Complete and unabridged Wordsworth American classic of one of the greatest war novels of all time. The book reports on the American Civil War through the eyes of Henry Fleming, an ordinary farm boy turned soldier. It evokes the chaos and the dull clatter of war, the acrid smoke, the incessant rumours of coming battles, the filth and cold, numbing monotony and the unworldly wail of the dying. Crane also captures some strange beauty: brilliant red flags against a blue sky, steel bayonets flashing in the morning sun... 192pp in paperback.

Rob Roy is set in the north of England and Scotland in the years before, during and after the first Jacobite rising of 1715. Rob Roy is a swashbuckling chieftain of the Clan MacGregor who is forced to become an outlaw for his alleged espousal of the Jacobite cause. 400pp. Paperback.

'Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say: this time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own!' declares Doctor Moreau to hapless narrator Edward Prendick. Moreau's highly controversial methods and ambitions conflict with the religious, moral and scientific norms of his day and Wells later called The Island of Doctor Moreau 'a youthful exercise in blasphemy'. Today his vivid depictions of the Beast People still strike modern readers with an uncanny glimpse of the animal in the human, while the behaviour of humans leave us wondering who is the most monstrous after all. This volume unites four of Wells' liveliest and most engaging tales of the strange evolution and behaviour of animals - including human beings. The Island of Doctor Moreau is followed by three fantastic yet chillingly plausible short stories of human-animal encounters. The Empire of the Ants is a darkly humorous account of intelligent Amazonian ants threatening to displace humans as 'the lords of the future and masters of the earth'. In The Sea Raiders, the south coast of England is terrorized by an unwelcome visit from deep-sea predator Haploteuthis ferox, while Æpyornis Island provides a marooned egg collector with an unusual companion. 192 page paperback.

At the end of the 19th century a stranger arrives in the Sussex countryside and mayhem ensues; in the sleepy county of Kent a miracle food brings biological chaos that engulfs and threatens the entire planet. H. G. Wells's fertile and mercurial imagination never brought us more bizarre and unsettling stories than those revealed in The Invisible Man (1897) and The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth (1904). These are stories of extraordinary physical transformations and are at once extremely funny and richly imaginative. At the same time, Wells poses some very probing questions about the ethical dimensions to science and the human capacity for both pity and cruelty. Brought together for the first time in this new Wordsworth edition, The Invisible Man and The Food of the Gods are two of Wells's most entertaining and thought-provoking works. 352 page paperback.

In these two compelling novels H.G. Wells imagines terrifying futures in which civilisation itself is threatened. The narrator of The War of the Worlds is quick to discover that what appeared to be a falling star was, in fact, a metallic cylinder landing from Mars. Six million people begin to flee London in panic as tentacled invaders emerge and overpower the city. With their heat-ray, killing machines, black gas, and a taste for fresh human blood, is there anything that can be done to stop the Martians? In The War in the Air, naive but resourceful Bert Smallways is thrilled by speed and fascinated by the new flying machines. His curiosity sweeps him away by accident into a German plan to conquer America, beginning with the destruction of New York. The ease of movement in aerial warfare means that nothing and nobody is safe as Total War erupts, civilisation crumbles, and Bert's hopes of getting back to London to marry his love seem impossibly distant. 432 pages. Paperback.

These comic novels will resonate with anyone who has ever felt trapped by circumstance. Their central characters, Artie Kipps and Alfred Polly, are prisoners of their modest social class, limited education, dull work, and sterile relationships. In Wells' hands they break out of the cages that society has constructed for them, learning after bitter experience the truth that 'if the world does not please you, you can change it'. This message, a revolutionary one in its day for the growing army of Edwardian clerks and drapers, is handled with a rich comedy and freshness that belies its deadly seriousness. Wells is at his very best here in exposing and satirising the unequal nature of British society while preparing the ground for its reformation. 496 page paperback.

When penniless businessman Mr Bedford retreats to Kent to write a play, he encounters Dr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist who has invented a material that counteracts gravity. This discovery enables the two men to set off on a fantastic journey to the Moon. But they are not prepared for what they find there - a world of freezing nights, boiling days and danger from a sinister alien life form, the selenites, creatures who have developed an intricate hierarchical society beneath the lunar surface. The First Men in the Moon ignited speculation in 19th century society concerning what lies on and beneath the surface of the Moon. By turns amusing, thrilling and stimulating, the novel is a classic of its genre. This volume also contains another of Wells's fascinating thought-provoking fantasies: A Modern Utopia in which two travellers fall into a space-warp and find themselves upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government. 416 page paperback.

Introduction and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York. Although the shortest of George Eliot's novels, Silas Marner is one of her most admired and loved works. It tells the sad story of the unjustly exiled Silas Marner - a handloom linen weaver of Raveloe in the agricultural heartland of England - and how he is restored to life by the unlikely means of the orphan child Eppie. Silas Marner is a tender and moving tale of sin and repentance set in a vanished rural world and holds the reader's attention until the last page as Eppie's bonds of affection for Silas are put to the test. 176 page paperback.

The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of 20th century fiction, an inspiration for many later, distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. Set before the First World War, it tells the tale of two wealthy and sophisticated couples, one English, one American, as they travel, socialise, and take the waters in the spa towns of Europe . They are 'playing the game' in style. That game has begun to unravel, however, and with compelling attention to the comic, as well as the tragic, results the American narrator reveals his growing awareness of the sexual intrigues and emotional betrayals that lie behind its façade. Wordsworth Classics paperback. 192pp.

It is 1921 in Berlin. Luise Schilling lives here in her father's deeply conservative household and longs to tear down the past and build a new future and through much hard work finally realises her dream, being accepted at Weimar's Bauhaus School to study architecture. But upon arriving, rather than the cutting-edge avant-garde school of design she was expecting, she encounters a fractured social world of mystics and formalists, communists and fascists and the line between the rigid past and hopeful future turns out to be a great deal more blurred that she had thought. In her search for community she gets involved with a cult-like spiritualist group, falling in love Jakob, an elusive art student. Luise's great ambitions have little to do with paying homage to great men, but being surrounded by luminaries like Gropius, Kandinsky and Klee with their attendant egos and sycophants, this is not always easy. As her peers retreat into a world of self-regard and jargon, Berlin begins to erupt into street violence and civil unrest and Luise has to decide where she stands: technology or art? Romanticism or avant-garde? Populism or the youth movement? In her search she encounters themes, ideas and utopian visions that still ring true today, a culture war that is still familiar. Not just a beautifully rendered novel, Enzensberger's book is also a history of the Bauhaus, the seminal German Arts and Crafts school founded by Walter Gropius which, though only operational from 1919 to 1933, is considered by many to be the most revolutionary artistic movement of the 20th century. It was shut down by Hitler who considered it a hotbed for fanatical communist ideology, but its traditions endured, particularly in the US, where many of its members fled after its forced closure. 236pp.