Professor Otto Lidenbrock's great adventure begins by chance when a scrap of paper drops out of an ancient book he has just bought. The coded inscription reveals the existence of a passageway leading to the centre of the earth and that the entrance lies within the crater of an extinct volcano in Iceland.

Thomas Hardy's beautiful and spirited heroine is driven to her tragic end by three men who betray her trust: John Durbeyfield, her drunken, feckless father; the seducer Alec d'Urberville, who leaves Tess pregnant at 16 with a son that dies in infancy; and Angel Clare, the unforgiving husband who rejects her.

The French Riviera of the mid-1920s is the new playground for rich Americans, among them elegant heiress Nicole Warren and her husband, ambitious psychiatrist Dick Diver. The Divers' renowned hospitality brings celebrities and socialites flocking to their villa, but when a starlet called Rosemary Hoyt finds her way into their charmed circle, the consequences are devastating.

Silas Marner (1861) is Eliot's classic tale of an outsider. A weaver who comes to live and work alone in the Midlands village of Raveloe, Silas Marner's sole pleasure is to count his growing hoard of gold. When it is stolen, his life ceases to have meaning - until Eppie wanders into the weaver's cottage one snowy New Year's Eve and falls asleep on his hearth. Eppie is two years old.

"I am half agony, half hope."

Anne Elliot lost the love of her life eight years earlier and the sorrow lingers on. Yet the dashing Captain Wentworth did not desert her; it was Anne who rejected him because she was persuaded that she could make a better match.

'Please, sir, I want some more. '

Oliver Twist sent out shock waves when it appeared in 1838. With a half-starved orphan for a hero, it was Dickens' first attempt to rouse the public conscience over the social evils of his day.

Northanger Abbey is the light-hearted account of a young girl's first excursion into fashionable society. Catherine Morland is taken to Bath where, among a crowd of new acquaintances, she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to stay at their family home, Northanger Abbey. Catherine, a devotee of 'horrid' Gothic novels, fervently hopes that the Abbey will match the haunted ruins conjured up in her imagination.

Written in the early part of Dickens's career, Nicholas Nickleby (1838) is a masterly piece of comic fiction that recalls the roistering picaresque novels of the previous century. Nicholas's adventures throw him in with some of Dickens's most memorable characters: Wackford Squeers, the sadistic one-eyed headmaster of Dotheboys Hall; poor ill-used Smike, victim of a grim family secret; and the eccentric Crummies theatre troupe, complete with their 'Infant Phenomenon' - her growth stunted on a diet of gin-and-water since infancy.

Everyone looks upon shy, self-effacing Fanny Price as the poor relation among her four spoiled cousins at Mansfield Park.

Adopted at a tender age by an uncle and aunt who have grown rich from a sugar plantation in distant Antigua, she finds herself morally at odds with them and their offspring. Her chief consolation is the kindness of the younger son, Edmund Bertram, whom she secretly loves.

The backdrop to this campaigning novel is the grim industrial centre of Coketown, with its belching chimneys, purple-dyed river and hordes of downtrodden mill hands. Here headmaster Thomas Gradgrind sternly prepares his pupils for their pre-determined fate as industrial fodder. Facts and figures are all that he will tolerate, because he scorns 'fancy' and forbids any use of the imagination.

Into the sleepy village of Weatherburv arrives one day Bathsheba Everdene, come to take charge of her late uncle's thriving farm. Strong-willed and beautiful, her presence ensures that life in the area will never be the same again.

Forced by the death of her parents to seek her fortune in London, Fanny Hill is duped into prostitution by an old procuress. In Mrs Brown's bawdy-house the naive young woman begins her sexual initiation and soon embarks on her own path in pursuit of pleasure, until she at last finds true love.

Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome (1911) is a classic of American literature. Mattie Silver, a young and guileless girl, is hired to keep house on the bleak New England farm belonging to Ethan Frome and his sickly wife Zeena, who is her cousin. Mattie completely captures Ethan's heart, but the would-be lovers are kept apart by the spiteful Zeena, who then banishes the girl without warning. Before she leaves, Ethan takes Mattie on a promised sled run, with profound and dreadful consequences.

'Patience, Firmness, and Perseverance were my only weapons.'

Agnes Grey (1847) was Anne Bronte's first novel and a poignant account of her own experience as a struggling governess, obliged to earn her living in one of the few ways open to an educated Victorian girl.

'It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. '

A Tale of Two Cities moves between two great European capitals, London and Paris, before and during the French Revolution.

Like the house itself, Wuthering Heights is set on the bleak Pennine moors, a fitting backdrop to this story of love, torment and revenge, and a landscape familiar to Emily Brontb.

Heathcliff is a foundling, adopted and raised as one of the Earn'shaw children. With this act of charity, the seeds of ardent love and jealousy are planted. Catherine Earnshaw becomes devoted to Heathcliff, while her brother Hindley always views him as a rival for Wuthering Heights.

This startlingly raw tale of a man and boy sold into slavery and the hardships they face was one of the first to address the subject of slavery and what it truly meant.

Stowe's controversial novel combines an overarching focus on the movement against slavery and Christianity with an adventurous, yet tragic storyline and memorable characters, and is as poignant today as it was 150 years ago.

"Like millions of my race, my mother and father were born slaves, but were not contented to live and die so."

First published in 1872, William Still's collection of accounts and letters is a powerful testament to the trials and tribulations of fugitive slaves who used The Underground Railroad, a secret network that enabled them to escape from bondage. 

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"

This is the first line of Rousseau's seminal work of political philosophy, a treatise that would go on trainspire revolutions in America and France and make governments across the world question what legitimacy really meant. The idea of the "social contract" is just as powerful today as when Rousseau first wrote these words more than 250 years earlier.

The elderly husband of Hester Prynne returns unexpectedly to their New England village to find his wife nursing an illegitimate baby and wearing a scarlet letter 'A' - for Adulteress - embroidered on her dress. While her husband embarks on a vengeful hunt for the child's father, Hester refuses to name him because he holds a recpected position in the Puritan community.