The Hound of the Baskervilles(1901-02) is Arthur Conan Doyle's most celebrated Sherlock Holmes adventure. At the end of the yew tree path of his ancestral home, Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead. Close by are the footprints of a gigantic hound. Called to investigate, Holmes seems to face a supernatural foe. In the tense narration of the detective's efforts to solve the crime, Conan Doyle meditates on late Victorian and early twentieth-century ideas of ancestry and atavism, the possible biological determination of criminals, the stability of the British landed classes, and the place of the supernatural. Historical documents included with this fully-annotated Broadview edition help contextualize the novel's debates and reveal its cultural and literary significance as a supreme instance of early detective fiction. Also included is the Conan Doyle short story "The Adventure of the Speckled Band."

Begun as a series of stories told by Kenneth Grahame to his six-year-old son, The Wind in the Willows has become one of the most beloved works of children's literature ever written. It has been illustrated, famously, by E.H. Shepard and Arthur Rackham, and parts of it were dramatized by A.A. Milne as Toad of Toad Hall. A century after its initial publication it still enchants. Much in Grahame's novel "the sensitivity of Mole, the mania of Toad, the domesticity of Rat"permeates our imaginative lives (as children and adults). And Grahame's burnished prose still dazzles. Now comes an annotated edition of The Wind in the Willows by a leading literary scholar that instructs the reader in a larger appreciation of the novel's charms and serene narrative magic. In an introduction aimed at a general audience, Seth Lerer tells us everything that we, as adults, need to know about the author and his work. He vividly captures Grahame's world and the circumstances under which The Wind in the Willows came into being. In his running commentary on the novel, Lerer offers complete annotations to the language, contexts, allusions, and larger texture of Grahame's prose. Anyone who has read and loved The Wind in the Willows will want to own and cherish this beautiful gift edition. Those coming to the novel for the first time, or returning to it with their own children, will not find a better, more sensitive guide than Seth Lerer.

Twelfth-century England is in turmoil. The Third Crusade failed; King Richard is imprisoned in Austria; Prince John--the king's evil brother--controls the throne; and country's ruling class, the French-descended Normans, are taking advantage of Saxon landowners and nobles. Before the knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe left for the crusades, Cedric, his Saxon father, shunned him for supporting King Richard. Now that Ivanhoe has returned, he attempts to save his love, Lady Rowena, and right the many wrongs--with the aid of a mysterious Black Knight as well as Robin Hood and his merry men. Filled with jousting, sword fighting, and damsels in distress, this historical romance by Scottish author Sir Walter Scott also examines topics such as prejudice and reconciliation. This is an unabridged edition of the classic novel, which was first published in England in 1820.

The brevity of Muriel Spark's novels is equaled only by their brilliance. These four novels, each a miniature masterpiece, illustrate her development over four decades. Despite the seriousness of their themes, all four are fantastic comedies of manners, bristling with wit.   Spark's most celebrated novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher's catastrophic effect on her pupils. The Girls of Slender Means is a beautifully drawn portrait of young women living in a hostel in London in the giddy postwar days of 1945. The Driver's Seat follows the final haunted hours of a woman descending into madness. And The Only Problem is a witty fable about suffering that brings the Book of Job to bear on contemporary terrorism.   All four novels give evidence of one of the most original and unmistakable voices in contemporary fiction. Characters are vividly etched in a few words; earth-shaking events are lightly touched on. Yet underneath the glittering surface there is an obsessive probing of metaphysical questions: the meaning of good and evil, the need for salvation, the search for significance.

Inspired by a feverish dream, Stevenson's renowned horror fantasy is a glimpse into the darker side of all human beings. Dr. Henry Jekyll has been obsessed since early manhood by the uneasy duality of good and evil that he senses in himself and others, and is driven, to the dismay of his peers, to tamper with the mysterious, transcendental side of science. The respected doctor becomes inexplicably silent and reclusive, while, at the same time, the terrifying Mr. Edward Hyde begins to stalk the streets of London. At heart a chilling tale of the perils of ambition and hubris, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reflects many of the preoccupations of Stevenson's own Victorian milieu--the dangers of a morbidly repressive society and the post-Darwinian fear of man's bestial nature.