CLASSICS

His first published work of fiction (1934), More Pricks Than Kicks is a set of ten interlocked stories, set in Dublin and involving their adrift hero Belacqua in a series...

'Malone', writes Malone, 'is what I am called now.' On his deathbed, and wiling away the time with stories, the octogenarian Malone's account of his condition is intermittent and contradictory,...

This European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneracy of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of World War I.Hans Castorp is 'a perfectly ordinary,...

The buttoned-up world of the British upper classes is exploded by the brilliance, wit and audacity of Saki's bomb-like stories. In 'The Open Window' an imaginative teenager gives a visitor...

'The best translation of Crime and Punishment currently available... An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it' Washington PostConsumed by the idea of his own special destiny,...

''I saw a monster rising from the waves.'**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK****Winner of the Man Booker Prize 1978**Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of...

'In this holy community she would play the witch.' Imber Court is a quiet haven for lost souls, a utopia for those who can neither live in the world, nor...

'This is real life, Jake,' she said. 'You'd better wake up.'Jake is clever, lazy and scraping by in London as a hack translator. Jake loves Anna. Anna is an elusive...

'He must know by now, I should think, that I can give as good as I get!'This is the story of Gigi, educated as a future courtesan in Paris, her...

Chinua Achebe is considered the father of African literature in English, the writer who 'opened the magic casements of African fiction' for an international readership. Following the 50th anniversary of...

After spending several years in a sanatorium recovering from an illness that caused him to lose his memory and ability to reason, Prince Myshkin arrives in St Petersburg and is...

The unnamed narrator of the novel, a former government official, has decided to retire from the world and lead a life of inactivity and contemplation. His fiercely bitter, cynical and...

Inspired by Dostoevsky's own gambling addiction and written under pressure in order to pay off his creditors and retain his rights to his literary legacy, The Gambler is set in...

A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town and proceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual and somewhat macabre proposition....

Candide is an innocent young nobleman who leads an idyllic, sheltered life and has adopted the optimistic mindset promoted by his tutor Dr Pangloss. But after committing an indiscretion and...

An old man arrives at the offices of the lawyer Derville, claiming to be Colonel Chabert, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars who was left for dead on the battlefield,...

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was born in Odense, the son of a shoemaker. His early life was wretched, but he was adopted by a patron and became a short-story writer,...

From the author of the classic novel 'At-Swim-Two-Birds' comes this ingenious tale which follows the mad and absurd ambitions of a scientist determined to destroy the world. Flann O'Brien's third...

A complex, intense American novel of family from the winner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureWith an introduction by Richard HughesEver since the first furore was created on its publication...

'What beauties the book contains! There are many pages in it so saturated with warm and lovely intimacies that one reads absorbed' GuardianWomen in Love begins one blossoming spring day...

The Gift is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapestry...

Collecting five stories of suspense, mystery and slow, creeping horror, Daphne Du Maurier's Don't Look Now and Other Stories includes an introduction by Susan Hill, author of The Woman in...

From the bard of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Maggie Cassidy is an autobiographical novel of young love, published in Penguin Modern Classics.Though publishers stopped Maggie Cassidy's Jack Duluoz and...

A modernist work of profound wisdom that continues to enthral readers with its subtle blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf...

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray'Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it,...

A stunning Penguin clothbound edition of Homer's great epic, in E. V. Rieu's classic translation.The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization - an epic...

This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in...

Jane Austen's masterworks in a single beautiful Penguin English Library volume Few novelists have observed their society with the wit and insight of Jane Austen. This volume brings together her...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin'My hour is come ... the clock of eternity is about to strike, but its knell must be unheard...

A new Penguin English Library edition of Jane Austen's tantalizing final work - set to be a major Andrew Davies ITV adaptation this autumnWritten in the last months of Austen's...

A collection of nine exceptional stories from the acclaimed author of The Catcher in the Rye'This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The...

AN UNFORGETTABLE STORY OF MURDER, MYSTERY AND PASSION, FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCAIn the bitter November wind, Mary Yellan crosses Bodmin Moor to Jamaica Inn. Her mother's dying wish...

Christopher Isherwood gives fascinating insight into pre-war Berlin.MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINSThe first of Christopher Isherwood's classic 'Berlin' novels, this portrays the encounter and growing friendship between young William Bradshaw and...

'My dear, I don't give a damn.'Margaret Mitchell's page-turning, sweeping American epic has been a classic for over eighty years. Beloved and thought by many to be the greatest of...

'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink...'This is the story of Cassandra, precocious and charming, who begins a journal detailing her life with her bohemian family in a crumbling...

In this masterful retelling of one of the greatest works of world literature, Alasdair Gray - in his last work - offers an original translation in prosaic English rhyme. Lyrical...

'Du Maurier is a storyteller whose sole aim is to bewitch and beguile. And in My Cousin Rachel she does both, with Rebecca looking fondly over her shoulder' New York...

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA'How long he fought with them in the darkness he could not tell, but at last the beating of the wings about him lessened and...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain'I'm unfavorable to killin' a man as long as you can git around it; it ain't good...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells'Death!' I shouted. 'Death is coming! Death!'In this pioneering, shocking and nightmarish tale, naive suburban Londoners...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe'I walk'd about on the shore, lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapt up...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen'No sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Howards End by E. M. Forster'The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Emma by Jane Austen'I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen"The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen'We have all been more or less to blame ... every one of us, excepting Fanny'Taken from the poverty of...