Classics

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Helen’s beloved brother Declan is dying. Now, she must join her mother and grandmother in a crumbling old house by the sea, three generations calling an uneasy truce after years of strife, to be by his side...

From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidenceand then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman's...

In the summer of 1946, while secluded in August Strindberg’s small cabin in the Stockholm archipelago, Stig Dagerman wrote Island of the Doomed. This novel was unlike any other yet seen in Sweden and would establish him as the country’s...

On June 23rd, 1950, Pavese, Italy's greatest modern writer received the coveted Strega Award for his novel Among Women Only. On August 26th, in a small hotel in his home town of Turin, he took his own life. Shortly before his death, he methodically...

With an Introduction by Angus Calder. As Angus Calder states in his introduction to this edition, 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the major statements about the fighting experience of the First World War'. Lawrence's younger brothers, Frank and Will,...

"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity—a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast," observes John Updike in his foreword to...

An enduring classic and a passionate commentary on the shattering realities of social inequality, Steinbeck’s all-powerful Great Depression era tale follows an Oklahoma family heading to California in search of land, dignity and a future...

Blending piercing perception with endlessly reinventive language, Mercies is a searing collection of poems from one of the most ground-breaking voices of her generation. When Anne Sexton took her own life in October 1974, she left behind a body of...

Discover our collectable Puffin Clothbound Classic edition of David Copperfield. Puffin Clothbound Classics are stunning collectable gift editions of some of the best-loved classics in the world - including this irresistible 175th anniversary edition of...

Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during Charles Dickens' lifetime. He had always loved a good ghost story himself, particularly at Christmas time, and was open-minded, willing to accept, and indeed put to the test, the existence of spirits...

In this classic social commentary from Dickens, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired business man and confirmed bachelor, is determined that after a quiet life of enterprise the time has come to go out into the world. Together with the other members of the...

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'Vividly interweaving epic historical drama with personal tragedy, Dickens's gripping novel depicts the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney...

Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster. Illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen.Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with...

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.’ Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of...

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...