Macmillan Collector's Library

As a young woman, Anne Shirley is embracing adulthood by becoming a productive member of society making the transition from imaginative student to respected schoolteacher. In this classic coming of age story, Anne navigates various challenges that tempt old habits and test her new maturity. A now 16-year-old Anne continues to live with Marilla in the quaint farming town of Avonlea. While poised to start a new teaching position, Anne struggles to balance...

"Hard Times is perhaps the archetypal Dickens novel, full as it is with family difficulties, estrangement, rotten values and unhappiness. It was published in 1854 and it is the story of the family of Thomas Gradgrind, and occurs in the imaginary Coketown, an industrial city inspired by Preston. Gradgrind is a man obsessed with misguided 'Utilitarian' values that make him trust facts, statistics and practicality more than emotion and is based upon...

To young James Herriot, fresh out of veterinary college, Yorkshire appears to offer an idyllic pocket of rural life in a rapidly changing world. But even life in the sleepy village of Darrowby has its challenges: from his new colleagues, brothers Siegfried and Tristan Farnon, to herds of semi-feral cattle and gruff farmers with incomprehensible accents. Heart-breaking and hilarious in equal measure, If Only They Could Talk is the first volume of classic...

"The New Oxford Shakespeare edition of Romeo and Juliet provides a fresh and authoritative introduction to one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies. - Provides a fresh analysis of one of Shakespeare's most famous and enduring works - The introduction examines in particular the play's performance history and presents a new interpretation that veers away from its perception as a core text of heterosexual love - Hannah August challenges Romeo and Juliet's...

A baby is found by wood nymphs in the forest of Burzee. They raise him as their own and give him the name Neclaus. When he grows up, Neclaus has to leave the forest so he makes a home for himself in the laughing valley of Hohaha, where he lives amongst humans for the first time. He discovers there that many children are very poor and neglected so, to cheer them up, he whittles wooden toys as gifts. Eventually he makes presents for all the children...

Franz Kafka creates a maze-like prose to mimic the bureaucracy of early twentieth-century Germany, trapping his protagonist in an unlawful conviction that alters the path of his life. On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, a young bank official named Joseph K is arrested although he has done nothing wrong and is never told what he's been charged with. The Trial is the chronicle of his fight to prove his innocence, of his struggles and encounters...