CLASSICS

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,...

Thirteen strangely wrought, ingeniously crafted stories make up Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape to. Their...

Demian is a coming-of-age story that follows a young boy's maturation as he grapples with good and evil, lightness and darkness, and forges alternatives to the ever-present corruption and suffering...

'I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship.'Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth - four "little women" enduring hardships and enjoying adventures in Civil War New...

A new translation and abridgement of one of the four classical Chinese novels - an epic story of warring factions in the era of China's Han dynastyPart historical and part...

The second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young womanThea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado...

The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heartJim and Antonia meets as children in the...

The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed itTo the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra...

Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead' is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men...

'It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.'After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion...

'Everything was dead, everything unreal; the dark mob was made up of stiff lay-figures'One of America's greatest writers explores mob violence, voyeurism and betrayal in these unforgettable tales of Californian...

'They didn't seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn't take much interest in them myself.'From...

' "Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs, - useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the truly...

'It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life'Jay Gatsby is the man...

'They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden party if they had ordered it'A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their...

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the...