Celebrated for his playwriting, British author Michael Frayn has also written screenplays and several acclaimed novels. Headlong, a Booker Prize finalist, combines a heavy dose of humor with a fascinating glimpse into the world of priceless art. When Martin Clay and his art historian wife are asked to appraise the private collection of a loutish man, it is Martin, not his wife, who believes he has discovered a lost masterpiece from Dutch painter Bruegel....

Rickie Elliot, sensitive and idealistic, misleads himself through his conventional desire for marriage and fatherhood. Falling for and marrying Agnes Pembroke, he journeys away from the philosophical ideals of his Cambridge youth.

One of the first and greatest detective stories, The Moonstone tells of the theft of a sacred diamond and the efforts of Sergeant Cuff, the policeman investigating the crime, to solve the mystery.

In Victorian England, a woman recounts her difficult marriage to an alcoholic whom she attempted to change and the battles she fought with double standards once she left her husband, taking her son with her.

The novel "Little Dorrit", published originally between 1855 and 1857, is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period. Much of Dickens' ire is focused upon the institutions of debtor's prisons-in which people who owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they have repaid their debts. The representative prison in this case is the Marshalsea where the author's own father had been imprisoned. Most of Dickens'...

Stella Benson has left behind her life in London to be an au pair for a family in a rural Sussex village.

Gibreel Farishta, India's legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices, fall earthward from a bombed jet toward the sea, singing rival verses in an eternal wrestling match between good and evil.

"Michael Henchard has risen to become a prosperous merchant and mayor of Casterbridge, but he harbors a shameful secret. In his youth, while in a drunken rage, the now-respectable Henchard auctioned off his wife and infant daughter to a passing sailor. When his family unexpectedly returns, he tries to make amends, thus setting off a chain of events that will have grave consequences"--Back cover.

Simon Serrailler is called upon to work a case in the seemingly idyllic cathedral town of Lafferton as part of a dangerous undercover operation.

When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first...