Penguin Books Ltd

Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake.

Describes Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world. This work describes his search for 'a practical religion not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth'.

At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. In this book, the author entwines grand themes - conflict and love, birth and death, free will and faith - with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in its imperfection and grandeur.

A devastating account of a man fighting his inevitable end, and asks the existential question: why must a good person be taken before his time?

Offers an account of a young person's emerging awareness of the world and of his place within it.

At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever.

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, and a great novelist. This book paints a fresh portrait of Dickens, capturing the complex character of this great genius.

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats.

A title that involves us so deeply that Austen's final illness and death come almost as a personal tragedy to the reader. It presents Austen as remarkably clever; sensitive, but sentimental; tough, yet observant; guarded; and a woman with the devil of a genius in her.

Ignatius J Reilly is fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much unhinged, too. But is he bothered by this? No. For this misanthropic crusader against an America fallen into vice and ignorance has a mission: to rescue a naked female philosopher in distress.