Classics

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...

'A Latin American James Dean or Jack Kerouac' -- Washington Post'It's true; Marxists just wanna have fun... a revolutionary bestseller' -- GuardianAt the age of twenty-three, Ernesto 'Che' Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado set out from their native...

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...

The latest installment in our fully revised edition of Plutarch’s Lives of the great men of the ancient world, this volume focusing on early RomeThe biographies collected in this volume bring together Plutarch’s Lives of those great men who established...

Bringing together nine biographies from Plutarch's Parallel Lives series, this edition examines the lives of major figures in Roman history, from Lucullus (118-57 BC), an aristocratic politician and conqueror of Eastern kingdoms, to Otho (32-69...

The Parallel Lives of Plutarch are cornerstones of Western literature, and have exerted a profound influence on writers and statesmen since the Renaissance, most notably Shakespeare. This selection of ten biographies spans the period from the start of...

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account of T.E. Lawrence - also known as 'Lawrence of Arabia' - of his service in the Arab Revolt during the First World War, published in Penguin Modern Classics.Although 'continually and bitterly...

A coming-of-age classic about two Jewish boys growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s, this “profound and universal” (The Wall Street Journal) story of faith, family, tradition, and assimilation remains deeply pertinent today.“Works of this caliber should be...

(Available after 3-20 days) Revered in eleventh-century Persia as an astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Omar Khayyam is now known first and foremost for his Ruba'iyat. The short epigrammatic stanza form allowed poets of his day to express...

First published in 1861, Humiliated and Insulted plunges the reader into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love and irreconcil­able relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and...

Agatha Christie's ingenious murder mystery, reissued with a striking new cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers. Beautiful Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband, yet there were five other...

In his own day the dominant personality of the Western Church, Augustine of Hippo today stands as perhaps the greatest thinker of Christian antiquity, and his Confessions is one of the great works of Western literature. In this intensely personal...

A compelling new translation of Tacitus' Annals, one of the greatest accounts of ancient Rome, by Cynthia Damon. Tacitus' Annals recounts the major historical events from the years shortly before the death of Augustus to the death of Nero...

First published in 1939, a few years before his most influential works in theatre and philosophy, The Wall was Sartre’s first and only collection of short fiction. The title piece tells the story of a prisoner during the Spanish Civil War, on the...

The Phantom of the Opera is Gaston Leroux's exquisite blend of Gothic horror and tragic romance, which formed the basis for a world-renowned stage musical. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes by Mireille Ribiere, and an introduction by...

A hardboiled novel about life in the American underground, from the pool halls of Portland to the cells of San Quentin. Simply one of the finest books ever written about being down on your luck. Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling is a...

Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unloved, unseen, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes. In this way she dreams of...

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation."One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi’s opera La Traviata, the...

A generous one-volume selection of the best and most important works—poems, songs, stories, essays, novellas, and novels—by the prolific Bard of Bengal, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.Rabindranath Tagore published...

A brilliant, yet brutal, portrait of a woman struggling to retrieve both life and love, from the author of Wide Sargasso SeaFor six months, Julia has lived alone in a drab Parisian hotel on an allowance from her ex-lover, Mr. Mackenzie. When his...