The renewed relationship of two high-society Americans, young diplomat George Darrow and widow Anna Leath, is shaken in France when George embarks on an affair with Sophy Viner, an appealing woman of the lower classes whom Anna's stepson loves.

An American's interactions with Europeans in Europe.

Three couples planned to rent a villa together in St. Tropez. When one of the friends dies, the others urge her husband to join them, not realizing that the villa is far from the mansion they envisioned or that a young, beautiful movie star has been invited as their friend's guest.

"Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a 34-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and bold opinions and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. We never learn her real name. Sadie has met her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"- making him...

One of the greatest epic novels in history, Les Misérables is the moving story of Jean Valjean's struggle for redemption and his lifelong pursuit by Javert, a police detective determined to return Valjean to chains. Always one step ahead of Javert, Valjean encounters the tragic Fantine, and ultimately rescues Fantine's daughter, Cosette, from her wretched life with the Thénadiers, treating the child as his own as she comes of age in pre-revolutionary...

Presents Gustave Flaubert's 1857 novel about a young woman of the bourgeois class whose unhappiness in her marriage leads her to several affairs and a tragic fate. Includes a scholarly introduction and documents from the trial in which Flaubert was accused of offending public morality.

"In a cavernous theater, the lights dim. A beautiful young soprano, Christine Daae, comes onstage to sing Marguerite in Gounod's Faust. In the audience, the Vicomte de Chagny is overcome with love. But unbeknownst to Chagny, he has a rival for the singer's affections: the Opera Ghost, a specter sometimes called the Angel of Music. This is the appropriately Gothic set-up for The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux's enduringly popular thriller. With...

"Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life...

Set in the contemporary Paris of American expatriate liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.