Katy Carr is untidy, tall and gangling and lives with her brothers and sisters planning for the day when she will be "beautiful and beloved, and amiable as an angel". An accidental fall from a swing seems to threaten her hopes for the future, but Katy struggles to overcome her difficulties with pluck, vitality and good humour.

The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Much Ado About Nothing has long been celebrated as one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies. The central relationship, between Benedick and Beatrice, is wittily combative until...

The Diary of a Nobody is so unassuming a work that even its author, George Grossmith, seemed unaware that he had produced a masterpiece. For more than a century this wonderfully comic portrayal of suburban life and values has remained in print, a source of delight to generations of readers, and a major literary influence, much imitated but never equalled. If you don’t recognise yourself at...

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent at Canterbury. Set in the reign of Richard I, Coeur de Lion, Ivanhoe is packed with memorable incidents - sieges, ambushes and combats - and equally memorable characters: Cedric of Rotherwood, the die-hard Saxon; his ward Rowena; the fierce Templar knight, Sir Brian de Bois-Gilbert; the Jew, Isaac of York, and his beautiful, spirited...

Agnes Grey is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a deeply personal novel written from the author's own experience and as such Agnes Grey has a power and poignancy which mark it out as a landmark work of literature dealing with the social and moral...

The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes is a fascinating collection of stories featuring detectives, criminal agents and debonair crooks from the golden age of crime fiction: a time when Sherlock Holmes was esconsced in his rooms at 221B Baker Street and London was permanently wreathed in a sinister fog. These gripping tales of mystery, suspense and clever puzzles are wonderfully entertaining and in...

For more than forty years, Isaac Asimov thrilled millions of readers with his bestselling Foundation series, a spellbinding tale of the future that spans thousands of years and dozens of worlds. Completed just weeks before his death in April 1992, Forward the Foundation is the seventh and concluding volume of this masterwork, which was awarded a Hugo for the 'Best All-Time Science Fiction...

Two hundred and twenty years after Captain Cook’s first tour of New Zealand, Dick Parsons takes us on a more comfortable voyage of discovery round the north and south islands. He gives us a fascinating insight into the life—human, animal and botanical—of this green and majestic land on the other side of the world. From ninety-mile beach in the far north to Dunedin via the Southern...

From the Costa Book of the Year-winning author of Days Without End Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live. Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and...

James Joyce's Dubliners is an enthralling collection of modernist short stories which create a vivid picture of the day-to-day experience of Dublin life. This Penguin Classics edition includes notes and an introduction by Terence Brown. Joyce's first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail...

Explore how electric currents appear in nature, from static to lightning bolts, and how these natural marvels inspired scientists to conduct experiments. In this book, you can see how we create electricity and the many ways it is used every day.

With an Introduction and Notes by R.T.Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York Moll Flanders follows the life of its eponymous heroine through its many vicissitudes, which include her early seduction, careers in crime and prostitution, conviction for theft and transportation to the plantations of Virginia, and her ultimate redemption and prosperity in the new World.

Modernism is usually thought of as a shock wave of innovations hitting art, architecture, music, cinema and literature - the work of Picasso, Joyce, Schoenberg, movements like Futurism and Dada, the architecture of Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and the avant-garde theatre of Bertolt Brecht or Samuel Beckett. But what really defines modernism? Why did it begin and how long did it...

Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her. In this, her first full-length novel,...

Absolutely brilliant.' Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow Meet the business anthropologists seeking to explain how we buy, sell, work and think. From supermarkets to factories, trading floors to tech firms, their methods are revealing the hidden codes that define our lives. The result is a wholly new way to see human behaviour: anthro-vision. One of the World's Top 50...

'The best new writer of fiction in America. The best.' - John Irving Nathan Hill's brilliant debut takes the reader from the rural Midwest of the 1960s, to New York City during Occupy Wall Street; from Chicago in 1968, to wartime Norway: home of the mysterious Nix. Meet Samuel: stalled writer, bored teacher at a local college, obsessive player of online video games. He hasn't seen his mother,...

A good life involves more than just pleasure. Suffering is essential too. It seems obvious that pleasure leads to happiness - and pain does the opposite. And yet we are irresistibly drawn to a host of experiences that truly hurt, from the exhilarating fear of horror movies or extreme sport, to the wrenching sadness of a song or novel, to the gruelling challenges of exercise, work, creativity...

Kim is Rudyard Kipling’s finest work. Now controversial, this novel is a memorably vivid evocation of the life and landscapes of India in the late nineteenth century. Kim himself is a resourceful lad who befriends a lama, an ageing priest; and both embark on a combined quest. Whereas Kim has an insatiable interest in the varied activities around him, the lama seeks redemption from the ‘Wheel of...

This beautiful and engaging volume charts the evolution of manga from its roots in late 19th-century Japan through the many and varied forms of comics, cartoons and animation created throughout Asia for more than 100 years. World authority on comic art Paul Gravett details the evolving meanings of the myths and legends told and retold by manga artists of every decade and reveals the development...

This book looks at the life, art, collaborations, films, friendships and fun surrounding the Fab Four - all in a brilliantly illustrated A to Z format. This tells the stories of their early days playing all-night sets in Hamburg and Liverpool, through the mop-top era, to experimentation in India and elevating pop music into an undisputed artform. The Beatles remain unrivalled in their effect on...