explore the social and moral values by which these families' lives are ordered.

This volume of Jane Austen's classic novel of manners and mores in early 19th-century England has an exquisitely designed foil-stamped binding, with distinctive coloured edging and an attractive silk-ribbon bookmark.

Emma Wodehouse has led a simple life, but during the course of this, she at last reaps her share of the world's vexations. In this comedy of manners, the heroine learns to come to terms with the reality of other people, and with her own erring nature.

Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally.

During an eventful season at Bath, naive Catherine Morland experiences joys of fashionable society for first time. She is delighted with her acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey.

David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. This title is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality.

Based in part on his own childhood in Harlem, the author chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.

Sounds a clarion warning to the world.