Nathaniel P. Ashcroft – författare

Written in 1918, when the Zeppelin raids were real and the English coast was truly watched, E. Phillips Oppenheim's spy story is a quiet, domestic one, played out over dinner tables. A passenger is set down from a Zeppelin and walks into the house of a woman who must now weigh what she owes her country against what she owes an old and dangerous debt. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 35 full-page color plates.

Drawn from Thomas Hardy's own years as an architect restoring West Country churches, A Pair of Blue Eyes sends a young designer to a remote Cornish parish to survey a crumbling tower - where he loses his heart to the rector's daughter, as, later, does the very London critic who reviews his work. Set on the cliffs Hardy knew intimately, it is also the novel that gave the word 'cliffhanger' its literal birth. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates, Millais and Courbet's coasts among them.

George W. Gough tells the story of the Jacobite Forty-Five not as a romance of tartan and lost causes but as an ordinary man's war. In the Staffordshire of 1745, with the Young Pretender's army marching south, a yeoman farmer's son with a sure sword arm finds himself carrying dispatches he cannot read for a cause he never chose. Published in 1917, when England was again counting its sons, this edition presents Gough's complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates.

Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan is one of the founding works of modern weird fiction, praised by writers from Lovecraft to Stephen King. A reckless surgeon operates on a young woman's brain so that she might glimpse the god Pan - and years later a chain of respectable London gentlemen begin, one by one, to take their own lives. Denounced as degenerate on its appearance in 1894, it has quietly haunted horror ever since. This edition presents Machen's complete and unabridged novella, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

A weary man who has spent his whole life in a single office steps off at an unremarkable railway junction, forms no plans, and stays - and Mugby Junction begins to tell him its stories. Among them is the greatest ghost story Dickens ever wrote: 'The Signal-Man,' who works the line below the tunnel mouth and has seen something dreadful on the track. Written for the Christmas number of 1866, the year after Dickens survived the Staplehurst rail disaster, this edition presents the complete and unabridged text, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

The novel that introduced the world to Sherlock Holmes. An army surgeon invalided home from Afghanistan, in want of cheap lodgings, is introduced to a singular young man conducting chemical experiments in a hospital laboratory - and Dr. Watson's life, and detective fiction, are changed forever. From the rooms at 221B Baker Street to a murder whose roots run back across an American desert, the method and the friendship arrive here fully formed. Conan Doyle wrote it in three weeks and sold it outright for twenty-five pounds. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

Emily Bronte's only novel is like nothing else in English. On the wild Yorkshire moors, across two houses and three generations, a love burns between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff too fierce for either to name and too destructive to survive - spilling revenge down onto the innocent who come after. Told at two removes, by a bewildered stranger and a partial servant, it forces the reader to weigh how much can be believed. Published under a man's name and dismissed as brutal, it is now recognized as a masterpiece. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates - Fuseli's Nightmare, Goya, Millais - chosen to match its weather.

Daniel Defoe's own sequel to the most famous adventure in English carries Robinson Crusoe far beyond his island. Old, wealthy, and unable to rest, Crusoe returns to the scene of his marooning and then sails on - to Madagascar, India, and China, and overland across the vast Siberian winter to Archangel. Read for a century as the other half of Crusoe's story, this edition presents Defoe's complete and unabridged sequel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates.

Sickened by the popular novels that dressed up criminals as romantic heroes, William Makepeace Thackeray wrote Catherine to spoil the taste. Catherine Hayes, a servant girl, marries badly, poisons her way out, and burns at Tyburn - drawn as repellently as her author could manage, though his contempt keeps sliding into something like pity. His attack on the Newgate novel, and an early flash of the great satirist to come, this edition presents the complete and unabridged serial, newly typeset and illustrated with 37 full-page color plates, Hogarth among them.

Perhaps the most quietly terrifying story Henry James ever wrote - and nothing happens in it. John Marcher is certain he has been singled out for some rare and dreadful fate, and can do nothing but wait; May Bartram agrees to wait beside him, and the years drain away in drawing rooms. The beast has been crouching in the jungle the whole time, and the reader sees it long before Marcher does. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novella, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates, Hammershoi's empty rooms among them.

'Handsome, clever, and rich,' Emma Woodhouse is quite certain she knows what everyone around her should want - and quite blind to her own heart. Jane Austen said she was choosing a heroine no one but herself would much like, and then wrote her funniest and most perfectly constructed novel around her, a comedy in which every scheme of matchmaking misfires. The plot is a puzzle whose every clue lies open on the page, and almost no first reader ever spots them. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates - Gainsborough's country gentry, Hogarth's marriage market.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius sold literature by the ton - his five-cent Little Blue Books put Shakespeare and Darwin into the overall pockets of working America. Yet the novel he wrote with his wife Marcet in 1921 is harder and bleaker than anything the Blue Books peddled. On a Kansas farm, a marriage made for the sake of the land binds a woman to a husband who is not cruel, only certain, amid the dust, the wheat, and the mortgages that grind them both down. This edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.