Adam Sims

Set deep in the remote countryside of Massachusetts, New England, in a world of small-town prejudice, pettiness and rural poverty, the story of Ethan Frome explores the crippling marriage of a young man to an older woman and his love for her vibrant...

Famous Heroes of the American West is a lively account of the ‘Wild West’ and its renowned figures, narrated with vigour by Adam Sims. The lives of Davy Crockett, Christopher ‘Kit’ Carson, Calamity Jane and Sitting Bull, amongst others, are explored...

Information is everything in Hard-boiled Wonderland. A specialist encrypter is attacked by thugs with orders from an unknown source, is chased by invisible predators, and dates an insatiably hungry librarian who never puts on weight. In the End of the...

Published in 1888 to immediate popularity (it was the second-ever novel to sell over one million copies in the United States), Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a dynamic rejection of industrial capitalism, and presents a depiction of a socialist utopia....

Fall 1917. The Western Front is in stalemate.Captain Malcolm MacPhail of the Canadian Corps has been in the trenches for longer than he cares to remember. He's just landed a new job on the intelligence staff, but if he thinks staying alive is going to...

More than half a century ago, the naturalist Farley Mowat accepted an assignment to investigate why wolves were killing Arctic caribou. Mowat’s account of the summer he lived in the frozen tundra alone – studying the wolf population and developing a...

Stanton Carlisle is smart, good-looking and ambitious. Among the outcasts, freaks and geeks of the Ten-in-One sideshow, he learns that the public is there to be gulled, and he learns how to do it. Amoral and brilliant, he aims for the brighter lights...

William James was one of the most influential figures in 19th-century American philosophy and psychology. His Pragmatism is a set of lectures that he gave in 1906–07 in answer to the enduring debate between empiricism and rationalism. Shifting between...

Kindly Rip Van Winkle, loved by all, lives a quiet existence in a small village at the foot of the Catskill Mountains. One day, travelling in the mountains, he somehow falls asleep; upon waking, he finds that twenty years have passed! For adults and...

Roderick Hudson and Rowland Mallet are like two sides of the same coin: while the whimsical and egotistical Roderick recklessly follows his passions in the name of art, altruistic Rowland lives with restraint and measure. The two are bound together...

Self-made American millionaire Christopher Newman arrives in Paris brimming with hope and optimism, excited to experience the culture and, hopefully, find the perfect woman to become his wife. After a chance encounter with American expatriate friends...

In The Aspern Papers, a cold and ruthless literary biographer travels to Venice on the trail of personal letters belonging to the deceased American poet Jeffrey Aspern. His journey takes him to a dilapidated, rambling house belonging to an elderly...

Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who...

Taking place in Boston, Massachusetts, a decade after the Civil War, The Bostonians tells the story of two cousins who battle for the affections of and control over an enchanting prophetess. While visiting his cousin Olive Chancellor, a fierce...

Ten Days that Shook the World is John Reed’s phenomenal firsthand account of the October Revolution, leading up to the storming of the Winter Palace and the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917. A socialist journalist from the United States,...

After the collapse of her marriage to an illustrious German prince, Baroness Eugenia Münster arrives in America with her brother, in search of wealthy New England relatives. The duo have an immediate impact on their American cousins, the Wentworths....

‘To inherit a great fortune. To inherit a great misfortune.’ These words, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notebook, neatly encapsulate the theme of The House of the Seven Gables – that of a family whose fortunes are poisoned by its past misdeeds. The sins...

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe’s only full novel, is one of his most unusual works. A riveting story, in the first person, it tells of a disastrous sea voyage involving storms, mutiny, starvation, thirst and a mysterious...

The Scarlet Letter is one of the great classics of American literature. Set in the harsh Puritan environment of 17th-century Boston, it describes the plight of Hester Prynne, an independent-minded woman who stands alone against society. Having given...

First published in 1920, This Side of Paradise proved to be a best-selling novel in Fitzgerald’s own lifetime. The book follows the early life and education of Amory Blaine and is, in fact, a thinly disguised account of Fitzgerald’s own experience as...

Washington Square tells the poignant and gently comic story of Catherine Sloper, a sweet and unassuming young heiress, and her fortune-seeking suitor Morris Townsend. Set in New York City during the 1840s, the story follows Ms Sloper’s conflicts with...