Classics

A stolen throne, a blackmailer’s memoirs, and a body in a country house — early, breezy, and unmistakably Christie.

When Anthony Cade agrees to deliver a packet of explosive royal memoirs to England, he walks straight into a tangle of stolen jewels, foreign intrigue, and murder at the great house called Chimneys. First published in 1925, this is...

The mystery with one of the most famous twists ever written — and the case that made Hercule Poirot a legend.

In the quiet village of King’s Abbot, the wealthy Roger Ackroyd is found stabbed in his study. Retired to grow vegetable marrows, Hercule Poirot is drawn back to work by a neighbor’s plea — and the solution he uncovers stunned readers in...

In 1873, four young Americans nearly walked off with the Bank of England’s fortune. This is the confidence man’s own story.

No tunnel. No pistol. Just good tailoring, a false name, and a devastating understanding of how Victorian banking ran on trust. Posing as a wealthy American named Frederick Albert Warren, Austin Bidwell talked his way into...

Have you seen the Yellow Sign?

There is a play that no one can read twice. Its first act is harmless. Everyone who reads into the second act is ruined — driven mad, damned, or changed forever. It is called The King in Yellow, and the genius of Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 masterpiece is that he never lets you read it. You only meet the wreckage it...

Newlyweds tour the solar system in a private spaceship — a dazzling vision of space travel written two years before the Wright brothers left the ground.

An English lord and his American bride set off on the ultimate honeymoon: a voyage in their own gravity-defying vessel to the Moon, Mars, Venus, and beyond, discovering wonders and dangers on...

Four strangers, one medieval Italian castle, one enchanted month — the cozy classic behind the beloved film.

On a wet February afternoon in London, Mrs. Wilkins reads an advertisement she cannot afford and cannot resist: a small mediaeval castle on the Italian Riviera, to be let for the month of April, “To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and...

The cozy classic a new generation is rediscovering — from the author of Anne of Green Gables.

At twenty-nine, Valancy Stirling has never been loved, never been free, and never once spent a night away from the joyless house where her clan of aunts and uncles rules her life. Her only escape is a castle she has built inside her own mind. Then a...

A Peruvian mummy, a strangled scholar, and a fortune in emeralds — a vintage murder mystery from the best-selling detective novelist you’ve never heard of.

When a rare green mummy vanishes and a man is found dead, an Egyptology-obsessed suitor must untangle a web of theft, obsession, and murder to win the woman he loves. Fergus Hume outsold...

The complete, unabridged original that gave the world Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — a two-volume annotated edition. This is Volume One.

A stranger walks into a small barber’s shop by St. Dunstan’s church. He is never seen to walk out. So begins the most notorious penny dreadful ever written, the sprawling Victorian romance...

The thrilling conclusion of the complete, unabridged original that gave the world Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This is Volume Two.

The barber’s trade by St. Dunstan’s church has grown too bold, and the mystery of the string of pearls, the missing sailor, and the celebrated pies of Mrs. Lovett draws steadily toward the light....

An undercover detective infiltrates a council of anarchists — and falls down a rabbit hole that has baffled and delighted readers for over a century.

Gabriel Syme is a poet and a policeman, sworn to destroy the secret Central Council of Anarchists, whose seven members are code-named for the days of the week. But nothing on that council is what...

The novel that invented the Gothic — and the book Jane Austen’s heroine couldn’t put down.

Orphaned Emily St. Aubert is carried off to a brooding castle in the Apennines, where a scheming guardian, a veiled horror, and secrets behind every locked door test her reason and her courage. First published in 1794, The Mysteries of Udolpho is the...

The Gothic novel so shocking that Parliament denounced it and its own author was forced to censor it.

Ambrosio is Madrid’s most revered holy man — until temptation enters his monastery and drags him into a spiral of obsession, black magic, and unspeakable crime. Published in 1796 when its author was just twenty, The Monk scandalized Europe, was...

Meet the original gentleman thief — the master of disguise who inspired a century of imitators and a global streaming phenomenon.

He robs only those who deserve it, walks out of prison on his own schedule, and signs his crimes with a flourish. In these first adventures from 1907, Maurice Leblanc introduced Arsène Lupin — burglar, escape artist,...

He sits down at your table a stranger. By morning he owns your fortune, your will, and even your voice.

Germany, in the ruined years after the Great War. Into the gambling clubs and seance parlors of a society coming apart walks a man with no fixed face: physician, hypnotist, forger, market-rigger, and murderer. He calls himself many names. The...

Published in the last year of the Great War, this is not the gentle book its title promises.

Roughly its first third is war satire aimed squarely at the German Emperor and his son. Kaiser Wilhelm II is interrogated by the Crown Prince to the tune of Lewis Carroll. A parody of the Rubaiyat stars Billi Kaisam, Surnamed the Tentbreaker. And the...

A kitten sets sail across the Atlantic because a cat may look at a king, so surely a kitten may look at a prince.

An ant with more social ambition than provisions invites five score guests to a ball and then sits up all night working out how to feed them. A giraffe is measured. A violet arrives late. And an elf borrows a sleeping dormouse’s...

Printed at Sidney’s Press in New Haven in 1806, adorned with cuts, and offered for the amusement of Little Lack Beard and his pretty sisters.

This is a chapbook: a cheap, thin, hand-illustrated popular book of the kind peddlers sold for pennies and children read to pieces. Thousands were printed in the early American republic. Very few survive.

Before Gatsby’s parties, there were Dorothy Speare’s dancers.

It is 1922. Twenty-year-old Joy Nelson arrives in a New England college town with a country stillness about her and a secret she barely trusts: she can sing. What she finds instead is a set of young people who cannot sit still — the “Excitement-Eaters,” who dance until the milk wagons...

What would happen if one man suddenly owned more gold than most governments on earth?

Aboard a steamer bound for Buenos Ayres, the composed American Robert Brent falls into conversation with a shrewd Scotsman named Duncan Fraser. Out of that meeting comes a secret hidden in the Cordilleras of South America, and out of the secret comes a hoard...

Dotty spends an entire year secretly collecting a story for every month, pasting them into a scrapbook so it can go under the Christmas tree for Marjorie.

Everything in this book is what Marjorie read. A little girl telephones Santa Claus and is asked, instead of giving her list, to find children he ought to know about. A valentine goes to...