Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope's series of witty, gently satirical stories of provincial life are set in the fictional town of Barchester and the surrounding county of Barsetshire. With a focus on the lives, loves and tribulations of the local clergy and rural gentry, the canvas is broad and colourful, with a set of iconic characters in whose lives we become intimately involved as they grow up, grow old, and fall in or out of love and friendship across the years....

Augustus Melmotte is a fraudulent foreign financier who preys on dissolute nobility - using charm to tempt the weak into making foolish investments in his dubious schemes. Persuaded to put money into a notional plot to run a railroad from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, the capricious gambler Felix Carbury soon becomes one of his victims.

'Barchester Towers', Trollope's most popular novel, is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire. Trollope continues the story, begun in 'The Warden', of Mr Harding and his daughter Eleanor, introducing Mr Slope, Dr Proudie and the Stanhope family.

The first of Trollope's six Palliser novels, 'Can You Forgive Her?' explores the dilemma of Alice Vavasor, torn between two suitors, and the choices faced by two other independent women. The tensions within Victorian society highlighted by the plot are illuminated in the introduction and notes to this new edition.

The Revd Mark Robarts puts his future and his family in peril when he guarantees the debts of an unscrupulous MP. The romantic hopes of Mark's sister Lucy are also dependent on the goodwill of Mark's offended patroness, mother of Lucy's suitor. Trollope's fourth Barchester novel, 'Framley Parsonage' remains one of his most popular stories.

Lizzie Eustace marries for money, and when her husband dies she inherits his estate and the family diamonds. The Eustace lawyers demand that the diamonds be returned, but Lizzie is determined to hold on to them.

This is Trollope's most detailed and concise study of middle-class life in Baslehurst, in the Devon countryside. It is also a love-story about sweet-natured Rachel Ray and her suitor Luke Rowan, whose battle to take control of Baslehurst's brewery involves a host of typically Trollopian local characters.