Peter Dann
Moby Dick; or, The Whale (version 2)
This great, genre-bending novel nominally centres on the quest of the monomaniacal Captain Ahab to gain revenge for the loss of his leg to a…
The Odyssey (Version 4)
Homer's "The Odyssey" forms the template of practically every adventure story that has been told in the West since it was composed…
Heart of Darkness (version 4)
In this powerful novella based on Joseph Conrad's own experiences in the Belgian Congo, Charles Marlow, an experienced seaman, tells a small…
The Red and the Black
It is a brave author indeed who gives his hero as many flaws as Stendhal bestows upon young Julien Sorel, an ambitious young carpenter's son…
Moll Flanders - Version 2
This warm and witty novel presents itself as the first person narration of an immensely likeable and resourceful woman who, born in the most…
Don Quixote (Complete, Ormsby Translation)
It is a curious paradox that while the two volumes of Don Quixote have been described as the "best novel of all time" and the &quo…
Madame Bovary (Version 2)
Written over a century and a half ago, Madame Bovary is still an extraordinarily fresh, exciting and shockingly frank novel, at once an acut…
The Iliad (Version 2)
This great and terrifying poem about the final weeks of a long war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans before the city of Troy (here r…
Almayer's Folly (Version 3)
Joseph Conrad was born in former Poland, spent part of his childhood exiled in Russia because of his father's Polish nationalist political a…
Gulliver's Travels (Version 3)
First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" presents, as a mock travel tale, a series of thought experiments mi…
Lord Jim (version 2)
While it's not often described as such, "Lord Jim" can be viewed as a kind of love story whose real theme is the close bond which …
The French Revolution: A History. Volume 1: The Bastille (Version 2)
Subtitled "The Bastille", Volume 1 of Thomas Carlyle's three volume "The French Revolution: A History" was first publish…
The Good Soldier (Version 2)
First published in 1915, The Good Soldier might be characterised as a melodrama of English upper class infidelities, cut into little pieces,…
Nostromo (Version 2)
In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad has transformed an apocryphal anecdote about a sailor who got away with stealing a boat loaded with silver into a…
'Twixt Land and Sea
While the central figures in each of the three stories in this collection are sailing captains, the main action in two of them takes place o…
Some Do Not...
Set immediately before and during the Great War, Some Do Not... is a tale of social cruelty among the English upper classes that pits real h…
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Version 2)
"I do not pretend to say the young man is without faults; but they are all the faults of wildness and of youth; faults which he may, na…
The Mirror of the Sea (Version 2)
"Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages,…
The End Of The Tether
At an age when he should, by rights, be embarking on a well-deserved and comfortable retirement, Captain Whalley, a sailor of the old school…
The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (Version 2)
Today, we're likely to react to the title of this novella, on whose 'sincerity of expression' Conrad was willing to stake his artisitic repu…