Classics

In twenty short books, Penguin Classics brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary...

In twenty short books, Penguin Classics brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth. Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary...

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner.Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a...

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner, a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. With a foreword by...

Kafka's most celebrated tale of a commercial salesman unexpectedly freed from the drudgery of his job by his inexplicable transformation into a huge insect is an enduring masterwork of dark humour, existentialist dread and sublime sense of drama. This...

August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades...

A masterpiece of black humour from the renown comic and acclaimed author of ‘At Swim-Two-Birds’ – Flann O’Brien. A thriller, a hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity,...

A classic of postwar literature, a small masterpiece of humour, humanity and heroism from one of the best Czech writers For twenty-two-year-old Milos, bumbling apprentice at a sleepy Czech railway station, life is full of worries: his burdensome...

Jan Karski’s Story of a Secret State stands as one of the most poignant and inspiring memoirs of World War II and the Holocaust. With elements of a spy thriller, documenting his experiences in the Polish Underground, and as one of the first...

Saroyan’s debut collection of stories. A timeless selection of brilliant short stories that won William Saroyan a position among the foremost, most widely popular writers of America when it first appeared in 1934.With the greatest of ease William...

A new selection of the much-loved Father Brown stories, now part of the Penguin English Library.'No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be'With his round, unassuming face, his pipe and umbrella, the bumbling priest Father Brown...

Set in the freezing wastelands of the northern wilds, Jack London’s majestic adventure tale is a moving story of cruelty and redemption The wolf-dog White Fang, born in the biting cold and aching silence of the Yukon, grows up to learn the harsh...

Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the...

‘Life is cruel and we do terrible things to each other.’ The lives of Humphrey and James Boyce, a seasoned antique dealer and his good-looking nephew, are changed for ever when the elegant Leonora Eyre glides into their bustling Bond Street...

INTRODUCED BY HAZEL HOLT. When Barbara Pym died in 1980, she left a considerable amount of unpublished material. This volume contains an early novel, Civil to Strangers, three novellas and an autobiographical essay, 'Finding a Voice', Pym's only written...

BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHORWITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CLARE CHAMBERS.Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good-looking and fairly young - but very bored. Her staid husband Rodney, a civil servant, is...

INTRODUCED BY MAVIS CHEEK. 'I'm a huge fan of Barbara Pym' -- Richard Osman. 'She is the rarest of treasures; she reminds us of the heartbreaking silliness of everyday life' -- Anne Tyler. Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads...

This classic novel holds the mirror up to human nature and the battle between the sexes as it explores the love lives of a group of anthropologists.Catherine Oliphant writes for women's magazines and lives comfortably with anthropologist Tom...

'I'm alive inside. A bird is my heart. Mama and Daddy is not win. I'm winning.' This is the story of Precious, a sixteen-year-old illiterate Black girl who has never been out of Harlem. Pregnant by her own father for the second time, she is kicked 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,...