Wuthering Heights

Mr Lockwood, renting a house on the Yorkshire moors, is driven by a storm to spend the night at Wuthering Heights, the farmhouse of his landlord Heathcliff, where a ghostly child scratches at the window. The housekeeper Nelly Dean then tells him the history: how Heathcliff, a foundling, grew up with Catherine Earnshaw and loved her beyond reason, how she married the gentle Edgar Linton instead, and how Heathcliff spent the rest of his life taking revenge on both families, down to the next generation.

Emily Brontë's only novel was published in 1847 under the name Ellis Bell, a year before her death; its violence and its nested way of telling puzzled early readers and now seem astonishing. Ruth Golding reads it alone, in about fifteen hours.