Best Book Quotes

Charlotte Bronte’s strikingly modern gothic romance continues to weave its spell over millions of readers, with the central relationship between the eponymous heroine and the brooding Mr. Rochester forming a cornerstone of Victorian fiction. Exquisitely written and fascinating in its sexual politics, Jane Eyre endures as a darkly twinkling literary jewel.

Tells the story of distinguished but eccentric Professor Lidenbrock, who finds a scrap of parchment in an old manuscript. A cipher written in runes, it tells of an entrance to another world - a world hidden beneath our own, illuminated by an electrified gas and populated by strange, prehistoric beings.

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There, two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette.

Looking back on a seventy-year old West Indian woman's life and evoking the relationships that have given it meaning, this novel deals with such themes as sex, human relations, and the interplay of power and powerlessness - and how easy it is to fall from one into the other.

From its iconic vampiric tropes to its now-familiar cast of characters, such as Mina Murray, Van Helsing and, of course, the eponymous Count, Dracula has lost none of its power to terrify and enthrall.

A secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands.

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, the author broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This book brings together the famous poems that made his name as a defining figure of the counterculture.

The winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, Beloved remains American novelist Toni Morrison’s crowning achievement. Dedicated to the ‘Sixty Million and more’ Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, the novel remains both a mesmerising family story and a landmark depiction of the legacy of slavery, both on individuals and America’s national psyche.

It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while - down.

Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, Joseph Heller's bestselling novel is a hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it. An absurdist condemnation of armed conflict and a rallying cry against the arbitrary authority of those in power, Catch 22 is one of the landmarks of twentieth-century fiction.

Twenty four hours in the life of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s Dublin-set modernist master-class may have a fearsome reputation, but is, in truth, tremendous fun. Playful, sly, bawdy and humane, Ulysses is a linguistic and structural triumph that deserves a much broader audience.

Part of Alma Classics Evergreens series, this new edition of Frankenstein contains pictures and an extensive section on Shelley's life and works.

A runaway teen and an ageing cat whisperer collide in this fabulist extravaganza that showcases all of Murakami’s philosophical playfulness and surreal exuberance. Kafka on the Shore effortlessly siphons the legacy of magic realism into Murakami’s own hypnotically skewed version, leaving the reader enthralled and intoxicated by the novel’s close.

One of the undisputed jewels of American fiction, Fitzgerald’s dazzling critique of the superficiality of the Jazz Age captures the glamorous facade at the heart of the American Dream in devastating style.

He is a true artist' New York Times Book Review Billy Pilgrim - hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier - has become unstuck in time.

Orwell’s brilliantly bleak future vision of totalitarianism is arguably the greatest of all literary dystopias, contriving to look back to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s whilst simultaneously predicting with uncanny accuracy the worst excesses of the Cold War-era Soviet Union.

A brilliant sci-fi novel from one of the last century's most influential pop culture figures.

This work is part of the "Continuum Contemporaries" series giving readers accessible and informative introductions to 30 of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential contemporary novels. It contains a biography of the novelist and a full-length study of the novel.

___________________________________ 'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.' A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man falsely charged with the rape of a white girl.

Jane Austen teased readers with the idea of a 'heroine whom no one but myself will much like', but Emma is irresistible. 'Handsome, clever, and rich', Emma is also an 'imaginist', 'on fire with speculation and foresight'. Her matchmaking maps out relationships that Jane Austen ironically tweaks into a clearer perspective.

A classic sci-fi dystopia that started out as a parody of H.G. Wells’s Utopian novels, Brave New World is a savage critique of the fallacy of the perfect state, the vogue for genetic engineering and the idea of the noble savage.