Classics

People tend to forget that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote more than just The Great Gatsby, but alas, he did indeed. Similar in theme, The Beautiful and the Damned is the story of a descent into an unsustainable lifestyle and what it will take to turn that...

'Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.' Following the success of Malice Aforethought,...

As he walked away from the phone there was a puzzled expression on Blampignon's massive countenance. He was thinking: Le Touquet again!With some trepidation Nigel Derry approaches the country house of his enigmatic and unpredictable aunt Gwenny for an...

Edith Wharton's novels of manners seem to grow in stature as time passes. Here she draws a beautiful social climber, Undine Sprague, who is a monster of selfishness and honestly doesn't know it. Although the worlds she wants to conquer have vanished,...

An authoritative new translation of Plato's The Republic by Christopher Rowe, with notes and an introduction. 'We set about founding the best city we could, because we could be confident that if it was good we would find justice in it' The Republic,...

“An absorbing, dark, beautifully written” novel on the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire “written with the melancholy wit and grace of Gogol” (New Statesman, The Times).This deeply moving, deeply philosophical story set...

'Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.' One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was...

Tells the story of Lady Constantine, who breaks all the rules of decorum when she falls in love with the beautiful youth Swithin St Cleeve, her social inferior and ten years her junior. Together, in an ancient monument converted into an astronomical...

'He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson ... He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.'Sherlock Holmes, scourge of criminals everywhere, whether they be...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Kim by Rudyard Kipling. 'He knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell. "Eh, miss, but that be a rare young lady! She do have such pretty coaxing ways ..." Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson worships her widowed father. But when he decides to...

O. Henry was a master of the short story and one of the most popular American writers of the twentieth century. This selection of tales from across his writing career ranges from New York apartments to the cattle-lands of Texas, taking in con men,...

'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 garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour's...

Set on a South Pacific island under Japanese control, Mailer’s uncompromising study of a band of men in extremis pulsates with brutal energy and whip-smart prose. Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during...

"An absolute treat... Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language" Nicholas Lezard, Guardian. At an end-of-season London soirée a young Hungarian scholar, Dr János Bátky, is introduced to the Earl...

Pandora has looked up to her older brother Edison since they were children. Now she revels in the anonymity of her suburban Iowa life, while her brother basks in the limelight as a New York jazz musician. But when Edison arrives in Iowa, suddenly in need...

A curse. An arranged marriage. A chance to live happily ever after. For as long as Astrid can remember she's been betrothed to a stranger. When tragedy strikes her husband-to-be emerges from the shadows ready to claim her hand in marriage. Unable to...

The acclaimed author of Voyage of the Sparrowhawkweaves the beautiful and compassionate tale of two friends dealt a bad hand by fate and desperate to start again on their very own island. What will two children risk to steal an island? From...

Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up, coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives from the First World War to Greenham Common and beyond. This is the ‘edited’ diary of an individual woman, born in 1901, and a story of the...

Based on the true experiences of Bao Ninh and banned by the communist party, The Sorrow of War is revered as the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front for our era’. Kien’s job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. He knows...