Secondhand Classics

Tales of the Jazz Age features eleven of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-loved short stories and 'novelettes' including 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' and 'The Diamond as Big as the...

The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed are wonderfully vivid and perceptive descriptions of two great Italian cities, told through their history and art, revealing Mary McCarthy to be one...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope'What! to come here a stranger, a young, unknown, and unfriended stranger, and tell us, in the name of the...

By the author of Life and Fate, now a major Radio 4 drama starring Kenneth Branagh. Vasily Grossman is widely recognized as one of the outstanding literary figures of the...

'I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.' Twenty-three-year-old Frits -...

Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters is a story of romance, scandal and intrigue within the confines of a watchful, gossiping English village during the early nineteenth century. This Penguin Classics...

A lyrical tour of life as a young working-class man born into the first days of the 20th century, Caliban Shrieks is a lost masterpiece of 1930s British literature.WITH NEW...

The famous, funny and inspiring stories from one of the world's greatest storytellers. From the 'satiable curiosity of the elephant's child to the crab who played with the sea, from...

Mrs Lippincote's house, with its mahogany furniture and yellowing photographs, stands as a reminder of all the certainties that have vanished with the advent of war. Temporarily, this is home...

'This story of the alliance between Italian aristocracy and American millionaires is "a work unique among all [James'] novels: it is [his] only novel in which things come out right...

The young Dickens composed these sketches, his first attempts at authorship, poised between two worlds. Thea Holmes writes in her Introduction, 'On the one hand Dickens depicts in relentless detail...

Vidal writes with ease and grace, and roams through many subjects and genres. He is a master of the historical novel, in which he has explored American history, ancient history,...

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public, first in France, then...

One of the most `modern' of eighteenth-century novels, Les Liasons Dangereuses is the brilliantly observed and vividly rendered story of two libertines and the innocent characters they plot to destroy.

Set in 1757, during the American colonial wars between the English and French, this second of Cooper's five tales shows both camps united in dispossessing the native Indians and concentrates...

NOW A CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED FILM WITH BAFTA WINNING ACTRESS, JUDY DAVIS 'A splendidly vivid display . . . its sharply detailed, entirely convincing voice' THE TIMES 'An insightful exploration of...

Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honore de Balzac's Eugenie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics.In...