Classics

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...

'Can't you see that I don't care what anybody says?' Charity Royall lives in the small New England village of North Dormer. Born among outcasts from the Mountain beyond, she is rescued by lawyer Royall and lives with him as his ward. Never allowed to...

'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...

An old woman enters into a fantastical world of dreams and nightmares in this surrealist classic admired by Björk and Luis Buñuel.Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The...

Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman is a story of lurking disquiet and haunting disorientation, inspired by the real-life, unsolved disappearance of a female college student. 'Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written' Donna...

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...

In pursuit of color, fire, and the unknown. Ophelia abandons her home in Amsterdam and embarks on a journey of self-discovery that takes her across the globe. Led by strange connections and coincidences, she sets out on a solo trip to Lanzarote, travels...

A forgotten mid-century genius, recently rediscovered in France and never before translated into English, Hélène Bessette is a treasure and a bracing force to reckon with. Lili Is Crying, Hélène Bessette’s debut novel,...

90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books. Fabien tonight was wandering over the vast splendour of a sea of clouds, but below him lay eternity. Inspired by his career as an aviator, Saint-Exupéry’s soaring novel follows the...

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my...

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...