1865 Best Seller.

The story of Hans and his sister's participation in a skating competition is interwoven with their class reading of _The Hero of Haarlem_ (the boy who saved his country by plugging a dike with his finger). Somehow poplular myth has transferred Han's name to the dike boy.

Historical fiction novel. The story begins with an actual historical tragedy - the 1672 lynching of the Dutch Grand Pensionary (roughly equivalent to a modern Prime Minister) Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis, by a wild mob of their own countrymen - one of the most painful episodes in Dutch history, described by Dumas with a dramatic intensity.

More Musketeering adventure! This time the musketeers are in conflict over the man in the iron mask who is thought to be King Louis XIV's twin brother, isolated as an infant and now held prisoner in the Bastille for the last 18 years. The throne of France is threatened as he escapes to seek revenge. Will The Three Musketeers manage to fight and save their country this time in their final saga?

Publishers Weekly #1 Best Seller for 1911.

Farnol developed the Regency Romance genre. Books in this style invoked the literature and language of the English Regency period, more or less around the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French revolution.

Farnol's first novel, a swashbuckling story of the highroads of Kent in the Regency era, is still regarded as a classic and catapulted him to fame.

A seminal work of Realism, and one of the most influential novels ever written.

"What is remarkable in Madame Bovary is that its mediocre beings, with their earthbound ambitions and pedestrian problems, impress us, by virtue of the structure and the writing that create them, as beings who are out of the ordinary within their ordinary manner of being." - Mario Vargas Llosa, in The Perpetual Orgy

The novel focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, as she spirals out of control trying to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

Mary Barton is a millworker's daughter who comes into contact with the son of a wealthy family. She must decide between her devoted lover and the possibilities of joining a middle class family. The book explores the British lower classes' frustration, the false sense of class mobility of the 1800s, at a time when the working class were not able to vote. Much of this novel is autobiographical, incorporating incidents from Gaskell's own life.

Charming Charley Kinraid, harpooner, captures the heart of Sylvia but is then press-ganged into service to fight Napoleon. Her cousin, Philip Hepburn, has designs on Sylvia and is not above withholding vital information to get his way. Thus is the stage set for disaster...