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...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, the seminal work of gay literature that sparked an infamous legal trial for obscenity and went on to become a bestseller. The Well of Loneliness tells the story of tomboyish Stephen, who hunts, wears trousers and cuts her...

One of the most influential and well-loved books of Christianity, The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis appears here in Penguin Classics in a new translation by Robert Jeffery, with an introduction by Max Von Habsburg, notes, a chronology and...

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of 'Poetry Review'.Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg...

As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, 36-year-old woman and three centuries...

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...

John Milton's celebrated epic poem exploring the cosmological, moral and spiritual origins of man's existenceA Penguin ClassicIn Paradise Lost Milton produced poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge...

With his trademark dry wit, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle is an inventive science fiction satire that preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon - and, worse still, surviving it. Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic...

(Available after 3-20 days)Netochka Nezvanova - a 'Nameless Nobody' - tells the story of a childhood dominated by her stepfather, Efimov, a failed musician who believes he is a neglected genius. The young girl is strangely drawn to this drunken ruin of a...

‘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...

A wheelchair-bound Poirot returns to Styles, the venue of his first investigation, where he knows another murder is going to take place... The house guests at Styles seemed perfectly pleasant to Captain Hastings; there was his own daughter Judith, an...

(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...

Athens and Sparta, the mighty city states of ancient Greece, locked together in a quarter century of conflict: the Peloponnesian War. Alexias the Athenian was born, passed through childhood and grew to manhood in those troubled years, that desperate and...

'I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's' Bob DylanSal Paradise, a young innocent, joins his hero, the mystical traveller Dean Moriarty, on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States...

The winner of the Booker Prize 1999 After years teaching Romantic poetry at the Technical University of Cape Town, David Lurie, middle-aged and twice divorced, has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours; and when discovered by the college...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was America's leading feminist intellectual of the early twentieth century. The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories makes available the fullest selection ever printed of her short fiction, featuring the pioneering feminist...