Classics

Glen Runciter is dead.Or is he?Someone died in the explosion orchestrated by his business rivals, but even as his funeral is scheduled, his mourning employees are receiving bewildering messages from their boss. And the world around them is warping and...

'A great shout of life and individuality ... an act of defiance that gladdens the soul' -- Guardian.Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving,...

'How could such a book speak so powerfully to our present moment? The short answer is that we, too, live in dark times' -- Washington PostHannah Arendt's chilling analysis of the conditions that led to the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes is a...

As relevant now as when it was first published, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South skilfully weaves a compelling love story into a clash between the pursuit of profit and humanitarian ideals. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction...

Athena seized the writhing serpent and hurled it into the sky, and fixed it to the very pole of the heavens. The constellations we recognize today were first mapped by the ancient Greeks, who arranged the stars into patterns for that purpose. In the...

Don Quixote, originally published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, stands as Cervantes' belated but colossal literary success. A work which has achieved mythic status, it is considered to have pioneered the modern novel. Don Quixote, a poor gentleman from...

One of the most important nineteenth-century schools of thought, Utilitarianism propounds the view that the value or rightness of an action rests in how well it promotes the welfare of those affected by it, aiming for 'the greatest happiness of the...

Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. THE CONSOLATION was written...

'I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to-night.'Between the First World War and the Wall Street Crash the French Riviera was the stylish place for wealthy Americans...

`Few venture as thou hast in the alarming paths of sin.' This is the final judgement of Satan on Victoria di Loredani, the heroine of Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), a tale of lust, betrayal, and multiple murder set in Venice in the last days of the...

By the author of Stoner, the surprise international bestseller After the brutal murder of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of Rome. He is destined,...

An utterly unforgettable novel that portrays a vast internal emptiness by using the cool, haunting voice of a young woman in Scotland lost in the profound anomie of her generation—from “one of the most talented, original and interesting...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. 'All art,' Oscar Wilde once announced, 'is quite useless.' Selected here are some of his finest prose works on the subject of art – useless, illuminating, artificial, uplifting, radical,...

Gonzo journalist and literary roustabout Hunter S. Thompson flies with the angels—Hell’s Angels, that is—in this short work of nonfiction. “California, Labor Day weekend . . . early, with ocean fog still in the streets,...

Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson this autumn with a collection of her finest, darkest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerising best. There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales,...

THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY is a book without any modern parallel. Forming an active link in a chain that reaches back through Ovid's METAMORPHOSES directly to Homer, Roberto Calasso's re-exploration of the fantastic fables and mysteries we may...

'Endo is one of the world's greatest novelists' -- Washington Post. A group of Japanese tourists journey to the sacred River Ganges, each on a secret personal pilgrimage. Widower Isobe mourns for the devoted wife he neglected; gentle children's writer...

A collection of nine exceptional stories from the much-loved author of The Catcher in the Rye. An American soldier has a strange encounter with an orphaned English teenager the night before he leaves for war. A four-year-old boy runs away in a dinghy; a...

The Jane Austen brand is well established. Satire, love, quippy dialogue—and it’s all here in her final novel. It’s the story of Anne and Frederick, once engaged, now meeting again nearly a decade later. Will love win out? Probably...

Join Dostoevsky on his tumultuous honeymoon in this hypnotic cult classic , introduced by Susan Sontag.'A wonderful work of art.' Jon McGregor'Extraordinary in its confidence and enchantment.' Chris Power'Addictive, dreamlike and dazzlingly unique.' Adam...