Each volume in the Collector's Library series has a specially commissioned Afterword, brief biography of the author and a further reading list. The Afterword is by leading UK playwright, novelist and Sherlockian, David Stuart Davies.

Black Beauty tells the story of the horse's own long and varied life, from a well-born colt in a pleasant meadow, to an elegant carriage horse for a gentleman, to a painfully overworked cab horse. Throughout, Sewell rails — in a gentle, nineteenth-century manner — against animal maltreatment. Young readers will follow Black Beauty's fortunes, good and bad, with gentle masters as well as cruel. Children can easily make the leap from horse-human relationships to human-human relationships, and begin to understand how their own consideration of others may be a benefit to all.

«Each volume in the «Collector's Library» series has a specially commissioned Afterword, brief biography of the author and a further reading list. The Afterword for this first collected edition of M. R. James's «Complete Ghost Stories» is by the well-known crime writer and eminent Sherlockian, David Stuart Davies. This is the only complete edition in print and it contains three further stories written after publication of M. R. James's «Collected Ghost Stories»: «The Experiment», «The Malice of Inanimate Objects» and «A Vignette».»

«Part of the «Collector's Library» series, this title includes an Afterword, brief biography of the author and a further reading list.»

«Part of the «Collector's Library» series, this book's Afterword is by the experienced book editor and well-known writer, Anna South. It features a brief biography of the author and a reading list.»

Wilkie Collins' classic story, The Woman in White, is one of the great mystery thrillers of the nineteenth century and beyond. It is a wonderful combination of rich characterisation and cunning melodrama which ensnares the reader from its opening pages. The novel features one of the strongest heroines of the Victorian Age, Marian Halcombe, who was a revelation for the readers of the time. Although not conventionally attractive, she is a tough, determined and feisty soul, well equipped to travel down the dark and dangerous pathway fate has decreed for her. Also featured is one of the great villains of all literature, the sly, smooth and corpulent Count Fosco, whose eccentric habits both chill and amuse. Since its publication, The Woman in White has never been out of print and has been the subject of numerous theatrical, film and television adaptations, including most recently a musical version by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Containing an afterword, each volume in the Collector's Library series includes a biography of the author, and a further reading list.

Each volume in the Collector's Library series has a specially commissioned Afterword, biography of the author, and a further reading list.

Dubliners was first published in 1914. The book depicts middle-class Catholic life in Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century. The topics related in the opening stories include the disappointments of childhood, the frustrations of adolescence, and the importance of sexual awakening. Joyce was 25 years old when he wrote this miscellaneous collection of short stories, among which The Dead is probably the most famous. Considered at the time as a literary experiment, they are refreshingly original and as surprising at the beginning of this century as they were at the beginning of the last.

Connie's unhappy marriage to Clifford Chatterley is one scarred by mutual frustration and alienation. Crippled from wartime action, Clifford is confined to a wheelchair, while Connie's solitary, sterile existence is contained within the narrow parameters of the Chatterley ancestral home, Wragby. She seizes her chance at happiness and freedom when she embarks on a passionate affair with the estate's gamekeeper, Mellors, discovering a world of sexual opportunity and pleasure she'd thought lost to her. The explosive passion of Connie and Mellors' relationship — and the searing candour with which it is described — marked a watershed in twentieth century fiction, garnering Lady Chatterley's Lover a wide and enduring readership and lasting notoriety.

This is one of the most significant literary works of the 20th century, and one of the most innovative. Young Irish Catholic, Stephen Dedalus, rejects religion and national ties to develop unfettered as an artist. Strongly autobiographical, the novel is one of the founding texts of Modernism and the precursor of Ulysses. Its originality shocked contemporary readers on its publication in 1916, who found its treating of the minutiae of daily life indecorous, and its central character unappealing.

The boxed set contains the following volumes: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes; The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes; The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear; The Return of Sherlock Holmes and his Last Bow; A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four.

A Study in Scarlet introduced the great scientific detective Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, his friend and chronicler, to the reading public. This novel, a cornerstone in the annals of crime fiction, tells of their first meeting and how they set up in rooms together in Baker Street. It is not long before the charismatic sleuth and his faithful companion are plunged into a dramatic mystery which starts with the discovery of a corpse in a deserted house and the letters RACHE scrawled on the wall in blood. The Sign of the Four, the second Holmes novel, presents the detective with one of his greatest challenges — solving the theft of the great Agra treasure in India. In these two classic novels you have the foundation of the Sherlock Holmes legend. As well as his witty and illuminating Afterword to this edition, David Stuart Davies, the illustrious editor of Sherlock magazine, has provided a fascinating chronology of the Sherlock Holmes Stories.

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends, George and Harris, decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a T. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian clerking classes, it hilariously captured the spirit of its age.

Around the World in Eighty Days (Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours) is a classic. The story starts in London on 2 October 1872. Phileas Fogg is a wealthy, solitary man with regular habits, who fires his former butler for getting wrong the temperature of his shaving water. He hires Passepartout as a replacement. Later that day he gets involved in an argument over an article in the Daily Telegraph, stating that with the opening of a new railway in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in eighty days. The exciting, if now dated, adventure of Fogg and Passepartout will entertain modern readers as much as it did the Victorians.

Sherlock Holmes is back on the case in this collection of sparkling short stories. Not only does Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brilliant detective investigate a fascinating series of crimes and misdemeanours in The Memoirs, but we also learn about Holmes' early days as a sleuth hound and encounter the detective's brilliant brother, Mycroft, who is a member of the Diogenes Club, one of the strangest establishments in London. And, of course, in The Final Problem Holmes come face to face with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, The Napoleon of Crime. Their struggle, seemingly to the death, was to leave many readers desolate at the loss of Holmes, but was also to lead to his immortality as a literary figure. As well as his witty and illuminating Afterword to this edition, David Stuart Davies, the illustrious editor of Sherlock magazine, has provided a fascinating chronology of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair. Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be a simple tale proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. This new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a monstrous town, a place of idiocy, madness, criminality and butchery.

The Waves traces the lives and interactions of seven friends in an exploratory and sensuous narrative. The Waves was conceived and written during a highly political phase in Woolfs career, when she was speaking on issues of gender and of class. This was also the period when her love affair with Vita Sackville-West was at its most intense. The work is often described as if it were the product of a secluded, disembodied sensibility. Yet its writing is supremely engaged and engaging, providing an experience which the reader is unlikely to forget.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the greatest collection of detective short stories ever written. From his residence at 221B Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes solves a series of baffling and bizarre cases using his inimitable deductive powers, recounted to us by the faithful though sometimes bemused Dr Watson.

Dicken's tale of David Copperfield follows him from birth through to his successful career as a novelist. The novel boasts a famously rich cast of outlandish characters: the glamorous Steerforth, the cheerful Mr Micawber, the villainous Uriah Heep and David's eccentric aunt Betsy Trotwood, among others. Dickens described this energetic and enjoyable novel as his 'favourite child' and it is easy to see why.