From a difficult childhood to hard-won success, David Copperfield's journey through Victorian England is Dickens at his most personal and expansive - a sprawling, richly peopled novel of resilience, friendship, and self-discovery.
A young American is summoned to a house in the woods where an old man has raised his son to speak no word and hear no sound - an experiment in silence - and where a murder has been committed that only the silent man witnessed.
Ghosts of the Anglo-Scottish border, written by a man who had spent his life collecting its ballads: reivers who ride after death, a piper, a drowned man at a ford, the grey figure that walks a peel tower.
Shipwrecked alone on a desert island for nearly three decades, Robinson Crusoe has nothing but grit, ingenuity, and a battered Bible to survive - until a single footprint in the sand changes everything.
Four Freeland brothers - a squire, a bureaucrat, a banker and a Tolstoyan - quarrel over England while farm labourers are evicted from their cottages and a girl of their own family takes the labourers' side.
Windsor in 1529: Henry has seen Anne Boleyn, Wolsey is falling, and Herne the Hunter rides the forest with antlers on his head and an offer for anyone desperate enough.
Clyde Griffiths escapes a poor, religious upbringing and lands in his wealthy uncle's orbit, where money, status, and a glamorous woman all suddenly seem within reach - as long as he can get rid of the pregnant factory girl who's now in his way.
Peter Ruff, a small London agent with a genius for the discreet, is recruited into the Double Four - a European criminal directorate - and finds the way out is to run it.
Leiden, 1574: the Spanish are outside the walls, the city is starving, and the burgomaster's wife holds the household - and half the town's nerve - together while her husband refuses to surrender.
Where words come from and what they carry: Trench takes ordinary English - knave, villain, pagan, sincere - and shows the history fossilised inside each one, and what it says about the people who made it.
A footman is dressed up as a baronet by two gentlemen who need an heir produced, and the impostor turns out to have more honour than his sponsors - and to be in love with the woman the fraud is aimed at.
In the forests of Venezuela a fugitive from a failed revolution hears a voice in the trees - a girl the Indians will not go near and mean to kill, who speaks a language nobody knows and moves through the canopy like something the forest made.
A fifteen-year-old dressmaker's apprentice is seduced and abandoned, and a dissenting minister and his sister take her in and pass her off as a widow - a lie that must eventually be paid for by someone.
Argyll after the Forty-five: a French-Scots gentleman comes to a ruinous castle on Loch Fyne carrying a purse of Jacobite gold and a fencing master's manners, into a country where every second man is an informer.
The Killing Time in Galloway: Covenanters hiding in the moss-hags with a price on their heads, Claverhouse's dragoons quartering the moors, and a boy of a great house who must choose which side of his own family to betray.
A rich young widower with a Catholic estate is worked on by a Jesuit who intends the property for the Church, and the woman who loves him has no weapons but the truth.
Rome in the 1860s: the Saracinesca family, a marriage under strain, a forged claim to a title, and the Papal city in its last years before Italy takes it.
A butler's daughter has published a book of verse, married a rich man's son, been widowed at twenty-one, and now goes about London society as a lady while her father waits at table and her sisters are in service - and four men want to marry her.
Two brothers, two sons: one raised in London society, one on an island among people with no laws at all - and the natural man, brought home, asks the questions polite England cannot answer.
A young American painter falls in love with a photograph of a German princess and sets off across Europe to find her - Gibraltar, Cairo, Baden - with a friend who watches him do it.
A rising politician of a great Whig family falls in love with a divorced woman, and his career, his party and his relations all quietly explain to him what is possible.
Hazel Woodus lives with her father, a coffin-maker and beekeeper, on a Shropshire hill, keeps a tame fox, and is wanted by two men - a minister and the master of the hunt.
Jean rides the Lazy A alone - her father is in prison for murder, the ranch is going, and a moving-picture outfit turns up wanting a real cowgirl for the camera.
The narrator dies, takes a stagecoach with several other shades, is examined at the gate by Minos, and finds the great men of history rather different from their reputations - after which Julian the Apostate recounts his own twenty transmigrations, as a slave, a bishop, a beau and a tailor.
A Basque soldier meets a Gypsy woman outside a cigarette factory in Seville, lets her go, and loses everything by degrees: rank, freedom, and the ability to imagine a life without her.
The Exodus told through an Egyptian officer of Hebrew birth - Hosea, who will be called Joshua - caught between the army he has served and the people he is asked to lead out.
A clergyman writes a book proving the Bible mostly legend, London society takes him up as a celebrity, and two women - one clever, one clever about men - arrange the consequences.
Two sisters serve as recluses in the temple of Serapis at Memphis, pouring libations for the dead, and the elder is noticed by the King - which is the worst thing that can happen to her.
Two men marry, and the two marriages are set side by side for twenty years: one wife makes a home, the other makes a point, and the husbands go the way the houses take them.
A chancery suit has been grinding through the courts for so long that no one alive remembers what it was about, and the fog that opens the novel never really lifts from it.
Newland Archer is engaged to the correct girl when her cousin returns from Europe with a failed marriage behind her and no intention of pretending otherwise.
Sixteen years after they left the caves of Kor, Holly and Leo follow a vision to the mountains of Central Asia, to a monastery above a plain and a veiled Hesea who rules the Mountain of Fire.
