Burlington Public Library

A powerful and courageous work of fiction, Hard Times looks at working conditions in a Victorian factory town in the industrial north of England. It's an extraordinary novel that considers how enslavement to systems at the expense of imagination and feeling can wreck human lives. This edition celebrates Charles Dickens' most openly campaigning novel, through which the author said he aimed to 'strike the heaviest blow in my power'. Hard Times explores...

Probably Garcia Marquez's finest and most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.

The first volume of Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, also known as Remembrance of Things Past, Swann's Way is the auspicious beginning of Proust's most prominent work. A mature, unnamed man recalls the details of his commonplace, idyllic existence as a sensitive and intuitive boy in Combray. For a time, the story is narrated through his younger mind in beautiful, almost dream-like prose. In a subsequent section of the volume, the...

It was the time of the French Revolution - a time of great change and great danger. It was a time when injustice was met by a lust for vengeance, and rarely was a distinction made between the innocent and the guilty. Against this tumultuous historical backdrop, Dickens' great story of unsurpassed adventure and courage unfolds.Unjustly imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille, Dr. Alexandre Manette is reunited with his daughter, Lucie, and safely transported...

This 1962 novel is set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, and depicts the chaos when McMurphy, a rebellious prison inmate who has faked insanity in order to finish his sentence in the hospital, incites the other patients to disobey the feared Nurse Ratched. An escalating series of incidents leads to a tragic conclusion.

Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces reisistance from the society she inhabits.

An intimate portrait of two men who cherish the slim bond between them and the dream they share in a world marred by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy,and callousness. Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation, George and his simple-minded friend Lenny dream, as drifters will, of a place to call their own - a couple of acres and a few pigs, chickens, and rabbits back in Hill Country where land is cheap. But after they come...

"To the Lighthouse features the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests who are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Virginia Woolf constructs a moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflicts within a marriage."--BOOK JACKET

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt...

The Scarlet Letter is the story of three New England settlers at odds with the Puritan society in which they live. Roger Chillingworth, an ageing scholar, arrives in New England after two years separation from his wife Hester to find her on trial for adultery. For refusing to reveal her lover's identity, she is condemned to wear a letter °' sewn onto her clothes. Roger resolves to discover and destroy the man who has stolen his honor. For the next...