Classics

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...

'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...

A beautiful hardback edition of Calvino's genre-switching masterwork. A book of surprise and adventure but you, the reader, are the hero. You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a...

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...

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,...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Grapes of Wrath is an epic human drama, with a stunning new cover by renowned artist Bijou Karman.'To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut...

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 eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with...

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...

“Prescient and technically astonishing.” —Geoff Dyer, GQ.Often considered Jean Rhys’s most autobiographical novel, this masterful and moving work follows a chorus girl, Anna, who struggles to adjust to cold and inhospitable...

'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...

Life and Fate is an epic tale of twentieth-century Russia told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs, from the Sunday Times bestselling author ofStalingrad. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their...

Ingeniously intertwining narratives, from remorse-ridden Pontius Pilate to a persecuted writer in Stalinist Moscow, Bulgakov's sparkling critique of totalitarianism is a powerful meditation on love, evil, freedom and the greatest magician of all -...

It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his...

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...

Dostoevsky’s final, greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, paints a complex and richly detailed portrait of a family tormented by its extraordinarily cruel patriarch, Fyodor Pavlovich, whose callous decisions slowly decimate the lives of his...

Two small masterpieces in one volume. First, The Double, a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare that foreshadows Kafka and Sartre. A minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger - a man who has his name and his face...

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...

Exuberantly mocking the vices and pretensions of his Roman contemporaries, Horace's Satiresare stuffed full of comic vignettes, moral insights, and his pervasive humanity. Boasting famous episodes such as the fable of the town mouse and the country mouse...