Classics

"I really don't understand how people can blame a priest so much, when he strays from the path."Serge Mouret, is an obsessively devout priest, aspiring to perfect purity and sanctity. A serious illness leaves him with amnesia, and no longer knowing he is...

'What was the beginning, or how did things start? What was there before?'The Prose Edda is the most renowned of all works of Scandinavian literature and our most extensive source for Norse mythology. Written in Iceland a century after the close...

In the 1920s the eminent French novelist and critic André Gide was given a copy of James Hogg's neglected masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and went on to record how he had read 'this astounding book [.....

Set in the author’s beloved small-town New England and filled with all the bittersweet promise of frustrated desire and forbidden love discovered and undone, Summer follows the tragic progress of Charity Royall and the passionate affair...

Behind the glamour of Gilded Age New York, a marriage of convenience between an artisan and a ballerina masks their shared appetite for revenge in this darkly seductive gothic romance.   In early 1900s New York, former ballerina Petronille De...

“A very good novel indeed about the fragility and also the tenacity of love.”—The Spectator. Written in 1953, the last book by best-selling novelist Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance is a quietly gripping story about the...

Philosophy in the Bedroom accounts the lascivious education of a privileged young lady at the dawn of womanhood.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700...

Award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser takes readers on an epic journey to uncover the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece’s greatest legends, and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer's Iliad and...

A brilliant and impassioned biography of one of the founding fathers of humanism, from one of its greatest defenders in the 20th century.Written during the Second World War, Zweig's typically passionate and readable biography of Michel de Montaigne, is...

This iconic, fantastical short story from the acclaimed author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84 about a man who joins forces with a giant frog to save Tokyo is presented in an exquisite hardback edition, translated by Jay Rubin...

In time for the centennial of his birth, the Noble Prize winner’s moving final novel Deeply insightful, Saul Bellow’s moving last novel is a journey through love and memory, an elegy to friendship, and a poignant meditation on death. Told in...

One of the great mavericks of French literature, Georges Bernanos combined raw realism with a spiritual focus of visionary intensity. Mouchette stands with his celebrated Diary of a Country Priest as the perfection of his singular art...

Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett, experience one new mother’s psychological journey in this lost 1930 foremother of Sylvia Plath''s The Bell Jar.''Astonishing and moving. A pretty amazing book.'' Tessa Hadley''Extraordinary. A...

Going to the Dogs is set in Berlin after the crash of 1929 and before the Nazi takeover, years of rising unemployment and financial collapse. The moralist in question is Jakob Fabian, “aged thirty-two, profession variable, at present advertising...

'It is stripped off - the paper - in great patches . . . The colour is repellent . . . In the places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so - I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about . . . 'Based...

Newly revised and updated by Megan McDowell, and with a new introduction by Alejandro Zambra: at last, the unabridged, centennial edition of Donoso’s terrifying masterpiece sees the light of day   Deep in a maze of musty, forgotten hallways,...

'Perhaps the best chess story ever written, perhaps the best about any game' Economist 'Zweig belongs with those masters of the novella - Maupassant, Turgenev, Chekhov' Paul Bailey, TLS Chess champion Mirko Czentovic is travelling on an ocean...

An elegantly hair-raising collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, selected and with a preface written by the author herself.No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton’s most...

Centuries old and still captivating readers, The Odyssey has become a genre in and of itself. Join Odysseus and Co. as they trick a cyclops, outsmart syrens and vie for survival against the ever-crafty creatures of Greek mythology. Told in beautiful...

To the Lighthouse is Woolf's most autobiographical and best-known novel, and this new edition provides a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of its appeal. David Bradshaw is a well-known and respected Woolf scholar whose OWC edition...