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First serialised in Household Words in 1851, Cranford is a charming, episodic novel which has been adapted for the stage, radio and TV. Based on the small Cheshire town of Knutsford where Gaskell was raised, Cranford paints a tender, witty portrait of an English village and its beloved locals. Consisting of a series of sketches, the novel recounts the lives of the kind-hearted but anxious Miss Matty Jenkins, and her sharper, opinionated sister Miss Deborah.

Often considered her most experimental work, Virginia Woolf's The Waves is a masterclass in modernist fiction, and a profound exploration of time, consciousness and the conflicting rhythms of individual lives. Published in 1931, The Waves unfolds through the soliloquies of six characters whose voices come and go – much like the sea tides they are surrounded by – in a blend of consciousness, tracing their journeys from childhood to old age. Around them drifts the unseen presence of a seventh figure, Percival, whose absence becomes a powerful refrain throughout the book.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a series of short stories that made the fortunes of the Strand magazine, in which they were first published, and won immense popularity for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The detective is at the height of his powers and the volume is full of famous cases, including 'The Red-Headed League', 'The Blue Carbuncle', and 'The Speckled Band'.

In A Clergyman's Daughter, Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy's faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life.

In 1910, while hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness.

Dead Souls, Gogol's epic poem in prose, is widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. We follow Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant turned conman, through the countryside in pursuit of his shady enterprise as he arrives in the provincial town of 'N' and begins visiting various landowners to make each a strange and ghostly offer.

When Laura Willowes’s beloved father dies, she is absorbed in the household of her brother and his family. There, she leaves behind “Laura” and enters into the state of “Aunt Lolly,” a genteel spinster indispensable to the upbringing of her nieces. For twenty years, Lolly is neither indulgent nor impulsive, until one day when she decides to move to a village in the Chilterns, much to her family’s chagrin.

Emma Bovary, a beautiful yet naïve young woman living in rural France. Her husband, a kind-hearted physician, is committed to his wife, but Emma soon grows listless and dissatisfied with the provincial life he has provided her with. Yearning for passion, excitement and luxury, Emma daringly engages in various affairs, while accumulating enormous debt as she attempts to live a life beyond her means. A moving and tragic tale of misguided idealism, materialism and the bourgeois lifestyle.

Set in the fictional town of Winesburg, Sherwood Anderson's quietly powerful masterpiece explores the hidden lives of ordinary people – most notably George Willard, a young reporter – as they struggle with loneliness, repression, and the haunting distance between inner truth and outward appearance. Beneath the town's veneer of small-town simplicity lies a world full of private anguish, failed connections and emotional isolation.

Ethan works his unproductive farm, and struggles to maintain an existence with his suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's cousin enters their household as a "hired girl", Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

Jane Austen’s final, unfinished novel centres on Charlotte Heywood as she arrives in an up-and-coming seaside town. As she meets a host of characters, from her hosts’ family to visitors from the West Indies, Austen's final novel gives us a concise insight into the deception, snobbery, and unexpected romances that occur in the world of her characters.

The queen bee of the fictional village of Riseholme, Mrs. Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas is a snobbish yet oddly charming woman who prides herself on being the cultural and intellectual leader of her community. She dabbles in art, plants Shakespeare-themed flower arrangements in her garden and uses fake Italian phrases to maintain her social standing. Trouble brews when some new arrivals to town – including the glamorous opera singer Olga Bracely and the eccentric spiritualist Daisy Quantock – begin to challenge Lucia’s hold over Riseholme.

Set in the quaint seaside town of Tilling, inspired by the real-life village of Rye where Benson once lived, busybody Miss Mapp is known for her sharp eye and even sharper tongue. Usually found spying on the neighbourhood through her bay window, Elizabeth works hard to maintain her social standing through winning bridge games, making the most lavish dresses of the town and obtaining the best gossip.