Classics

'I shall imagine myself as if I had no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, no senses at all'Descartes was prepared to go to any lengths in his search for certainty – even to deny those things that seemed most self-evident. In...

'War is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to our will'Writing at the time of Napoleon's greatest campaigns, Prussian soldier and writer Carl von Clausewitz created this landmark treatise on the art of warfare, which presented war as part...

Jane Eyre (1847) has enjoyed huge popularity since first publication, and its success owes much to its exceptional emotional power. Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan, is engaged as governess at Thornfield Hall by the mysterious Mr Rochester. Her integrity...

Dumas’s epic novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery—one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written—in a newly revised translation.This beloved novel tells the story of Edmond Dantès, wrongfully...

A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town and proceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual and somewhat macabre proposition. He offers to buy the rights to the dead serfs who are...

'Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death.'The trial and condemnation of Socrates on charges of heresy and corrupting young minds is a defining moment in the history of classical Athens. In tracing these events through four dialogues,...

Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war’s end, Proust’s narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the...

The long-awaited fifth volume—representing "the very summit of Proust's art" (Slate)—in the acclaimed Penguin translation of "the greatest literary work of the twentieth century" (The New York Times)A Penguin Modern Classics Carol Clark's acclaimed...

When O-lan, a servant girl, marries the peasant Wang Lung, she toils tirelessly through four pregnancies for their family's survival. Reward at first is meagre, but there is sustenance in the land - until the famine comes.Half-starved, the family joins...

Accompanied by Stevenson’s other stories brimming with Gothic unease, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is chilling slice of Victorian psychological horror, mining a rich seam of split personality, remorse and the nature of evil. His...

'The Alices are the greatest nonsense ever written, and far greater, in my view, than most sense.' - Philip Pullman Collecting Alice's complete adventures, a source of delight to children and adults alike for generations, the Penguin Classics edition of...

As I Lay Dying is a 1930 Southern Gothic novel by American author William Faulkner. Faulkner's fifth novel, it is consistently ranked among the best novels of 20th-century literature.The title derives from Book XI of Homer's Odyssey (William Marris's...

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War.The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead...

'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...

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides—the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and...

‘Poisoning of aged iniquitous anglicised Levantine millionaire. Nicely characterised family of suspects. Delicious red herrings. Infinite suspense and shocking surprise finish make up for slight looseness of texture.’ - Maurice Richardson, The Observer,...

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth has it ALL and in a super cool instagrammable/TikTokable cover! Yes, it’s got the goods to back up your next favorite social media book! Multiple heroines to root for, scary, macabre and a twinkle of...

(Available after 3-20 days) Charlotte Brontë’s contemporary George Eliot wrote of Villette, “There is something almost preternatural in its power.” The deceptive stillness and security of a girls’ school provide the setting for this 1853 novel, Brontë’s...

Now a major film called The Unholy starring The Walking Dead's Jeffrey Dean Morgan.In James Herbert's horror novel Shrine, innocence and evil have become one . . .A little girl called Alice. A deaf-mute. A vision. A lady in shimmering white who says she...

A stunningly powerful novel of humanity's will to survive against all odds during an epidemic by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.An International Bestseller  • "This is a shattering work by a literary master.”—Boston GlobeA city is hit by an...