Classics

Italo Calvino's enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures, The Complete Cosmicomics is translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks and William Weaver in...

Internationally acclaimed Egyptian feminist writer Nawal El Saadawi's landmark novel Woman at Point Zero, published here with a new foreword.Firdaus is on death row. Her crime, the murder of a man. Born into poverty in a rural Egyptian village, her...

'Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.' One of the great literary curios of the twentieth century Save Me the Waltz is the first and only novel by the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. During the years when Fitzgerald was...

An early-twentieth-century classic — the turbulent, dreamlike story of a businessman torn between middle-class respectability and sensational bohemia.“No one who has read it has failed to love it.” — Nicholas Lezard.Mihály...

Tells the story of Lady Constantine, who breaks all the rules of decorum when she falls in love with the beautiful youth Swithin St Cleeve, her social inferior and ten years her junior. Together, in an ancient monument converted into an astronomical...

"I'm a fearful, frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of a nice girl that was not?"This edition contains two of Henry James's most popular short works. Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman,...

'He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson ... He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them.'Sherlock Holmes, scourge of criminals everywhere, whether they be...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Kim by Rudyard Kipling. 'He knew the wonderful walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid dreamed of; and he...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell. "Eh, miss, but that be a rare young lady! She do have such pretty coaxing ways ..." Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson worships her widowed father. But when he decides to...

O. Henry was a master of the short story and one of the most popular American writers of the twentieth century. This selection of tales from across his writing career ranges from New York apartments to the cattle-lands of Texas, taking in con men,...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. 'A parish child - the orphan of a workhouse - the humble, half-starved drudge - to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none' Dark, mysterious...

'They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden party if they had ordered it.' A windless, warm day greets the Sheridan family on the day of their garden party. As daughter Laura takes the reins on party preparations the news of a neighbour's...

'Venus in Furs' describes the obsessions of Severin von Kusiemski, a European nobleman who desires to be enslaved to a woman. Severin finds his ideal of voluptuous cruelty in the merciless Wanda von Dunajew. This is a passionate and powerful portrayal of...

'I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.' Los Angeles Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.' Meet the gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists of Cannery...

Set on a South Pacific island under Japanese control, Mailer’s uncompromising study of a band of men in extremis pulsates with brutal energy and whip-smart prose. Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during...

"An absolute treat... Szerb is a master novelist, a comedian whose powers transcend time and language" Nicholas Lezard, Guardian. At an end-of-season London soirée a young Hungarian scholar, Dr János Bátky, is introduced to the Earl...

Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieves peace and stability by dispensing with monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma...

Pandora has looked up to her older brother Edison since they were children. Now she revels in the anonymity of her suburban Iowa life, while her brother basks in the limelight as a New York jazz musician. But when Edison arrives in Iowa, suddenly in need...

A curse. An arranged marriage. A chance to live happily ever after. For as long as Astrid can remember she's been betrothed to a stranger. When tragedy strikes her husband-to-be emerges from the shadows ready to claim her hand in marriage. Unable to...