Warsaw under Russian rule in the late 1870s is the setting for Prus’s grand panorama of social conflict, political tension, and personal suffering. The middle-aged hero, Wokulski, successful in business, is being destroyed by his obsessive love for a frigid society doll, Izabela. Embattled aristocrats, the new men of finance, Dickensian tradesmen, and the urban poor all come vividly to life on the vast, superbly detailed canvas against which Wokulski’s personal tragedy is played out.

Unlike his Western European counterparts, Prus had to work under official censorship. In this edition, most of the smaller cuts made by the Tsarist censor have been restored, and one longer fragment is included as an appendix.

Precious Bane is a compelling story of passion, with an enduring air of enchantment throughout. This novel haunts us with its beauty and its timeless truths about our deepest hopes. Set in Shropshire in the 1800s, it is alive with the many moods of Nature, both benevolent and violent, and the equally varied moods of the people making lives there.

Prue Sarn is an unlikely heroine, born with a facial disfiguration which the Fates have dictated will deny her love. But Prue has strength far beyond her handicap, and this woman, suspected of witchcraft by her fellow townspeople, rises above them all through an all-encompassing sweetness of spirit.

Precious Bane is also the story of Gideon, Prue's doomed brother, equally strong-willed but with different motives. Determined to defeat the poverty of their farm, he devotes all his energies to making money. His only diversion from this ambition is abandoned for the stronger drive of his money lust.

Finally, it is the story of Kester Woodseaves, whose steady love for all created things leads him to resist people's cruelty toward nature and each other. His love for Prue Sarn enables him to discern her natural loveliness beneath her blighted appearance.

Mary Webb's narrative is one of beauty and resonance, capturing the reader with its lyrical prose and profound insights into human nature.

Giorgio Bassani’s acclaimed novel of unrequited love and the plight of the Italian Jews on the brink of World War II has become a classic of modern Italian literature. The narrator, a young middle-class Jew in the Italian city of Ferrara, has long been fascinated from afar by the Finzi-Continis, a wealthy and aristocratic Jewish family, and especially by their enchanting daughter Micol.

But it is not until 1938 that he is invited behind the walls of their lavish estate. As local Jews begin to gather there to avoid the racial laws of the Fascists, the garden of the Finzi-Continis becomes an idyllic sanctuary in an increasingly brutal world.

Years after the war, the narrator returns in memory to his doomed relationship with the lovely Micol and to the predicament that faced all the Ferrarese Jews, in this unforgettable portrait of a community about to be destroyed by the world outside the garden walls.