Another one from my vault of classic novels: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The story is set in nineteenth century England, and tells the tale of Pip, a young orphan brought un ‘by hand’ by his much elder sister whose kind husband later takes him as his apprentice as blacksmith. Through a series of more than…

Tess Durbeyfield is a young peasant who lives in 19th-century south England, and whose naive hopes are those of every young woman of her social class. However, when her father discovers that they are in fact the last direct descendants of the old and noble D’Urbervilles family, her life is turned upside down. Tess is…