Classics

Basil and Josephine charts the coming of age of two privileged youths from quiet Midwestern towns, Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry - based on Fitzgerald himself and a combination of his first love Ginevra King and his wife Zelda. As one struggles to...

The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with...

THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY is a book without any modern parallel. Forming an active link in a chain that reaches back through Ovid's METAMORPHOSES directly to Homer, Roberto Calasso's re-exploration of the fantastic fables and mysteries we may...

“Prescient and technically astonishing.” —Geoff Dyer, GQ.Often considered Jean Rhys’s most autobiographical novel, this masterful and moving work follows a chorus girl, Anna, who struggles to adjust to cold and inhospitable...

'Endo is one of the world's greatest novelists' -- Washington Post. A group of Japanese tourists journey to the sacred River Ganges, each on a secret personal pilgrimage. Widower Isobe mourns for the devoted wife he neglected; gentle children's writer...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ADAM THIRLWELL. 'Our very best writer today' -- Milan Kundera Sparkling with comic genius and narrative exuberance, I Served the King of England is a story of how the unbelievable came true. Its remarkable hero, Ditie, is a hotel...

Life and Fate is an epic tale of twentieth-century Russia told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs, from the Sunday Times bestselling author ofStalingrad. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their...

Ingeniously intertwining narratives, from remorse-ridden Pontius Pilate to a persecuted writer in Stalinist Moscow, Bulgakov's sparkling critique of totalitarianism is a powerful meditation on love, evil, freedom and the greatest magician of all -...

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his...

'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 merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of...

The Jane Austen brand is well established. Satire, love, quippy dialogue—and it’s all here in her final novel. It’s the story of Anne and Frederick, once engaged, now meeting again nearly a decade later. Will love win out? Probably...

Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan,...

Arsène Lupin is a gentleman thief, a character created by French writer Maurice Leblanc, considered the french Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, Lupin has been compared many times with Sherlock Holmes, and Le Blanc even borrowed the character of...

The best translation of Crime and Punishment currently available... An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it' -- Washington Post. Consumed by the idea of his own special destiny, immured in poverty and...

Set in mid 19th-century Russia, Demons examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers. Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor...

'This is as much a mystery as the Immaculate Conception, which of itself must make a doctor an unbeliever.' A stunning pair of short stories about faith and sacrificial love. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little...

A beautiful, display-worthy collector’s hardcover of one of the most beloved novels ever written, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great...

Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer. Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an...

Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of...

A teenage girl's difficult journey towards adulthood in a time of war. "A school story for grownups that is also about our inability or refusal to protect children from history" SARAH MOSS "Of all Szabo's novels, Abigail deserves the widest readership...