CLASSICS

''Me have that golden gown!''A blameless girl and her monstrous relatives clash over love and money in Balzac's matchless portrayal of greed in a French provincial town.

Saved, rescued, fished-up, half-drowned, out of the deep, dark river, dry clothes, hair shampooed and set...Set in a 1930s Paris of shabby hotel rooms, seedy bars and drunken encounters, Jean...

'Dead, she was his ghost'A gripping, intensely atmospheric story of love, espionage and betrayal in wartime Shanghai, Lust, Caution is accompanied here by four more shimmering tales of Chinese life.

'Nowhere could she discover the dens of iniquity about which she had dreamed...'Sparkling, darkly humorous tales of high society, playboys, courtesans, peasants, sex and savagery in nineteenth-century France, from the...

'I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.'Featuring an ordinary man who wakes up to find...

'Listen, Svejk, are you really God's prize oaf?''Humbly report, sir,' Svejk answered solemnly. 'I am!'Drunkard, malingerer, oaf and possible genius - the story of Czech soldier Svejk and his misadventures...

'You must give up this mad idea, Frank ... there is but one course left open to you. You MUST marry money'Doctor Thorne, considered by Trollope to be the best...

'"After all," he said, "you're only a monkey spirit. How can you delude yourself into supposing that you can seize the Jade Emperor's throne?"'Featuring the adventures of the irrepressible, cloud-riding...

'Then he saw the barrel of a gun aimed dead on target - not at him, as he might have expected, but at the clergyman's back.'Set in a crumbling Spanish...

'What! to come here a stranger, a young, unknown, and unfriended stranger, and tell us, in the name of the bishop his master, that we are ignorant of our duties,...

'I pity this house; the curse of God is hanging over it'Two lovers must face tyrants, war, riots, plague and famine as they struggle to be together, in this teeming...

Exploring issues of colonialism, faith and the limits of comprehension, E.M. Forster's A Passage to India is published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. When Adela Quested and...

'The book is grand, beautiful, exciting and poignant ... It is full of poetical phrasing ... yet allows for the naughty spirit of childhood to remain true' Guardian'Never before had...

'The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which...'Halas &...

The Jane Austen Treasury is a delightful collection of facts and insights into the life and times of the great novelist and the attitudes and customs that shaped both her...

Charles Dickens is the definitive illustrated guide to the man and his works. It follows Dickens from early childhood, including his time spent as a child labourer, and looks at...

When Isabel Archer, a young American woman with looks, wit, and imagination, arrives in Europe, she sees the world as 'a place of brightness, of free expression, of irresistible action'....

'He thought he could see, in a flash, the future of the Rougon-Macquart family, a pack of wild satiated appetites in the midst of a blaze of gold and blood.'Set...

`To love him was not enough for me after the happiness I had felt in falling in love. I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted...

Written by an eccentric Anglican curate, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) brought the terrors of the Gothic novel to a new fever pitch of intensity. Its tormented villain seeks a victim...

The seventh novel in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, L'Assommoir (1877) is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris. It was a contemporary bestseller, outraged conservative critics, and...

'it was butcher work...the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam'Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic shocker introduced Count Dracula to the...

'I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D....

The Golden Ass is a unique, entertaining, and thoroughly readable Latin novel - the only work of fiction in Latin to have survived in its entirety.It tells the story of...

Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day,...

'As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the...

Nana opens in 1867, the year of the World Fair, when Paris, thronged by a cosmopolitan elite, was la Ville Lumiere, a perfect victim for Zola's scathing denunciation of hypocrisy...

Did possessing and killing amount to the same thing deep within the dark recesses of the human beast? La Bete humaine (1890), is one of Zola's most violent and explicit...

`the ideal reading...for the hours after midnight'Thus Henry James described the style of supernatural tale of which Sheridan Le Fanu was a master. Known in nineteenth-century Dublin as `The Invisible...

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of...

In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what...

'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road...

'I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne'James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with...

'Lord Orville did me the honour to hand me to the coach, talking all the way of the honour I had done him! O these fashionable people!'Frances Burney's first and...

"He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had...

Drawing directly on her own unhappy experiences, Anne Bronte's first-person narrative describes the almost unbelievable pressures endured by nineteenth-century governesses - the isolation, the frustration, and the insensitive and sometimes...

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his...

'Only the earth is immortal...the earth we love enough to commit murder for her.'Zola's novel of peasant life, the fifteenth in the Rougon-Macquart series, is generally regarded as one of...

'The irresistible power of money, a lever that can lift the world. Love and money are the only things.'Aristide Rougon, known as Saccard, is a failed property speculator determined to...

'a Casement violently opened just over my Head, and a Woman gave three frightful Skreetches, and then cry'd, Oh! Death, Death, Death!'Purporting to be an eye-witness account, the Journal of...

'no one pitied him as he would have liked to be pitied'As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of...

'Abbe Faujas has arrived!'The arrival of Abbe Faujas in the provincial town of Plassans has profound consequences for the community, and for the family of Francois Mouret in particular. Faujas...

Woolf described this work on the title-page of the first draft as 'the life of anybody'. "The Waves" (1931) traces the lives and interactions of seven friends in an exploratory...

'The Queen and the bat had been talking a good deal that afternoon...'The Victorian fascination with fairyland vivified the literature of the period, and led to some of the most...

'I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.'Becky Sharp is sharp, calculating, and determined to succeed. Craving wealth and a position in society,...

'If life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.' Isaac BabelTolstoy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the...

Something pushed out from the body there on the floor, and stretched forth a slimy, wavering tentacle...Perhaps no figure better embodies the transition from the Gothic tradition to modern horror...