Classics

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!' (from 'The Ugly Duckling') This collection brings together some of Hans...

First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. Told in the first person by Celine's fictional alter ego Bardamu, the novel is loosely based on the author's own...

Penguin's commemorative hardback reissue of One Hundred Years of Solitude by late Nobel laureate and author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a timeless classic and the perfect Christmas gift for any booklover.Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been one of the...

This narrative chronicles the decline of the American South through the experiences of Benjy Compson, who struggles to articulate his vision of life. William Faulkner is the author of "As I Lay Dying" and "Sanctuary" and he won the Nobel Prize in 1949...

Jaroslav Hašek's black satire, the inspiration for such works as Joseph Heller's Catch-22Good-natured and garrulous, Švejk becomes the Austro-Hungarian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although...

“This fine version, with David Cronenberg’s inspired introduction and the new translator’s beguiling afterword, is, I suspect, the most disturbing though the most comforting of all so far; others will follow, but don’t hesitate: this is the transforming...

A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela’s Ashes is Frank McCourt’s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland.“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood:...

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation"One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi’s opera La Traviata, the...

In 1506, Michelangelo - a young but already renowned sculptor - is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da...

Frances Burnett Hodgson's novel The Secret Garden is both intriguing and uplifting. It is regarded as one of the best children's books written in the twentieth century. Mary Lennox, a sickly ten year old girl, adrift in the world after both her mother...

'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from...

The most popular anthology of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories, Fictions is a wildly original and influential collection of fantastic tales, translated from the Spanish with an afterword by Andrew Hurley in Penguin Modern Classics.Jorge Luis...

A gothic adventure story, a classic tale with a feminist twist, a story of ambition and obsession, forbidden love and sabotage...' It is not the monster you must fear, but the monster it makes of men...'Mary is the great-niece of Victor Frankenstein. She...

'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through...

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...

A sweeping historical adventure set during one of the most turbulent periods of British history—featuring a heroine you’ll never forget ...   Dorset, 1642. When bloody civil war breaks out between the king and Parliament, families and communities across...

While fulfilling his dead father's dream of creating a prosperous farm in California, Joseph Wayne comes to believe that a magnificent tree on the farm embodies his father's spirit. His brothers and their families share in Joseph's prosperity andthe farm...

Celtic mythology, Arthurian romance, and an intriguing interpretation of British history—these are just some of the themes embraced by the anonymous authors of the eleven tales that make up the Welsh medieval masterpiece known as the Mabinogion. They...

(Available after 3-20 days)Previously adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola starring Kirsten Dunst, this is the story of the five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the entire neighbourhood. The boys...

"Salty, frank, and realistic." — San Francisco Chronicle   In her most famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally relating the stories of those...