CLASSICS

"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...

'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...

'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...

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...

'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...

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...

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...

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,...

'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 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...

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 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...

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...

'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...

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 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...

`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...

'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...

'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...

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'....

Need to swot up on your Shakespeare? If you've always felt a bit embarrassed at your precarious grasp on the plot of Othello, or you haven't a clue what a...

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...

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...

'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 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...

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...

'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,...

'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...

'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...

'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.

'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...

'"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...

'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...

''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.

'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...

'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...

'There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.'This dreamlike meditation on being young and alone in Paris is a feverish work...

'Berlin-west, a morning in May.'An aspiring young Berlin actress turns the tables on her lustful middle-aged admirer, in Nabokov's deadpan, deliciously cruel story of hopeless infatuation and horribly inventive revenge.

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...

'The eyes that glanced at me shone with a pale-green light'A crazed vivisectionist engineers a new super-breed of monstrous 'Beast Men' on a remote Pacific island, in H. G. Wells's...

'He said that Shamil had ordered Hadji Murat to be taken dead or alive....' Two masterly Russian tales of freedom, fighting and great warriors in the majestic mountains of the...

'Aristocracy, liberalism, progress, principles...useless words! A Russian doesn't need them'This humane, moving masterpiece of families, love, duels, heartache, failure and the clash between generations caused a scandal in nineteenth-century Russia...

'She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'A gorgeous clothbound edition of Jean Rhys's great masterpiece of desire and madness in the Caribbean, published for the novel's fiftieth...

'If there be one place in all this orb of earth where a secret is a Secret, that place is a Roman Conclave' Part novel, part daydream, part diatribe, this...

'An eerily prescient foreshadowing of current affairs' Guardian'Not only Lewis's most important book but one of the most important books ever produced in the United States' New YorkerA vain, outlandish,...