Alchemy, premonitions, disappearances, madness, supernatural sightings and even a whiff of incest combine...a pleasingly nasty affair

An atmospheric and ghostly evocation of a wintry Venice in the 1800s

Wilkie Collins is the finest practitioner of the novel of sensation... he took the elements gothic fiction relied upon - secret lives, lovers, villainy - and moved them into the suburbs... here the genre fused with the already established crime novel and took it in a new direction, more familiar and more frightening

Wilkie Collins [drew] on the conventions of blood and thunder melodrama but subtly let the reader know he's having fun with the game

Fans of Sophie Kinsella will love this effervescent story.

Only Emily Brontë exposes her imagination to the dark spirit

Hers...is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts...by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar

Commonly thought of as 'romantic', but try rereading it without being astonished by the comfortableness with which Brontë's characters subject one another to extremes of physical and psychological violence

Lambasted when it came out as irredeemably perverse and, I quote, as practically "French"'

The greatest love story ever told, Heathcliff the hero being a wild, stormy, gothic fellow who will not rest until his beloved Cathy is in his arms again, even though she died some years previously. My favourite moment comes when he bribes the sexton who buried Cathy to bury him next to her, with the sides of their coffins left open, so when they're dug up 50 years hence nobody will know which bones are his, and which are hers