Classics

Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish...

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers with its depiction of a dark criminal underworld peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger,...

The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal...

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, University of Kent at Canterbury. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a...

Bouvard and Pécuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs and explore the world of ideas.In this, his last novel, unfinished on his death in...

A fresh and vivid translation of Flaubert’s influential bildungsroman. Gustave Flaubert conceived Sentimental Education, his final complete novel, as the history of his own generation, one that failed to fulfill the promise of the Revolution of...

Part love story, part historical novel, part satire, and an evocative tale youthful passion, Gustave Flaubert's A Sentimental Education is translated by Robert Baldick and revised with an introduction by Geoffrey Wall in Penguin Classics. Frederic...

'For certain men the stronger their desire, the less likely they are to act.' With his first glimpse of Madame Arnoux, Frédéric Moreau is convinced he has found his romantic destiny, but when he pursues her to Paris the young student is...

'She decided she would teach him to speak and he was very soon able to say, 'Pretty boy!', 'Your servant, sir!' and 'Hail Mary!'' With pathos and humour, Flaubert imagines the unexamined life of a servant girl. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80...

Illustrated by leading US manga artists, this series feeds into the growing popularity of manga worldwide, and presents Shakespeare's classic works in a highly visual and dynamic form.  Shakespeare's tale of fantasy has fascinated audiences for...

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Richard II is one of Shakespeare’s finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can be seen as a tragedy, or a...

A sizzling drama of desire, avarice and deception set in the American Deep South, Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is published in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to...

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Antony and Cleopatra is one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies: a spectacular, widely-ranging drama of love and war, passion and...

Introduction and Notes by Dr Ian Littlewood, University of Sussex. Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon...

Elective Affinities was written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. This is a new edition of his penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks...

Eduard and Charlotte are an aristocratic couple who live a harmonious but idle life in their estate. But the peace of their existence is thrown into chaos when two visitors - Eduard's friend the Captain and Charlotte's passionate young ward Ottilie -...

Goethe's account of his passage through Italy from 1786 to 1788 is a great travel chronicle as well as a candid self-portrait of a genius in the grip of spiritual crisis.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic...

"I can promise to be candid, not, however, to be impartial."A selection of the most insightful maxims and reflections from one of Germany's greatest ever thinkers.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black...

One of Voltaire's earliest tales, Zadig is set in the exotic East and is told in the comic spirit of Candide; L'Ingenu, written after Candide, is a darker tale in which an American Indian records his impressions of France

Inspired by Voltaire's two-year stay in England (1726-8), this is one of the key works of the Enlightment. Exactly contemporary with Gulliver's Travels and The Beggar's Opera, Voltaire's controversial pronouncements on politics, philosophy, religion, and...