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In St Petersburg, Raskolnikov, a very poor former student, lives in a tiny room under the roof. He has convinced himself that certain exceptional men have the right to break the law, and he kills an old pawnbroker with an axe. From then on, fear and fever never leave him, while the cunning and patient magistrate Porfiry seems to read his thoughts. We know from the start who the murderer is, and yet the suspense never lets up: everything happens in his conscience. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this masterpiece by Dostoevsky in the language you are learning.

This fourth volume of the Memoirs from Beyond the Grave covers the years 1815 to 1828. Chateaubriand tells of the Hundred Days, which he spends in Ghent with King Louis XVIII, and of the Battle of Waterloo, which he hears thundering in the distance. Then come Napoleon's exile and death on Saint Helena. Chateaubriand also tells of his own career: ambassador in Berlin and London, then Minister of Foreign Affairs. A witness at the heart of events tells from the inside the fall of Napoleon and the return of the kings, and paints a portrait of his friend Madame Récamier. With the translation always in front of you, you can read these famous memoirs in the language you are learning.

In London at the end of the nineteenth century, Adolf Verloc keeps a shady little shop in Soho, where he lives with his wife Winnie and Winnie's simple-minded young brother, Stevie. Secretly, he spies on anarchists for a foreign embassy. One day, his employer demands that he carry out a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory. Inspired by a real failed bombing, it is one of the first great novels about terrorism, and still strikingly relevant. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this dark, ironic novel in the language you are learning.

In the nineteenth-century English countryside, Lady Constantine lives alone on her estate while her husband hunts lions in Africa. She has promised him she will see almost no one, and she is bored. At the top of an old tower she finds Swithin St Cleeve, a young man of twenty who watches the sky and dreams of becoming an astronomer. She helps him with his research, and love grows between them, despite the difference in age and rank. Thomas Hardy sets this intimate story beneath the vastness of the starry sky. With the translation always in front of you, this tender novel is a pleasure to read in the language you are learning.

This collection brings together three sea stories. In “Youth”, Marlow remembers his first voyage as an officer, on a battered old cargo ship that catches fire on the way to the East. In “Typhoon”, Captain MacWhirr, a man without imagination, takes his steamer into the heart of a terrible storm, with two hundred Chinese labourers in the hold. In “The Secret Sharer”, a young captain hides a stranger on board, a man who swam up to the ship in the middle of the night. Conrad, who was a sailor for twenty years, makes you feel the sea like no one else: the danger, the captain's loneliness, the courage of ordinary men. With the translation always in front of you, you can discover them in the language you are learning.

Father Brown, a small Catholic priest with an absent-minded air, solves cases that baffle the police and the experts, often with his friend Flambeau, a former thief turned detective. A scientist accused of treason in Paris, travellers held up by brigands in the mountains of Italy, an old Cornish family: each puzzle is solved thanks to a detail no one else noticed. Twelve detective stories full of humour and paradox, in which this quiet priest, who knows the human heart well, guesses the truth before anyone else. You can read each story in one sitting in the language you are learning.

In Paris, Thérèse, a young society woman in a loveless marriage, is bored in her elegant drawing room. On a trip to Florence, the city whose emblem is the red lily, she falls in love with Jacques Dechartre, a sensitive and passionate artist. But Jacques is jealous, and Thérèse's past comes back to haunt him. A great story of love and jealousy under the Tuscan sun, by Anatole France, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this beautiful novel in the language you are learning.

Diogenes Laertius tells the lives and ideas of the philosophers of ancient Greece, from Thales to Epicurus. We see Thales fall into a ditch while gazing at the stars, and Diogenes the Cynic looking for an honest man in broad daylight, lantern in hand, or asking Alexander the Great to stand out of his sun. Funny or surprising, these anecdotes bring the great thinkers close and make them human. We understand what each one thought by seeing how he lived: a lively way into the origins of philosophy. Each life is a story of its own, and the book can be read at your own pace in the language you are learning.

Why are there so many different species, and why does each one seem made for its surroundings? Charles Darwin starts from concrete observations: breeders' pigeons, plants, the animals of distant islands. From them he draws a simple idea: in the struggle for life, it is the best adapted beings that survive and leave offspring. It is in this book that Darwin sets out his theory of evolution by natural selection. It changed for ever the way we see living things and our own place in nature. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great classic of science in the language you are learning.

Back from Europe, Dr Simão Bacamarte settles in Itaguaí, a small town in Brazil, and opens an asylum there, the Green House, to study madness methodically. First he locks up a few slightly odd inhabitants, then respected people, then so many that the asylum ends up housing four fifths of the town. With biting irony, Machado de Assis, Brazil's greatest writer, asks a question that makes us smile and think: who decides what is normal? Full of humour, this short story can be read in one sitting in the language you are learning.

On Wall Street, a lawyer takes on a new copyist, Bartleby, a pale, quiet young man who is very diligent at first. One day, when his employer asks him to check a copy with him, Bartleby simply replies: “I would prefer not to.” Then he gives the same answer to every request, without ever leaving the office. Funny and unsettling at once, this short story asks a question you do not forget: what do you do with someone who refuses everything, politely and without anger? His phrase, “I would prefer not to”, has become famous all over the world. You can read the story in one sitting in the language you are learning.

In the One State, surrounded by a wall, people no longer have names but numbers. They all live by the same timetable, in glass houses where everyone sees everything. D-503, the engineer of a spaceship meant to carry this perfect happiness to other planets, keeps a diary for the people of those planets. Then he meets I-330, a woman who does not follow the rules. Banned in the Soviet Union, this novel is one of the very first great stories about a totalitarian society, and George Orwell read it before writing “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Written as a diary, in short entries, the novel can be read with the translation always in front of you, in the language you are learning.

In the fifth century BC, Athens and Sparta, the two greatest cities of Greece, wage war on each other for almost thirty years. Thucydides, an Athenian general who lived through it, tells of the battles, the plague that strikes Athens, the speeches of Pericles and the disastrous expedition against Sicily. He tries to understand what drives men to war: fear, interest, honour. His lessons still hold: people still speak of the “Thucydides Trap” when a rising power alarms an established one. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great classic of history in the language you are learning.

Seneca, philosopher and adviser to the Emperor Nero, writes to those close to him to help them live better. The first of these six dialogues argues that life is not short, but that we waste it, busy with everything except living. The others speak of peace of mind, of the happy life and of the wise man's calm in the face of insults. His advice on the use of time and self-control still speaks to today's reader, and many of his sentences are made to be remembered. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great classic in the language you are learning.

One August morning, whole trainloads of sick people and pilgrims leave Paris for Lourdes. On board, Marie, a young woman who can no longer walk, hopes to be cured. Travelling beside her is Abbé Pierre Froment, her childhood friend, who became a priest but has lost his faith: she also prays that he will find it again. The novel takes place over five days, among the crowds and the sick. Zola shows the immense hope of those waiting for a miracle, and asks a question that touches everyone: what should we believe in the face of suffering? With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great novel by Zola in the language you are learning.

In London in 1902, Jane Holland, a young novelist, suddenly becomes famous. Her friend George Tanqueray, a writer of genius who is still unknown, warns her: for him, fame is the beginning of the end. Jane secretly loves him, but Tanqueray, who shuns society, marries Rose, the young servant who nursed him. The novel asks a question that has lost none of its force: can you love, marry and go on writing, and is the answer the same for a woman as for a man? With the translation always in front of you, you can discover this subtle and witty novel in the language you are learning.

This collection brings together Lu Xun's first stories, written in China in the years after the fall of the empire. A man becomes convinced that his neighbours want to eat him. A poor old scholar comes to drink his wine in a tavern where people laugh at him. A father buys a blood-soaked remedy to save his son. The most famous story follows Ah Q, a village labourer who turns every humiliation into an imaginary victory. In China, “the Ah Q spirit” still means this way of lying to yourself so as not to see your defeats. With the translation always in front of you, these short stories can be read one by one in the language you are learning.

During the war of 1870, ten travellers leave Prussian-occupied Rouen in the same stagecoach: local worthies, two nuns, a democrat and a prostitute nicknamed Boule de Suif. She is the only one who shares her food. But at an inn, a Prussian officer detains them and sets his conditions. This is the story that made Maupassant famous: with irony, he shows what fine principles are worth when everyone is thinking of themselves. Around it, the volume gathers eleven other stories about money, marriage and little middle-class arrangements. Short and lively, they can be read one by one in the language you are learning.

In the Caucasus in the 1830s, an old captain tells a traveller the story of Pechorin, a young Russian officer who is brilliant, jaded and dangerous to those who love him. Then the traveller gets hold of his journal. In it we read how Pechorin seduces a princess out of sheer boredom, and how he fights a duel coldly, almost out of curiosity. Lermontov, who himself died in a duel at twenty-six, made Pechorin one of the most fascinating characters in Russian literature: a hero who is no hero. Made up of five short stories, it is easy to read in the language you are learning.

Here Nietzsche attacks the certainties of philosophers, who claim to seek the truth without bias. He asks where our ideas of good and evil come from, and distinguishes a master morality, which celebrates strength and pride, from a slave morality, which makes virtues of humility and pity. A provocative book that makes you ask why you believe what you believe. It gave us a famous line: “if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you”. Written in fragments, often very short ones, it can be read one aphorism at a time, at your own pace, in the language you are learning.

Chichikov arrives in a provincial town, charms all of polite society and pays visits to the landowners round about. He offers them a strange deal: to buy their dead serfs. These peasants have died since the last census, but they are still on the registers, and their masters still pay tax on them. From estate to estate come the miser, the boor, the suspicious widow and the dreamer: Gogol draws from them a gallery of irresistible portraits, and one of the funniest novels in Russian literature. With the translation always in front of you, this humorous novel is a pleasure to read in the language you are learning.

London, 1869: Robert Orange, a young Catholic MP of French descent and a protégé of Disraeli, marries Brigit, a young widow whom he loves with an almost religious love. On the very day of the wedding, they learn that Brigit's first husband, believed drowned, is alive: so their marriage is not valid. Torn between politics, his faith and the eyes of the world, Orange must decide how to act, while the ambitious Lady Sara de Treverell takes an interest in him. This novel is about love, honour and conscience. With the translation always in front of you, you can read it in the language you are learning.

Ruined and determined to die, young Raphaël de Valentin walks into an antique shop, where the dealer offers him an animal skin covered in signs. This talisman grants every wish of its owner, but it shrinks with each wish, and its owner's life grows shorter with it. Rich overnight, Raphaël must choose between living long and living out his desires. Balzac blends the supernatural with a portrait of the Paris of his day. The novel left an expression still used in France: to shrink “like the peau de chagrin”. With the translation always in front of you, you can read this great novel in the language you are learning.

In Rome in the third century, after the fall of Palmyra, the nobleman Lucius Manlius Piso writes to his friend Fausta, who has stayed in the East. He tells her about Queen Zenobia, defeated and exiled near Rome, and about the Emperor Aurelian, a feared warrior who decides to crush the Christians. Yet Piso himself shares this new faith. This novel brings Rome to life at a time when two religions clash, seen from the inside by a witness in danger. It follows on from “Zenobia”, but Piso tells Fausta what has become of the queen, so it is easy to step into the story. Written in the form of letters, it is easy to read, one letter after another, in the language you are learning.