Roger Chillingworth arrives in New England after two years’ separation from his wife, Hester Prynne, to find her on trial for adultery. She refuses to reveal her lover and is sentenced to wear a scarlet letter ‘A’ sewn onto her clothes. Resolving to discover the man’s identity, Roger sets out to destroy his rival, while Hester desperately tries to protect her illegitimate daughter from a society determined to condemn them both.

A smash hit in its day, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is the gripping tale of three New England settlers at odds with the seventeenth-century Puritan society in which they live, and remains one of literature’s most evocative portraits of a love triangle.

This beautiful Macmillan Collector’s Library edition of The Scarlet Letter features an afterword by broadcaster Jonty Claypole.