Secondhand Classic Literature & Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2729

Secondhand Classic Literature & Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2729

A wide-ranging classic literature box with five Conan Doyle volumes — four Holmes titles plus the essential Baskervilles — alongside three Australian classics: C.J. Dennis's Sentimental Bloke, Marcus Clarke's For the Term of His Natural Life, and Henry Lawson's Joe Wilson's Mates. From there it fans out into Gide, Patrick White, Shakespeare twice, and a strong run of 19th-century European fiction — Stendhal, Fontane, Flaubert, and Thackeray.

1. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — ed. Richard Lancelyn Green — Not Doyle himself, but a Penguin anthology of continuation stories collected by the great Sherlockian bibliographer: the best of the Holmes pastiches gathered in one volume.
2. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle — The second collection of Holmes stories, running from "Silver Blaze" to "The Final Problem" — the story in which Holmes and Moriarty apparently go over the Reichenbach Falls together.
3. The Apprentice — Wilda Moxham — Published by the Real Books imprint.
4. The Sentimental Bloke and Other Verse — C.J. Dennis — The 1915 verse novel that made Dennis famous: Bill the larrikin, his courtship of Doreen, and a vernacular Melbourne voice that was entirely new in Australian poetry.
5. For the Term of His Natural Life — Marcus Clarke — The great Australian convict novel: Rufus Dawes, transported for a crime he didn't commit, surviving the brutality of Van Diemen's Land. One of the foundational texts of Australian literature.
6. Joe Wilson's Mates — Henry Lawson — Fifty-six stories from Lawson's prose works: the selectors, the bush workers, the women waiting for men who may not return. The 1890s Australia that shaped a national literature.
7. Leviathan — Thomas Hobbes (Penguin Classics) — Hobbes's 1651 argument that sovereign authority is the only alternative to the war of all against all. The text from which almost all subsequent political philosophy takes its bearings.
8. Paradise Lost — John Milton (Penguin Classics) — The fall of Satan, the temptation of Eve, the expulsion from Eden — Milton's twelve-book epic, the greatest sustained poem in the English language after Chaucer.
9. A Study in Scarlet — Arthur Conan Doyle — The first Holmes story: Watson meets Holmes, and the two investigate a murder in a Brixton house with RACHE written on the wall in blood. The beginning of everything.
10. The Valley of Fear — Arthur Conan Doyle — The last of the four Holmes novels: a cipher message from Moriarty, a murder at a Sussex manor, and a second half set in the Pennsylvania coalfields that reveals the full backstory.
11. The Portable Dickens — ed. Angus Wilson — Angus Wilson's selection from across Dickens's novels and journalism, designed for readers who want the essential Dickens in a single volume rather than fifteen.
12. The Counterfeiters — André Gide (Penguin Modern Classics) — Gide's most ambitious novel: a writer composing a novel about the same events as the one we're reading, with forged coins, a corrupt schoolboy network, and a narrative that keeps questioning its own authority.
13. Strait is the Gate / The Vatican Cellars — André Gide (trans. Dorothy Bussy) — Two Gide novellas in one volume: "Strait is the Gate," a love sacrificed to an ascetic ideal, and "The Vatican Cellars," a dark comedy of imposture and unmotivated crime.
14. The Vivisector — Patrick White — Hurtle Duffield, a painter of savage originality adopted by a wealthy family and then cast back into poverty, destroys and is destroyed by everyone he loves. White's most unsparing examination of what the artistic life actually costs.
15. King Lear — William Shakespeare (New Penguin Shakespeare) — An old king divides his kingdom between his daughters according to the love they profess, and loses everything. The most extreme of the tragedies, and by many measures the greatest play in the language.
16. The Hound of the Baskervilles — Arthur Conan Doyle — A supernatural hound on Dartmoor, a cursed family, and Holmes operating largely in the background while Watson carries the investigation forward. The most famous mystery novel in English.
17. Persuasion — Jane Austen (Penguin Classics) — Anne Elliot was persuaded eight years ago to reject the man she loved; now he has returned with a naval career and a fortune. Austen's last completed novel and her most emotionally direct.
18. Romeo and Juliet — William Shakespeare (Wordsworth Classics) — Two households, both alike in dignity, and the lovers whose deaths finally end their families' feud. The play Shakespeare wrote about the violent stupidity of inherited hatred.
19. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (Penguin Classics) — The Persian astronomer-poet's quatrains in the translation that made them famous in the English-speaking world: wine, roses, the brevity of life, and the futility of trying to puzzle out the universe.
20. Lucien Leuwen — Stendhal (Penguin Classics) — Stendhal's unfinished novel: a rich young officer posted to a provincial garrison town falls in love, enters politics, and finds that neither love nor public life delivers what he was promised.
21. Effi Briest — Theodor Fontane (Penguin Classics) — Often called the German Anna Karenina: a young woman married to an older man, a brief affair, and the slow, pitiless consequences of honour codes that everyone privately knows are wrong.
22. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert (Penguin Classics) — Emma Bovary, a doctor's wife in provincial Normandy, who believed that life should feel the way novels feel, and the terrible cost of that belief. The novel that invented literary realism.
23. Vanity Fair — William Thackeray (Penguin English Library) — Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, from Miss Pinkerton's academy through Waterloo and beyond: Thackeray's panoramic satire of ambition, money, and social climbing in Regency England.