Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in two parts, each resoundingly popular and receiving critical acclaim. The novel follows the lives of the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, from childhood into maturity. The journey is not an easy one, and each is humbled and ultimately uplifted by her encounters with love, society and death. The work is based loosely on Alcott's experiences growing up with three sisters.

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, was completed by Mary Shelley at the age of 19. She infused this original novel with Gothic and Romantic elements. Scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a large and powerful creature in the likeness of man, but is disgusted by his own creation and he abandons the being to fend for itself. Spawning generations of horror stories in the genre, Frankenstein is a gruesome warning against playing

Brimming with romance and adventure, Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote is considered by many to be the greatest work in the Spanish literary canon. Both humane and humorous, the two volume oeuvre centres on the adventures of the self-styled knight errant Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Quixote's credulous and chubby squire. Together the unlikely pair of heroes bumble their way from one bizarre adventure to another fueled in their quests by Quixote's

Recently the basis for a major motion picture starring Hollywood golden boy Brad Pitt, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was written in 1922 by the golden boy of early twentieth-century American fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of such era-defining masterworks as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. The tale follows the travails and triumphs of the title character, who is born in the body of an elderly man and becomes