HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'It happen'd one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz'd with the Print of a Man's naked Foot on the Shore.' Shipwrecked in a storm at sea, Robinson Crusoe is washed up on a remote and desolate island. As he struggles to piece together a life for himself, Crusoe's physical, moral and spiritual values are tested to the limit. For 24 years he remains in solitude and learns to tame and master the island, until he finally comes across another human being. Considered a classic literary masterpiece, and frequently interpreted as a comment on the British Imperialist approach at the time, Defoe's fable was and still is revered as the very first English novel.

Collins Classics - Moll Flanders
æMy true name is so well known in the Records or Registers at Newgate, and in the Old Bailey, and there are some things of such consequence still depending there, relating to my particular conduct, that it is not to be expected I should set my name or the account of my family to this work.Æ

Born into the seedy world of Newgate Prison and abandoned as a baby at six months old, Moll Flanders soon learns that she can only rely on herself. Her story is an unapologetic one of bigamy, prostitution and theft told in her own indomitable and alluring way. Scurrilous and incorrigible, the reader is left wondering whether Moll is merely a brazen criminal, or a victim or her own circumstance.

DefoeÆs witty romp through the eighteenth-century underworld has much to say about the forces of good and evil and is undeniably one of his most satirical novels.