Classics

A timeless classic, A Christmas Carol has surely kept many children off the naughty list. Ebenezer Scrooge has become an iconic character, one whose story of change will inspire others to act kind towards all. A Christmas Carol is one of Charles...

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. As a poor white boy, Sutpen was turned...

A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official's son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task – an ailing, world-weary “nobody” – seized with the...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - -between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later...

Arguably the first English novel and still the ultimate castaway narrative, Defoe’s iconic tale of shipwreck and survival retains its exoticism and adventure into the twenty-first century.  The Penguin English Library Edition of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel...

Samuel Richardson's Pamela is a captivating story of one young woman's rebellion against the social order, edited by Peter Sabor with an introduction by Margaret A. Doody in Penguin Classics.Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews, alone in the world, is pursued...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne'I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch...

'I have so much and my feeling for her devours everything, I have so much and without her everything is nothing.'The Sorrows of Young Werther propelled Goethe to instant fame when it first appeared in 1774. Goethe drew on his own unhappy experiences to...

Galdos's four-part Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-7), the masterpiece among his almost 80 novels, tells the turbulent story of two women, their husbands and their lovers, set against the intricate web of dynastic alliances and class contrasts of Madrid in...

Introduction and Notes by Dr Howard J. Booth, University of Kent at Canterbury. 'When you have experienced Sons and Lovers you have lived through the agonies of the young Lawrence striving to win free from his old life'.Richard Aldington This novel is...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence'"She was a brazen hussy.""She wasn't. - And she was pretty, wasn't she?""I didn't look ... And tell your girls, my son, that when they're running after you, they're not to come and...

It is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef.But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the...

The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb new translation by Michael HofmannFranz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that...

The first published novel from the controversial Nobel Prize winning Russian author of The Gulag Archipelago.In the madness of World War II, a dutiful Russian soldier is wrongfully convicted of treason and sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp...

Young Nour is a North African desert tribesman. It is 1909, and as the First World War looms Nour's tribe - the Blue Men - are forced from their lands by French colonial invaders. Spurred on by thirst, hunger, suffering, they seek guidance from a great...

Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese battle both the Japanese invaders and each other in the...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense—a masterful novel of "political intrigue and philosophy, romance and noir" (Vogue) and the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism from the Nobel Prize...

One of the Guardian's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, an addictive and searingly honest novel about childhood, family and grief. Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about his life with painful honesty. He writes about his childhood and teenage years, his...

Steinbeck's only work of fantasy literature—in a  deluxe edition with a foreword by Christopher Paolini, New York Times bestselling author of Eragon, Eldest and BrisingrA Penguin Classic Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was the first book that John Steinbeck...

Introduction and Notes by Laurence Davies, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers,...