CLASSICS

W. Somerset Maugham's semiautobiographical masterpiece unfolds in London and Paris at the end of the 19th century. The protagonist, Philip Carey, is a sensitive orphan who's burdened with a club...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker'Alone with the dead! I dare not go out, for I can hear the low howl of the wolf through the...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster'I had got an idea that everyone here spent their lives in making little sacrifices for...

'My first intimation of the possibilities of fiction' Zadie SmithMore than a love story, A Room with a View is a penetrating social comedy and a brilliant study of contrasts...

An aged prophetess at Delphi, the most sacred oracle in ancient Greece, looks back over her strange life as the Pythia, the First Lady and voice of the god Apollo....

In Ulysses and Us, Declan Kiberd argues that James Joyce's Ulysses offers a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life under the dreadful pressures of the modern world....

Ten years ago James Shapiro won the Samuel Johnson Prize for his best-seller 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Now, to mark the forthcoming 400th anniversary of...

William Golding's Lord of the Flies is a dystopian classic: 'exciting, relevant and thought-provoking' (Stephen King). When a group of schoolboys are stranded on a desert island, what could go...

These four last prose fictions by Samuel Beckett were originally published individually, and their composition spanned the final decade of his life. In Company a solitary hearer lying in blackness...

Written in Roussillon during World War Two, while Samuel Beckett was hiding from the Gestapo, Watt was first published in 1953. Beckett acknowledged that this comic novel unlike any other...

'Echo's Bones' was intended by Samuel Beckett to form the 'recessional' or end-piece of his early collection of interrelated stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, published in 1934. The story was...

Christopher Martin, the sole survivor of a torpedoed destroyer, is stranded upon a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Pitted against him are the sea, the sun, the night...

Mankind for has polluted the seas, lakes and rivers. The Iron Woman has come to take revenge.Lucy understands the Iron Woman's rage and she too wants to save the water...

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest . . . yo ho ho and a bottle of rum . . . When a terrifying stranger arrives at Jim Hawkin's father's...

He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.One of the masterpieces of classic literature, Wuthering Heights is a both the...

I can hear the creak of the saddle and the clop and clink of hoofs as we cross the bridge over the brook by Dundell Farm; there is a light...

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. Well, thought Belacqua, it's a quick...

Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles. A family sets out on a...

This volume contains 'Tarzan of the Apes', 'The Return of Tarzan', 'The Beasts of Tarzan', 'The Son of Tarzan', 'Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar' and 'Jungle Tales of Tarzan'...

The classic satire from the renowned comic and acclaimed author of 'At Swim-Two-Birds' - Flann O'Brien. Flann O'Brien's gloriously wicked satire of the traditional Irish peasant novel, The Poor Mouth...

'Don't you see that we are buried alive?'When Allan Quatermain is approached by Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to search for Sir Henry's missing brother, deep in...

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master, Mr Jones, and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and...

The Tale of the Heike is Japan's great martial epic; a masterpiece of world literature and the progenitor of all samurai stories, now in a major and groundbreaking new translation...

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple," declares Algernon early in Act One of The Importance of Being Earnest, and were it either, modern literature would be "a complete...

The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after its publication, literature had-in the words...

La Vita Nuova (1292-94) has many aspects. Dante's libello, or "little book," is most obviously a book about love. In a sequence of thirty-one poems, the author recounts his love...

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights has been called the most beautiful, most profoundly violent love story of all time. At its center are Catherine and Heathcliff, and the self-contained world of...