Author: Charles Dickens
Summary
Oliver Twist’s mother dies shortly after giving birth to him in a workhouse. At nine years old he goes to live with an undertaker where he is cruelly treated. He then runs away to London, where he becomes involved with a gang of child thieves, controlled by the evil Fagin. After a street robbery goes wrong, Oliver is cared for by the kindly Mr Brownlow but he soon ends up back in the grips of Fagin and his accomplice Bill Sikes.

Oliver is shot while breaking into the Maylie’s house and later recovers there, once again free of Fagin. However, Fagin and the mysterious Mr Monks plot to recapture him. Nancy, Sikes’s girlfriend, hears of the plot and tells Rose Maylie. On hearing of her deception, Sikes murders Nancy. We learn that Oliver is actually Monk’s half brother and entitled to a fortune from his father’s will, which was destroyed, and that Monks has been trying to turn Oliver into a criminal to discredit him. The truth comes out in the end and the characters get what they deserve. Sikes is killed, Fagin is hanged, and Oliver eventually finds long-lasting happiness.
Level: advanced.
Source: PENGUIN READERS, Teacher Support Programme.

Author: Victor Hugo
Summary
In Les Misérables, set in France in the nineteenth century, there are different stories intertwined and bound together by the life story of its main character, Jean Valjean,

a former convict who seeks social redemption by means of good deeds, but is haunted by his past.
Level: advanced.
Source: PENGUIN READERS, Teacher Support Programme.

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Summary
Crime and Punishment begins with the double murder of an elderly pawnbroker, Alena Ivanovna, and her younger sister, Elizabeth, by a young law student called Raskolnikoff.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to describing the psychological and physical consequences of the killings, both for the murderer himself and for those close to him.

Level: advanced.
Source: PENGUIN READERS, Teacher Support Programme.