Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist announces himself with a cry—and is promptly counted as “a new burden” on the parish. His mother has time for one desperate kiss before the workhouse surgeon turns away to dinner.

In mid-nineteenth-century England, Dickens opens in an unnamed town’s workhouse, where charity comes with rules, ledgers and a sharp eye on the cost of every child. Oliver survives his birth, but the parish soon sends him to be “farmed” with other poor children, in the care of a woman who knows exactly what is good for herself. Dickens’s bitter comedy makes the cruelty all the more chilling: Oliver must endure hunger and neglect before he is old enough to understand why the world has marked him out. How much can one small boy withstand?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.