CLASSICS

The Jungle Book introduces Mowgli, the human foundling adopted by a family of wolves. It tells of the enmity between him and the tiger Shere Khan, who killed Mowgli's parents,...

The Wonderful World of the Wizard of Oz, which the the Library of Congress named as 'America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale', is one of the great works of children's...

Robin Hood is perhaps the greatest of all British folk heroes. Henry Gilbert's book assembles all the disparate elements of the legend into an elegiac and detailed version of Robin's...

Treasure Island is the seminal pirates and buried treasure novel, which is so brilliantly concocted that it appeals to readers both young and old. The story is told in the...

The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stories collects some of Jack London's most profound and moving allegorical tales. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Andrew Sinclair...

'This is the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers' Edmund White, Washington Post When Arthur Montana, world-renowned 'Emperor of Soul', is found dead in a...

Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a captivating story of one young woman's rebellion against the social order, edited by Peter Sabor with an introduction by Margaret A. Doody in Penguin Classics.Fifteen-year-old...

Thady Quirk, devoted steward to the decaying estate of the Rackrent family, narrates a riotous story of four generations of a dying dynasty in Castle Rackrent (1800). Thady will defend...

The Penguin Classics edition of Jonathan Swift's savagely satirical A Modest Proposal and Other Writings is edited with an introduction and notes by Carol Fabricant.To ease poverty in Ireland by...

Restoration-era poet, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn was the first truly professional woman writer in English, and Oroonoko is her sophisticated and insightful condemnation of slavery. This Penguin Classics edition...

The Queen of Spades and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction showcasing Alexander Pushkin's application of Romantic sensibilities to uncompromising studies of human frailty. This Penguin Classics edition...

E.T.A. Hoffman's wildly original fictions are some of the most unusual examples of German Romanticism's dark passions, and the stories in Tales of Hoffman are selected and translated from the...

Victor Hugo's tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become...

'The best modern prose translation of The Iliad' Robin Lane Fox, The TimesThe first of the world's great tragedies, The Iliad centres on the pivotal four days towards the end...

A work of tremendous influence that has inspired writers from his ancient Greek contemporaries to modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Homer's epic poem The Iliad is translated by Robert...

A slave who represented his masters in court and negotiations, Aesop relied on allegorical animal stories, collected here in The Complete Fables, to convey his key points. This Penguin Classics...

'Venus in Furs' describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the...

The Steppe and Other Stories 1887-91 is a collection that reveals Anton Chekhov's evolution from a novice writer to a master of short narrative form. This Penguin Classics edition is...

The prize-winning translation of Miguel de Cervantes's mock-epic masterworkDon Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold...

The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is a collection of stories that emerged from a profound spiritual crisis, during which Leo Tolstoy believed that he had encountered death...

The inspiration for such works as Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Jaroslav Hasek's black satire The Good Soldier Svejk is translated with an introduction by Cecil Parrott in Penguin Classics.Good-natured and garrulous,...

'The prince of philosophical novels' John UpdikeIn Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the philosophical views of the Enlightenment to create one of the most glorious satires of...

Gentle linen weaver Silas Marner is wrongly accused of a heinous theft, and he exiles himself from the world-until he finds redemption and spiritual rebirth through his unselfish love for...

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set...

This early novel, written in collaboration with a friend, is a fascinating curiosity which suggests that Wodehouse might have become a very different, experimental sort of writer, had he continued...

Many of these stores are now so famous from film and television adaptations that they need no introduction. Roald Dahl is well known as a master of the macabre and...

First published in 1956, this collection of articles covers Wodehouse's feelings on United States, his adopted homeland all collected into one edition. Features a collection of articles originally from Punch...

In the five novels by Ireland's greatest comic writer we can explore the full range of his invention, from the multi-layered madness of At Swim-Two-Birds to the piercing realism of...

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - stories which combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller - allowing readers to...

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of...

On the day of his wedding, Edmond Dantes, master mariner, is arrested in Marseille on trumped-up charges and spirited away to the cellars of the Chateau d'If, an impregnable sea...

In The Time Machine an inventor travels to the remote future where he finds both love and terror. The protagonist of The Invisible Man struggles to come to terms with...

George Orwell was a novelist unlike any other, fiercely devoted to presenting the truth as he saw it. The three novels in this collection date from the 1930s, before his...

Included here are some of the well-loved Father Brown detective stories, surely among the best in the genre, and a range of poetry, serious and light-hearted - Chesterton wrote some...

At the turn of the twentieth century. When their father dies young, exhausted by the failure of his attempts at agriculture, it is left to the visionary Alexandra to guide...

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte's second and most celebrated novel. Set in the dramatic northern landscape made familiar by the author's more famous sisters, it tells the...

When Catherine Sloper falls for Maurice Townsend, her father, a wealthy New York doctor, believes that Townsend is a fortune hunter after his daughter's inheritance. He forbids the marriage but...

The Arabian Nights - stories told by Queen Shahrazad over a thousand and one nights, to beguile the Sultan into deferring her execution - first began to appear in the...

This beautiful hardback collection features the world's most famous detective in his most classic adventures. We begin with A Study in Scarlet, the novel that introduces the most famous characters...

After a lonely boyhood, and the painful ordeal of his schooldays, Philip's yearning for adventure takes him to Germany and later Paris where he tries to make his mark as...

'Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout...

'Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in...