Crime & mystery

Wordsworth Classics covers a huge list of beloved works of literature in English and translations. This growing series is rigorously updated, with scholarly introductions and notes added to new titles.

'Pride and Prejudice', which opens with one of the most famous sentences in English Literature, is an ironic novel of manners. In it, the garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim - that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. In this, she is mocked by her cynical and indolent husband.

With its wit, its social precision and, above all, its irresistible heroine, 'Pride and Prejudice' has proved one of the most enduringly popular novels in the English language.

Ricky Tomlinson, master storyteller, was right there in Liverpool at the start of the Mersey Beat music revolution led by The Beatles. In SEARCHING FOR THE ROCK ISLAND LINE, Ricky captures one of the most exciting eras in the history of rock 'n' roll, when it was being challenged in the popularity stakes by the washboard beat of skiffle. It is the compelling story of how the lyrics of a song lead a young Scouse musician on an adventure that takes him across the United States and through a series of life-changing experiences.

This is a thrilling tale that is certain to strike a chord with anybody interested in the formative times of The Beatles. Those were the days, my friends ...

Dialectology

The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing endeavours to take account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. About this book: Love, sex and death are the components of Shakespeare's classic story of the love of two young people which reaches across the barriers of family and convention.

It encompasses great love, high drama, low comedy and a tragic ending. Romeo and Juliet is a pure tragedy of youth told in verse that is both youthful and intense. The loveliness and the music of the poetry make believable the otherwise commonplace afflictions of blighted love.

The beautiful personification of some of the main characters has caused Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio and...

'Young women who have no economic or political power must attend to the serious business of contriving material security'. Jane Austen's sardonic humour lays bare the stratagems, the hypocrisy and the poignancy inherent in the struggle of two very different sisters to achieve respectability. 'Sense and Sensibility' is a delightful comedy of manners in which the sisters Elinor and Marianne represent these two qualities.

Elinor's character is one of Augustan detachment, while Marianne, a fervent disciple of the Romantic Age, learns to curb her passionate nature in the interests of survival.

Molly Sullivan said that the new baby was a little star. She was no trouble at all and she was always smiling...so she became known as Star and no one remembered that her name was Oona. Star Sullivan just wanted everyone to be happy - her father to stop gambling, her mother not to work so hard, her brother to stay out of trouble, her sister to stop worrying about every little thing she ate.

Then the Hale family moved in next door, and from the moment Star saw 23-year-old Laddy Hale, everything began to change - until Star was no longer the sweet, thoughtful girl everyone loved and no one worried about...

Rock & pop

19th century fiction