"It was the best of times; it was the worst of times ..." The year is 1789. In London, Lucie Darnay lives quietly with her father, who is a former prisoner, and her husband and child. In Paris, the bloody French Revolution is about to begin. How will the uprisings in faraway France affect Lucie and those she loves? What dreadful secrets from the distant past threaten their security, even their lives? When "the best of times" becomes "the worst of...

Set amid the riot, intrigue, and pageantry of medieval Paris, Victor Hugo’s masterful tale of heroism and adventure has been a perennial favorite since its first publication in 1831 and remains one of the most thrilling stories of all time.

Harvey Cheyne, the son of a millionaire, learns lessons about life, responsibility, determination, and self-reliance when, saved from drowning by a fishing schooner, he is forced to share the life and hard work of his rescuers.

Contains an introduction to the play, the text of the play, and notes.

"A meteor hits the earth in the early 20th century. Martians rise from the crater in devastating death machines and lay waste to the surrounding land. How can the earth's population avoid total annihilation at the hands of these bloodthirsty aliens? First published in 1898, The War of the Worlds is a fantasy that is both startlingly up-to-date and in touch with the most ancient of human fears."-- From publisher's description.

As much a tale of mystery and political intrigue as a swashbuckling adventure, The Man in the Iron Mask is the final novel in Alexandre Dumas’s series of d’Artagnan romances. The story follows the heroic young man from the country who, along with his three comrades, becomes a powerful influence on the course of French history. Yet what seems to be the most fantastic aspect of the story is based on fact. During Louis XIV’s reign, a mysterious...

In 1751 in Scotland, cheated out of his inheritance by a greedy uncle who has him kidnapped and put on a ship to the Carolinas, seventeen-year-old David Balfour escapes to the Highlands with the help of the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart and there encounters further danger and intrigue as he attempts to clear his name and regain his property.

This nineteenth-century tale of an electric submarine, its eccentric captain, and the undersea world, anticipated many of the scientific achievements of the twentieth century. The adventures of a French scientist and his companions who travel the seven seas as prisoners in the submarine of the mysterious Captain Nemo.

When young Edward VI of England and a poor boy who resembles him exchange places, each learns something about the other's very different station in life.

English novelist, historian and science writer Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) abandoned teaching and launched his literary career with a series of highly successful science-fiction novels. The Time Machine was the first of a number of these imaginative literary inventions. First published in 1895, the novel follows the adventures of a hypothetical Time Traveller who journeys into the future to find that humanity has evolved into two races: the peaceful...