CLASSICS

Part of the Penguin Essentials series, discover a beautifully designed edition of Evelyn Waugh's British classic featuring cover art by Jim Tierney'I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met...

A haunting portrait of family tragedy from the acclaimed author of The Catcher in the Rye'He was a great many things to a great many people while he lived, and...

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is one of the best-known novels of the 20th century: the controversial story of Humbert Humbert who falls in love with twelve year old Lolita, beautifully repackaged...

'It was the discovery of the essays celebrating his childhood and youth that altered my perception of Camus, from a thinker to a writer whose intellectual lucidity was a product...

A THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019'The best introduction to the plays I've read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop' Alex Preston, Observer'It makes you impatient to...

'The piteousness of his little soft shroud of hair falling down his brow and swept aside by the hand over blue serious eyes'Described by Kerouac as 'my most serious sad...

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte...

'A landmark of feminist thought and a rhetorical masterpiece' GuardianRanging from the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted imaginary sister to Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and the effects of poverty and...

'A fantasy, impossible but delicious ... an exuberance of life and wit' The Times Literary SupplementFirst masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through...

A superb new translation by Michael Hofmann of some of Kafka's most frightening and visionary short fictionStrange beasts, night terrors, absurd bureaucrats and sinister places abound in this collection of...

Great Expectations is one of the best-loved stories of all time, reissued in Puffin Classics, bringing classic literature to each new generation.As a small boy at Joe Gargery's forge, Pip...

Karl Rossman has been banished by his parents to America, following a family scandal. There, with unquenchable optimism, he throws himself into the strange experiences that lie before him as...

'One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael CunninghamClarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another...

The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home....

A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit,...

Ford Madox Ford's great masterpiece exploring love and identity during the First World War, in a Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by Julian Barnes. A masterly novel of destruction...

A pioneering work of dystopian fiction from one of Sweden's most acclaimed writersWritten midway between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the terrible events of the Second World War...

In this tender, impassioned fourth novel, James Baldwin created one of his most striking characters: a man struggling to become himself.'Everyone wishes to be loved, but in the event, nearly...

'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...

'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...

'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...

' "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 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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

'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...

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...

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...

'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,...

'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...

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...

'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...

'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...

'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.

'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...

''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.

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...

'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.

'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...

'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...

'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...

'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...

'"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...