In 13th-century Sussex, an illicit love-affair and ruthless power-politics find focus in a masterwork of medieval engineering.

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ßehemoth ... is the most gripping and the most thought-out [book that Watts has yet written] ... Like Greg Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful", Watts is arguing for an entirely different way of understanding and presenting character, one that reconfigures both how personality is constructed and how actions are to be understood. This seems to me a unique and particularly science-fictional contribution ... For all Watts's dark humor, and for all the incidental thrills of his future, ßehemoth caps a series which is one of the two or three most challenging works I've read in the last decade.

- Graham Sleight, The NY Review of Science Fiction

By the time Dickens set out for America in 1842, he was already a well known author and celebrity. His illuminating book American Notes is his depiction of the New World, a place with both admirable (well run hospitals, prisons, law courts) and despicable (slavery, unsavoury manners) qualities. When first published, his accounts and opinions incited hostile reactions on both sides of the Atlantic.

The novel follows Georges Duroy's corrupt rise to power. With assistance from a series of powerful mistresses Duroy quickly rises from a lowly returned serviceman to one of the most influential men of Paris.

The best known of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels. Cranford is the small rural town which serves as the backdrop for a series of episodes in the lives of Mary Smith and her friends, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two spinster sisters.

Daniel Deronda is the ward of wealthy Englishman, Sir Hugo Mallinger. He falls for the beautiful Gwendolen but a reversal in her family's fortunes sees her marry another and binds her to a different life. Meanwhile, Deronda saves a young Jewish woman, Mirah, and becomes involved in her search for lost family and identity. But a dramatic revelation threatens Deronda's own sense of identity. Romance and realism intertwine in this beautiful book.

Evelina, the title character, is the unacknowledged daughter of a dissipated English aristocrat. She is raised in seclusion and when she grows into a beautiful and intelligent young woman she travels to London to be introduced into society. The novel then follows her growth through a series of sometimes harrowing episodes. Some critics see the novel as autobiographical. Burney originally published the work anonymously in 1778 and only acknowledged authorship when the book became wildly successful.