Classics

A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the AmericasMachado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature. In his masterpiece, the 1881...

Impeccably crafted in flawless prose, the delightfully witty courtship of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy is brimming with Austen's characteristic playfulness and comic irony.  "He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention...

The famous tale by the trailblazing subject of major new film ColetteGIGI TRANSLATED BY ROGER SENHOUSE, THE CAT TRANSLATED BY ANTONIA WHITEGigi's days are filled with cigars, lobster, lace and superstitions: the education of a future courtesan. Bored 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,...

The second volume of a political treatise that changed the worldA vital cornerstone to Marx’s overall theory of economics, the second volume of Capital considers in depth the nature of commodity and the market-place bourgeois society. This immensely...

Zola's classic novel of turbulent passionIn a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when...

A magnetic, stirring debut novel about an adrift young woman whose growing fascination with her boyfriend’s cat ushers her into the possibilities of her own life—but not without first threatening to unravel it.Katie is far from home and fresh...

After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium,...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books.'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' - Colm Tóibín. A housewife’s life is shattered by a sudden epiphany. A simple tale of killing cockroaches fragments...

This sublime novella from the former New Yorker fiction editor explores the mysterious gravity of the past through the story of two lonely teenagers whose friendship comes to a dramatic end in 1920s rural Illinois, and the journey towards atonement one...

One of Baldwin's best known novels, often the first that readers discover; a classic of gay literature.Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is "a book that belongs in the...

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...

Poe and Kafka meet The Twilight Zone in this anthology of fifty fantastical tales, many of them reflecting the political and social energies of the time, by an Italian master of the short story.Dino Buzzati was a prolific writer of stories,...

Lose yourself in the tortured love lives of expats in 1920s Paris in this iconic cult classic. 'Nightwood is itself. It is its own created world, exotic and strange, and reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass ... From now...

In Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman, a young woman faces loneliness and alienation on a journey to find her own life outside of being a wife and mother.One evening, when Marianne and her husband, Bruno, are dining out...

Cassandra Mortmain lives with her bohemian and impoverished family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. Her journal records her life with her beautiful, bored sister, Rose, her fading glamorous stepmother, Topaz, her little brother Thomas,...

One of the landmark Japanese novels, Tanizaki’s immense family saga is as reliable a record of 1940s Osaka as any history book. Winningly affectionate yet bitingly critical, the horror and excess of the Second World War and Japan’s subsequent...

Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere? On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist attempts to extract the essence of life itself...

A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines. In the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanislaw Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet...

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...