Arthur's seduction of an innocent, young country girl results in remorse, suffering, and regret.

Beautiful Eustacia is torn between two suitors--one who would help her escape her routine life in nineteenth-century rural England, and another who would make their home the Wessex heath where he was raised.

In this book, the author depicts the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York with precision and wit, even as she movingly portrays the obstacles that impeded women's choices at the turn of the century. The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevent her from becoming one of the many women who succeed in those circumstances. Though her...

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...