CLASSICS

Herbert George Wells was perhaps best known as the author of such classic works of science fiction as The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. But it was in...

Moscow, 1929: a city that has lost its way amid corruption and fear, inhabited by people who have abandoned their morals and forsaken spirituality. But when a mysterious stranger arrives...

The famous story of three men and a dog setting off in an open boat on a hilarious voyage up the Thames. The story is full of mishaps - falling...

No writer has combined laughter with savagery more devastatingly than Saki. Though he died nearly ninety years ago, the blackness of his comedy is contemporary and his wit has lost...

A parable on Darwinian theory, and a biting social satire, H.G. Wells's science fiction classic The Island of Dr Moreau is a fascinating exploration of what it is to be...

One of the most magical concoctions in children's literature, Lewis Carroll's tale follows Alice into the upside-down, inside-out world of Wonderland and its fanciful creatures - the White Rabbit, March...

'His great book ... masterly in its prescience and its lucidity' ANITA DESAI A compelling portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India depicts the...

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD AND DAVID BRADSHAWFar in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MALCOLM BRADBURYDenis Stone, a naive young poet, is invited to stay at Crome, a country house renowned for its gatherings of 'bright young things'. His hosts,...

'Thus, gentle Reader, I have given thee a faithful History of my Travels for Sixteen Years, and above Seven Months; wherein I have not been so studious of Ornament as...

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here.'The 'Alice' books are two of the most translated,...

The Complete Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft collects the great horror author's novel, four novellas, and fifty-three short stories. Written between the years 1917 and 1935, this collection features Lovecraft's...

If Lord Ickenham had not succumbed to the temptation to dislodge the hat of irascible QC, Beefy Bastable, with a well-aimed Brazil nut, the latter's famous legal mind might never...

Jean Rhys's late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into...

D H Lawrence remarked that Hardy's best novels were about 'the struggle into love and the struggle with love', and THE MAJOR OF CASTLEBRIDGE is no exception. One of the...

Daniel Defoe's bawdy tale of a woman's struggle for independence and redemption, Moll Flanders is edited with an introduction and notes by David Blewett in Penguin Classics.Born in Newgate prison...

Included here are: a preface, a critical essay and explanatory annotations by Margo Culley; essays by acclaimed Kate Chopin biographers; selections from the conduct books of the period; contemporary perspectives...

Lord and Lady Clonbrony are more concerned with fashionable London society than with their responsibilities to those who live and work on their Irish estates. Concerned by this negligence, their...

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a modern, definitive edition of Shakespeare's great comedy of love, folly and mistaken identity. With an expert introduction by Sir Jonathan Bate, this unique...

At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a jovial group of pilgrims assembles, including an unscrupulous Pardoner, a noble-minded Knight, a ribald Miller, the lusty Wife of Bath, and Chaucer himself....

Beautiful Emma Rouault yearns for the life of wealth, passion and romance she has encountered in popular sentimental fiction, and when her doctor, the well-meaning but awkward and unremarkable Charles...

Originally published in Italy in 1928, and unavailable in Britain until 1960, when it was the subject of an infamous obscenity trial, Lady Chatterley's Lover is now regarded as one...

The most ambitious narrative of nineteenth-century realism, Middlemarch tells the story of an entire town in the years leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, a time when modern...

When the reporter Edward Malone is sent to interview the formidable Professor Challenger about his accounts of strange prehistoric beasts on a remote plateau in South America, he expects to...

Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of Milton. She is shocked by the poverty she encounters...

The intelligent and charming Newland Archer - a member of one of New York's most prominent families - is living the life that has always been expected of him: he...

The shop owner Adolf Verloc, member of an anarchist group and secret agent for a foreign government, is summoned to meet Mr Vladimir, the country's ambassador, who asks him to...

Having lived in the city of Orphalese for twelve years, the revered Prophet is about to board a ship taking him back to the isle of his birth. Before he...

Having been accused of theft and hounded out of a religious community many years previously, the weaver Silas Marner now lives alone in the village of Raveloe, hoarding the precious...

Young college graduate Carol Kennicott moves from a big city to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, the small town from which her new husband hails. Imbued with ideals of urban improvement, she...

When the Basque dragoon Don Jose meets a Gypsy woman at the factory he is guarding, he is immediately ensnared by her wiles. After she is arrested for injuring a...

First encountered in Lawrence's novel The Rainbow, sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are now grown-up women living in the English Midlands at the time of the First World War. Each...

It is New Year's Eve, and Nellie, the pretty daughter of a landowning general, is sitting in her room looking in the mirror. Although she is tired and her eyes...

The beautiful Nell is a thirteen-year-old orphan who lives with her grandfather in a London bric-a-brac shop. Worried about his charge's future, the old man secretly gambles at night in...

Widely considered one of the greatest American novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells the story of Huck Finn and his companion, the slave Jim, as they journey down the Mississippi...

The mysterious Griffin arrives at a picturesque English inn during a snowstorm, swaddled in bandages which cover his face and with his eyes hidden behind dark glasses. His odd get-up...

Raised in the idyllic setting of Dorlcote Mill, the wild and wilful Maggie Tulliver adores her elder brother Tom and is forever trying to gain the approbation of her parents....

Through a series of connected monologues, The Waves tells the story of six very different friends - Bernard, Louis, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda - as they progress from childhood...

"The friends Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley leave Miss Pinkerton's school together, ready to forge their paths in the tawdry and cut-throat world of the early nineteenth century. The scheming,...

'Ladies and Gentlemen...I have to state that Mrs Lovett's pies are made of human flesh!' This shocking announcement provides the stunning denouement to a narrative first published over a period...

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...