Classics

''I saw a monster rising from the waves."**A BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS BIG JUBILEE READ PICK****Winner of the Man Booker Prize 1978**Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation. He buys a mysteriously damp house...

Winner of the Booker Prize 1978 When Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics,...

Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as 'useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war', R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End is an unflinching vision of life in the trenches towards the end of the First World War, published in Penguin Classics.Set in the...

*Named a MOST ANTICIPATED Science Fiction & Fantasy Book of 2023 by Polygon, Tor, and Men's Health!*Named a MUST-READ Book of March 2023 by CrimeReads and Gizmodo!From New York Times bestselling author Owen King comes a Dickensian fantasy of illusion...

(Available after 3-20 days)The Kappa is a creature from Japanese folklore described as a scaly, child-sized being with a face like a tiger and a sharp, pointed beak. In the hands of Ryunosuke Akutagawa, one man's journey to Kappaland becomes the vehicle...

Lady Windermere's Fan/Salome/A Woman of No Importance/An Ideal Husband/A Florentine Tragedy/The Importance of Being Earnest'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness'The Importance of Being Earnest is a...

Oscar Wilde was already one of the best-known literary figures in Britain when he was persuaded to turn his extraordinary talents to the theatre. Between 1891 and 1895 he produced a sequence of distinctive plays which spearheaded the dramatic renaissance...

J.B. Priestley’s famed play about a wealthy family visited by a Police Inspector wishing to question them in connection to a working-class girl’s suicide weaves an ingenious, slow-burning tale of inequality and guilt. We don't live alone ... We are...

Beginning with a dilemma about whether he spends more money on reading or smoking, George Orwell's entertaining and uncompromising essays go on to explore everything from the perils of second-hand bookshops to the dubious profession of being a...

'A beautiful book' -- Ursula K. Le GuinThis mordantly funny and provocative tale from Soviet Russia's leading science fiction writers is the story of astrophysicist Dmitri Malianov. As he reaches a major breakthrough, he finds himself plagued by...

Carmen, Merimee's classic tale of passion and power, provided the inspiration for one of the world's most enduringly popular operas, and numerous films. Like Carmen, the other stories in this book, including Mateo Falcone, The Etruscan Vase, and The...

Impeccably crafted in flawless prose, the delightfully witty courtship of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy is brimming with Austen's characteristic playfulness and comic irony.  "He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention...

'There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life.'In Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet a popular cultural phenomenon is born. We meet two of the most famous characters in modern literary history: the consulting...

Arthur Conan Doyle famously killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, in the short story 'The Final Problem', but was tempted to bring him back to life ten years later, in the thirteen tales that comprise The Return of Sherlock Holmes. While the outcry that...

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes are overshadowed by the event with which they close - the meeting of the great detective and Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime. Their struggle, seemingly to the death, was to leave many readers desolate at the loss of Holmes,...

'The old woman opened the door, and the next moment I was in the presence of Uncle Silas.' In Victorian Derbyshire, 17 year old orphan and heiress Maud Ruthyn is sent to live at the claustrophobic Bartram-Haugh house with her mysterious Uncle Silas...

'Can we doubt ... that individuals having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and of procreating their kind?'In the Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply held beliefs of the...

Rumi's Masnavi is widely recognized as the greatest Sufi poem ever written, and has been called "the Koran in Persian." The thirteenth-century Muslim mystic Rumi composed his work for the benefit of his disciples in the Sufi order named after him, better...

An orphaned girl, a grim moorland manor with hundreds of empty rooms, strange cries in the night, and a walled garden, with its door locked and the key buried. These are the ingredients of one of the most famous and well-loved of children's classics, an...