CLASSICS

'The funniest book in the world' Evelyn Waugh Mr Charles Pooter is a respectable man. He has just moved into a very desirable home in Holloway with his dear wife...

After the war is over, a radioactive cloud begins to sweep southwards on the winds, gradually poisoning everything in its path. An American submarine captain is among the survivors left...

Read the masterful story of romance and revolution behind the hit BBC TV series.Les Miserables is a novel peopled by colourful characters from the nineteenth-century Parisian underworld; the street children,...

Even as little girls, Sarah and Emily are very different from each other. Emily looks up to her wiser and more stable older sister and is jealous of her relationship...

Duff Cooper's classic biography charts the remarkable progress of Talleyrand; a silver-tongued master diplomat, infamous turncoat, peacekeeper and libertine. Talleyrand held high office in five successive regimes from France's Ancient...

'The greatest love story I've ever read' Andrew Davies Anna Karenina is a novel of unparalleled richness and complexity, set against the backdrop of Russian high society. Tolstoy charts the...

A Jeeves and Wooster novelGussie Fink-Nottle's knowledge of the common newt is unparalleled. Drop him in a pond of newts and his behaviour will be exemplary, but introduce him to...

A Golf collectionThe Oldest Member knows everything that has ever happened on the golf course - and a great deal more besides.Take the story of Cuthbert, for instance. He's helplessly...

A Jeeves and Wooster novelWhen Bertie Wooster goes to Totleigh Towers to pour oil on the troubled waters of a lovers' breach between Madeline Bassett and Gussie Fink-Nottle, he isn't...

Discover the legendary story of a marine adventurer shipwrecked on a desert island. Robinson Crusoe runs away from home to join the navy. After a series of adventures at sea,...

'Among the six indispensable books in world literature' George Orwell In the course of his famous travels, Gulliver is captured by miniature people who wage war on each other because...

The great Russian 20th-century novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TIM BUTCHERThe silence of the jungle is broken only by the ominous sound of drumming. Life on the river is brutal and unknown threats lurk in...

Set entirely on one day, 16 June 1904, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus as they go about their daily business in Dublin. From this starting point, James Joyce...

'If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it' The Times Tolstoy's enthralling epic depicts Russia's...

The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SEBASTIAN FAULKSHenry Green, whom W. H. Auden called 'the finest living English novelist', is the most neglected writer of the last century and the one most...

Gripping, terrifying, an unputdownable read. Discover Graham Greene's most iconic novel.A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man....

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAMES WOOD. Scobie, a police officer serving in a wartime West African state, is distrusted, being scrupulously honest and immune to bribery. But then he falls...

Discover Graham Green's prescient political masterpiece'The novel that I love the most is The Quiet American' Ian McEwanInto the intrigue and violence of 1950s Indo-China comes CIA agent Alden Pyle,...

For over a hundred years the Pacific island of Pala has been the scene of a unique experiment in civilisation. Its inhabitants live in a society where western science has...

Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian classic Brave New World predicts - with eerie clarity - a terrifying vision of the future, which feels ever closer to our own reality.'The best science...

This postbellum Greek tragedy is the perfect introduction to Faulkner's elaborate descriptive syntax.Quentin Compson and Shreve, his Harvard roommate, are obsessed with the tragic rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen....

'Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird.' Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he...

'This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met' J K Rowling 'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink' is the first line of this timeless,...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAWThe dilettantes who frequent Lady Tantamount's society parties are determined to push forward the moral frontiers of the age. Marjorie has left her family to...

FROM THE PUBLISHER OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO - THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED TRANSLATION OF SOLZHENITSYN'S SEARING DEBUT NOVELThe Gulag, the Stalinist labour camps to which millions of Russians were condemned for...

Few readers will want, or be able, to resist this modern bestiary. Here you will find the familiar - Gryphons, Minotaurs and Unicorns - as well as the Monkey of...

TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY DAVID LUKEDeath in Venice is a story of obsession. Gustave von Aschenbach is a successful but ageing writer who travels to Venice for a holiday. One...

Iris Murdoch's first novel is set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets with frantic philosophers. Its hero, Jake Donaghue, is...

Darkness at Noon is set in an unnamed country ruled by a totalitarian government. Rubashov, once a powerful player in the regime, finds the tables turned on him when he...

A vivid, believable love story between an older woman and a younger man.Lea de Lonval is a magnificent and aging courtesan facing the end of her career. She has devoted...

The famous tale by the trailblazing subject of major new film ColetteGIGI TRANSLATED BY ROGER SENHOUSE, THE CAT TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA WHITEGigi's days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and...

If you loved BBC4's Hemingway, rediscover Ernest's Hemingway's powerful autobiographical story of war.In 1918, Ernest Hemingway went to war. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice...

This is the story of Francis Andrews, a young man whose betrayal of his fellow smugglers has left a man dead. Fearing vengeance, he flees and takes refuge in the...

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONTime Regained begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war's end,...

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn the two novels - The Captive and The Fugitive - contained in this volume, Proust's narrator is living...

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn Sodom and Gomorrah Proust's narrator not only depicts the class tensions of a changing France at the beginning...

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn The Guermantes Way Proust's narrator recalls his initiation into the dazzling world of Parisian high society. Looking back...

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONWithin a Budding Grove describes the first shoots of an astonishing love affair. When Proust's adolescent narrator travels from...

A masterpiece of modern literature that mirrors Maugham's own career.Of Human Bondage is the first and most autobiographical of Maugham's novels. It is the story of Philip Carey, an orphan...

The definitive translation of one of the greatest French novels of the twentieth centuryIn the opening volume of Proust's great novel, the narrator travels backwards in time in order to...

Bowen's Court describes the history of one Anglo-Irish family in County Cork from the Cromwellian settlement until 1959, when Elizabeth Bowen was forced to sell the family house she loved....

'Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature' John le...

During a vicious persecution of the clergy in Mexico, a worldly priest, the 'whisky priest', is on the run. With the police closing in, his routes of escape are being...

Discover Richard Wright's brutal and gripping masterpiece. 'The most important and celebrated novel of Negro life to have appeared in America' James BaldwinGripping and furious, Native Son follows Bigger Thomas,...

If you loved BBC4's Hemingway , read the book that won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent...

Read Elizabeth Bowen's accessible feminist take on the Irish aristocracyWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VICTORIA GLENDINNINGThe Irish troubles rage, but up at the 'Big House', tennis parties, dances and flirtations with...