Classics

Brilliantly capturing her young narrator's voice, Sagan's stiletto-sharp novella of entitlement, impetuosity and cruel tragedy on the Riviera is an ice-cool slice of essential summer fiction. Sylish, shimmering and amoral, Sagan's tale of adolescence...

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel...Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." —from If On A Winter's Night a Traveler   Italo Calvino's stunning classic imagines a novel...

Potent and vividly emotional, Simone de Beauvoir’s captivating novel questions freedom and individual responsibility in the face of brutality. ‘These carefree faces, on which we allowed our smiles to spread, were for others the mask of...

An astonishingly frank and deeply autobiographical account of homosexual relationships in an era when love between men was not only stigmatised, but also illegal, E.M. Forster's Maurice is edited by P.N. Furbank with an introduction by David Leavitt in...

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogs his every feeling and sensation. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea...

A major work of American literature that powerfully portrays the anguish of being Black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war.At the height of his theatrical career, the actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart...

Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel—the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals—is in English at last   Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel—the story of a girl and...

A classic among the dark academia genre, The Secret History is a captivating thriller about a group of college students who slowly lose their morality as they search to transcend the triviality of their own lives. Tartt’s writing is lyrically...

The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen.Over 1 million copies sold. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of...

California's fertile Salinas Valley is home to two families whose destinies are fruitfully, and fatally, intertwined. Over the generations, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of the First World War, the Trasks and the Hamiltons...

You have to read this. Everyone has to. It has all feels, from funny to devastating, and every word is practically breathing with life. Pick it up if you haven't read it, and pick it up if you have, it's an immortal classic."One Hundred Years of...

The inspiration for the new film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny,...

A runaway teen and an ageing cat whisperer collide in this fabulist extravaganza that showcases all of Murakami’s philosophical playfulness and surreal exuberance. Kafka on the Shore effortlessly siphons the legacy of magic realism into...

he Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and...

A hilarious, tragic novel about a would-be movie star in 1920s Berlin, from the author of Child of All NationsDoris is going to be a big star. Wearing a stolen fur coat and recently fired from her office job, she takes an all-night train to Berlin...

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together. Early every morning they would come out from the house where they lived and walk arm in arm down the street to work. Carson McCullers' prodigious first novel was published to instant...

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a 'masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance,' it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his...

‘One of the masters of the short story’ -- Guardian.‘I have to tell you – you see, this is just about the strangest experience I have been through...’These six stories of obsession, secrets, delusions and desires from one of...

When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous...

Tender-hearted and empathetic, Nabokov’s account of an émigré Russian professor struggling through a tenure at an American university wrings belly laughs from the wistful and melancholy. Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now...