Whether he's sneaking doughnuts, mooning over a pretty girl, or snookering the local boys to do his work for him, Tom Sawyer is the consummate schemer - but his charm and easygoing nature keep him from being in anyone's bad graces for long. However, when Tom teams up with his friend Huck Finn, their sleepy Missouri town had better watch out.

Die Jagd nach dem weißen Wal wird für Kapitän Ahab zu einer Lebensaufgabe und auch zu einem aufregenden Abenteuer auf Leben und Tod. Er ist besessen von einem einzigen Gedanken: Er will Rache üben an seinem Todfeind, Moby Dick, dem riesigen weißen Wal, der ihn zum Krüppel gemacht hat. Mit seinem Walfänger durchsegelt er die sieben Weltmeere.

A Signature Performance: Elijah Wood becomes the first narrator to bring a youthful voice and energy to the story, perhaps making it the closest interpretation to Twain’s original intent.

One of Jane Austen’s most beloved works, Pride and Prejudice, is vividly brought to life by Academy Award nominee Rosamund Pike ( Gone Girl). In her bright and energetic performance of this British classic, she expertly captures Austen’s signature wit and tone. Her attention to detail, her literary background, and her performance in the 2005 feature film version of the novel provide the perfect foundation from which to convey the story of Elizabeth Bennet, her four sisters, and the inimitable Mr. Darcy.

A Signature Performance: Kenneth Branagh plays this like a campfire ghost story, told by a haunted, slightly insane Marlow.

As a New England mother struggles to support her family in the wake of her husband's service in the Civil War, her four daughters struggle, too - caught between childhood dreams and the realities of burgeoning adulthood. For Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, raised in integrity and virtue, negotiating the right path in life means making choices that will either narrow or expand their destinies.

Pragmatic gambler Phileas Fogg has made a gentlemanly wager to the members of his exclusive club: that he can circle the world in just eighty days, right down to the minute. Fetching his newly appointed French valet, Fogg embarks on a fabulous journey across land and sea - by steamer, rail, and elephant - to win the bet of a lifetime.

Here is the precursor to Jurassic Park. Victorian explorers have heard there is a remote plateau where dinosaurs still survive, and a group set outs on a dangerous mission to find out more about it.

After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. But this lonely girl's life is transformed when she finds the key to the secret garden.

Written at the request of Charles Dickens, North and South is a book about rebellion that poses fundamental questions about the nature of social authority and obedience. Gaskell expertly blends individual feeling with social concern and her heroine, Margaret Hale, is one of the most original creations of Victorian literature. When Margaret Hale's father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience she is forced to leave her comfortable home in the tranquil countryside of Hampshire....

Robinson Crusoe is Daniel Defoe's classic novel of shipwreck and survival, now nearly 300 years old.

The story is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island, encountering Native Americans, captives, and mutineers. This is the tale of an ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances. Robinson Crusoe wrestles with fate and the nature of God.

A mysterious boatman on the Thames, a drowned heir, a dustman and his wife, and a host of other Dickens characters populate this novel of relationships between the classes, money, greed, and love. The 58 characters are presented with remarkable clarity by David Timson.

Golden Globe nominee Scarlett Johansson ( Lost in Translation, Girl with a Pearl Earring) brings a palpable sense of joy and exuberance to her performance of Lewis Carroll's enduring classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The young and imaginative Alice grows weary of her storybook, one "without pictures or conversations", and follows a hasty hare underground - to come face to face with a host of strange and fantastic characters.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, is a savage and haunting satire of the young, rootless postwar generation who lived intent only on the pursuit of wealth and decadent pleasure. Anthony Patch is a 1920s socialite and the presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune. His marriage to the beautiful but selfish Gloria is idyllic at first, but the union slowly disintegrates as reality sets in and their sole goal becomes Anthony's grandfather's fortune.