Those are famous lines of Dickens`s stirring tale of two cities, London and Paris, at the time of teh French Revolution. Suspense gathers from the opening scene, the dramatic coach journey to dover and the rescue of Dr. Manette from incarceration in the Bastille. At the cebntre of the novel are the figures of Sydney Carton and charles Darnay, both men in love with the doctor`s beautiful daughter Lucie, linked together by fate and by the engulfing terrors of revolution. A Tale Of Two Cities was written at a time of crisis in Dickens`s life. It is a wonderful love story and, aside from The Pickwick Papers, the most popular of all Dickens`s novels.

She is the beautiful daughter of the exiled Duke Senior and niece to his usurping brother Duke Frederick. Her father is banished from the kingdom which breaks her heart. She then meets Orlando and falls in love with him. After angering her uncle, she leaves his court for exile in the Forest of Arden. There, she lives disguised as a shepherd named Ganymede with her sweet and devoted cousin, Celia, disguised as his sister, Aliena and her uncle`s fool Touchstone. Eventually, Rosalind is reunited with her father and married to her faithful lover, Orlando.

Gulliver`s Travels is an adventure story (in reality, a misadventure story) involving several voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship`s surgeon, who, because of a series of mishaps en route to recognized ports, ends up, instead, on several unknown islands living with people and animals of unusual sizes, behaviors, and philosophies, but who, after each adventure, is somehow able to return to his home in England where he recovers from these unusual experiences and then sets out again on a new voyage.

Probably the most famous play in the English language, Hamlet transcends the revenge tradition and explores the nature of man. Learning that his father has been killed by Claudius, his uncle, Hamlet`s only honourable course of action is revenge. But Hamlet`s nature tends not towards action but reflection and in his incapacity to act lies the seed of his own destruction.

King Solomon`s Mines (1885) is a popular novel by the Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of one of the party. It is the first English adventure novel set in Africa, and is considered to be the genesis of the Lost World literary genre.

Oliver Twist, a meek, mild young boy, is born in the workhouse and spends his early years there until, finding the audacity to ask for more food, he is made to leave. Apprenticed to an undertaker by Mr. Bumble, Oliver runs away in desperation and falls in with Fagin and his gang of thieves where he begins his new life in the criminal underworld. Under the tutelage of the satanic Fagin, the brutal Bill Sikes and the wily Artful Dodger, Oliver learns to survive, although he is destined not to stay with Fagin but to find his own place in the world. With its terrifying evocation of the hypocrisy of the wealthy and the depths to which poverty pushes the human spirit, Oliver Twist is both a fascinating examination of evil and a poignant moving novel for all times.

Thought to be one of the first English novels, Robinson Crusoe is the timeless story of a merchant`s trading voyages and his adventures at sea, his shipwreck and subsequent life marooned alone.

Unfairly deprived of their family inheritance by the grasping Mrs John Dashwood and her husband, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood and their mother find themselves in greatly reduced circumstances. Compelled to leave Norland in Sussex for Barton Cottage in Devonshire, the two sisters are soon accepted into their new society. Marianne, whose sweet radiance and open nature charm the roguish John Willoughby, is soon deeply in love. Elinor, whose disposition is more cautious and considered, who carefully conceals her emotions, is suffering the loss of Edward Ferrars whom she has left behind. Despite their very different personalities, both sisters experience great sorrows in their affairs of the heart: Marianne demonstrably wretched and Elinor allowing no one see her private heartache. It is, however, the qualities common to them both - discernment, constancy and integrity in the face of the fecklessness of others - that allow them entry into a new life of peace and contentment.

In hiding from his drunken and tyrannical father, Huck Finn escapes to Jackson`s Island, where he meets Jim, a runaway slave. Together the boys set off on a raft down the Mississippi, in a daring bid for freedom from so-called `sivilization`. Action-packed and crammed with vibrant characters and incidents, Huckleberry Finn catches more vividly than any other novel the comedy, terror, resilience and spontaneity of boyhood. More than a mere sequel to Tom Sawyer, it is Mark Twain`s masterpiece and a great American novel.

The Scarlett Letter is the tragic story of a woman’s shame and the cruel treatment she suffers at the hands of the Puritan society in which she lives. A settler in New England, Hester Prynne has waited two years for her husband, an ageing English scholar, to join her. He arrives to find her in the pillory, a small baby in her arms. She must, as a punishment for her adultery, wear a scarlet �A’ embroidered on her breast and is consequently ostracized by her contemptuous neighbours. Sworn to keep secret the identity of both her husband and her lover, Hester slowly wins the respect of society by her charitable acts. Her own strength and the moral cowardice of the man who allows her to face guilt and shame alone are brought into sharp contrast in a dramatic and harrowing conclusion.