Classics

The original 'Great American Novel', Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is a masterful study of obsession. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Andrew Delblanco, with explanatory commentary by Tom Quirk. Call me Ishmael. So begins Herman...

With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University,Bakersfield. Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a...

Rediscover one of Virginia Woolf's greatest works in this beautiful new gift edition from Vintage Classics.Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. The novel's opening...

'Virginia Woolf wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it' Jeanette Winterson, from her introduction to The WavesThe Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing...

The classic bestseller - over a million copies sold worldwide.High fashion, low cunning - and the boss from hell.When Andrea first sets foot in the plush Manhattan offices of Runway she knows nothing. She's never heard of the world's most fashionable...

Camus’s masterpiece on the effects of isolation, claustrophobia and moral recklessness in an Algerian village ravaged by the plague weaves an extraordinary tapestry of life governed by fear. Humane, haunting and timeless, The Plague is a chilling,...

Asle is an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also...

(Available after 3-20 days)A classic of Mexican literature in the twentieth century, The Hole is a dazzlingly devastating novella   Set in a Mexican prison in the late 1960s, The Hole follows three inmates as they plot to sneak in drugs under the noses...

Born to drunken parents in the slums of Paris, Nana lives in squalor until she is discovered at the Theatre des Varietes. She soon rises from the streets to set the city alight as the most famous high-class prostitute of her day. Rich men, Comtes and...

With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant, Canterbury Christchurch University CollegeThe Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin, religion and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration...

This masterpiece of science (and mathematical) fiction is a delightfully unique and highly entertaining satire that has charmed readers for more than 100 years. The work of English clergyman, educator and Shakespearean scholar Edwin A. Abbott...

Heartwarming and profound, this account of one writer's relationship with his beloved German Shepherd is "one of the bonafide dog-lit classics" (New Yorker).The distinguished British man of letters J. R. Ackerley hardly thought of himself as a dog lover...

Towering over the rest of Greek tragedy, Sophocles' The Three Theban Plays are among the most enduring and timeless dramas ever written. This Penguin Classics edition is translated by Robert Fagles with introductions and notes by Bernard Knox.Collected...

Herodotus is not only known as the `father of history', as Cicero called him, but also the father of ethnography; as well as charting the historical background to the Persian Wars, his curiosity also prompts frequent digression on the cultures of the...

The ancient Sumerian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest written stories in existence, translated with an introduction by Andrew George in Penguin Classics.Miraculously preserved on clay tablets dating back as much as four thousand years, the...

Three masterpieces of classical tragedyContaining Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and Euripides' Medea, this important new selection brings the best works of the great tragedians together in one perfect introductory volume. This volume...

An immaculate portrait of adolescent love from one of our most beloved novelists.'One of the last century's greatest woman writers' GuardianWhen sixteen-year-old Portia is orphaned, she is plunged into the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of...

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex.Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy's Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the...

Delicately written yet packing an emotionally devastating punch, The Go-Between resounds with lost innocence and the inevitable corruption of youth. The exploitation of a young boy drawn into conveying messages between a farmer and a rich young woman at...

With their penetrating psychological insight and their emphasis on human dignity, respect and forgiveness, Dostoyevsky's early short stories contain the seeds of the themes that came to his major novels. Poor Folk, the author's first great literary...