Classics

The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin's Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of history's most prodigious thinkers. Each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-driven design that highlights the...

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction and Notes by Agnes Cardinal, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century' -- Michele RobertsJean Rhys's masterpiece tells the story...

'Brilliant interweaving of personal experience, imaginative musing and political clarity' -- Kate MosseThis volume combines two books which were among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form a brilliant attack...

As ripe for revisiting as The Night Manager, John le Carré’s 1983 thriller - now adapted for television - brilliantly presages the duplicity of our times. Razor-sharp, precisely plotted and gripping. Soon to be a major BBC TV series...

'There are certain words which possess, in themselves, when properly used, a virtue which illumines and lifts up towards the good'The philosopher and activist Simone Weil was one of the most courageous thinkers of the twentieth century. Here she writes,...

'That sense of the meaninglessness of existence that runs through much of twentieth-century writing - from Conrad and Kafka, to Beckett and beyond - starts in Dostoyevsky's work' Malcolm BradburyAlienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own...

Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's...

Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticidesRachel Carson's Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human...

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American...

'It was a puzzle with no solution. But he did not lose heart.' In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Stood in the coast's wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the...

'She was dead even before I became aware of her existence...'A child has been abducted from a sleepy Kent village, her face plastered across the media. As the crime unleashes a wave of hysteria, the claustrophobic world of Rowan Anderson and his...

A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers’s best stories, including her beloved novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” Glowingly impressive, informed with feeling and...

The same inimitable voice and dazzling insights that make Emily Dickinson's poems immortal can be found in the whimsical, humorous, and often deeply moving letters she wrote to her family and friends throughout her life. The selection of letters...

Vladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion...

'It was useless to think I'd ever be able to throw open the door behind which I was yet again hiding ... Not now. Not ever.' School is a place of unspoken hierarchies and rivalries for a young teenage boy growing up in the provincial town of Ferrara. But...

A witty, moving philosophical novel, Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums is a journey of self-discovery through the lens of Zen Buddhist thought. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Ann Douglas. Following the explosive energy of...

This “heart-stoppingly good” masterpiece about a crumbling love affair in 1950s New York perfectly captures “the desperate desire for love and the recognition that it is slipping away” (Slate).“One of the greatest, bleakest...

I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free.The...

C.S. Lewis's dazzling allegory about heaven and hell - and the chasm fixed between them - is one of his most brilliantly imaginative tales, as he takes issue with the ideas in William Blake's 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. In a dream, the narrator...