For David Copperfield, orphaned and with a cruel stepfather, the future looks bleak. But a new start beckons with the magnificent Mr Micawber, then with his eccentric aunt, Betsey Trotwood.

*NATIONAL BESTSELLER* “A lively adventure of the mind...The tone of the prose...is one of unqualified enthusiasm: energy, vigor, intellectual curiosity, and what might be called an ecstasy of imaginative journalism.” —The New York Times Book Review At the age of forty-eight, writer and film critic David Denby returned to Columbia University and re-enrolled in two core courses in Western civilization to confront the literary and philosophical masterpieces -- the "great books" -- that are now at the heart of the culture wars. In Great Books, he leads us on a glorious tour, a rediscovery and celebration of such authors as Homer and Boccaccio, Locke and Nietzsche. Conrad and Woolf. The resulting personal odyssey is an engaging blend of self-discovery, cultural commentary, reporting, criticism, and autobiography -- an inspiration for anyone in love with the written word.

An extraordinary modern novel in the Victorian tradition, Charles Palliser has created something extraordinary—a plot within a plot within a plot of family secrets, mysterious clues, low-born birth, high-reaching immorality, and, always, always the fog-enshrouded, enigmatic character of 19th century—London itself. “So compulsively absorbing that reality disappears . . . One is swept along by those enduring emotions that defy modern art and a random universe: hunger for revenge, longing for justice and the fantasy secretly entertained by most people that the bad will be punished and the good rewarded.”—The New York Times “A virtuoso achievement . . . It is an epic, a tour de force, a staggeringly complex and tantalizingly layered tale that will keep readers engrossed in days. . . . The Quincunx will not disappoint you. It is, quite simply, superb.”—Chicago Sun-Times “A bold and vivid tale that invites the reader to get lost in the intoxicating rhythms of another world. And the invitation is irresistible.”—San Francisco Chronicle “A remarkable book . . . In mood, color, atmosphere and characters, this is Charles Dickens reincarnated . . . It is an immersing experience.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “To read the first pages is to be trapped for seven-hundred odd more: you cannot stop turning them.”—The New Yorker “Few books, at most a dozen or two in a lifetime, affect us this way. . . . For sheer intricacy and ingenuity, for skill and clarity of storytelling, it is the kind of book readers wait for, a book to get lost in.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Dickens's last completed novel and one of the greatest books about London, Our Mutual Friend is a dark, enigmatic portrayal of a city corrupted by money. When a body is pulled out of the Thames it is presumed to be John Harmon, drowned under suspicious circumstances before he could claim the fortune his father made from rubbish heaps. This mystery impinges on the lives of the naïve, hardworking Boffins, the riverside scavenger Gaffer Hexam, his beautiful daughter Lizzie, the mercenary Bella Wilfer and the dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren, in a story of greed, death and renewal.

Charles Dickens is the greatest writer of the Victorian era who became the classic of English literature while still being alive. This book contains the cream of author’s creations. Here can be found an amusing novel about the adventures of English gentlemen The Pickwick Papers and fascinating story Great Expectations about wealth that came upon a young apprentice Pip. The book is garnished with such novels as Oliver Twist which is about a young vagrant who unexpectedly finds relatives and David Copperfield that describes the power of human will in overcoming any difficulties on the way to happiness. Dickens can be called one of the most human loving authors, he teaches the reader to be sincerely happy or sad. To be sad because of the horrible misery the characters of his books feel, to be happy due to kind and soft humour inseparable with the narration of his characters’ life adventures. ContentS: - A Tale of Two Cities - Great Expectations - A Christmas Carol in Prose - Hard Times - Oliver Twist, or The Parish Boy's Progress - David Copperfield - Bleak house - The Pickwick Papers - Our Mutual Friend - Little Dorrit - The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby - The Old Curiosity Shop - American Notes for General Circulation - Dombey and Son - The Mystery of Edwin Drood - A tale of the riots of ‘eighty - Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit - Three Ghost Stories - Hunted Down - Pictures from Italy - A child’s history of England - To be Read at Dusk - The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home - The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain - Holiday Romance - The Lamplighter - THE SEVEN POOR TRAVELLERS — IN THREE CHAPTERS - MUGBY JUNCTION - GEORGE SILVERMAN’S EXPLANATION - The Wreck of the Golden Mary - DOCTOR MARIGOLD - Master Humphrey's Clock - The Battle of Life - MUDFOG AND OTHER SKETCHES