Classics

'She was the golden beast, an unconscious force, the very scent of her could bring the world to ruin.'Nana, daughter of a drunk and a laundress, is the Helen of Troy of Paris. A sexually magnetic high-class prostitute and actress, she becomes a...

His haunting, impressionistic study of a man's slow corruption by jealousy, Emile Zola's The Beast Within (La Bete Humaine) is translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Roger Whitehouse in Penguin Classics. Roubaud is consumed by a...

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower classes in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere `human beasts' who kill in order...

A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.Marie lives with her...

A brilliant new translation of a perennial favorite of Russian literature The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful...

“The most influential Colombian novel before Gabriel García Márquez.”―Times Literary Supplement A new translation of a Latin American classic, José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex follows the young poet Arturo Cova...

Exploring the decadence of Jazz Age New York through a fictionalised version of his own marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned includes an introduction by Geoff Dyer in Penguin Modern Classics. Anthony Patch and...

In these stories, Dostoevsky explores both the figure of the dreamer divorced from reality, and also his own ambiguous attitude toward utopianism, themes central to his great novels. In White Nights, the apparent idyll of the dreamer's romantic...

The prequel to Love Me Tender, narrating Debré’s transformation from affluent career woman to broke single lesbian and writer.I see all her beauty, I see the beauty of women. I see my own body, new. I tell myself there are so many...

The darkly comic Transparent Things, one of Nabokov's final books, traces the bleak life of Hugh Person through murder, madness, prison and trips to Switzerland. One of these was the last journey his father ever took; on another, having been sent to...

Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache. Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born...

"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...

"She tried to settle that most difficult problem for women, how much was to be utterly merged in obedience to authority, and how much might be set apart for freedom in working."North and South is a novel about rebellion. Moving from the industrial riots...

'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...

James Hogg''s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a Scottish classic, a quintessentially Gothic tale of psychological horror, and a relentless attack on Calvinist dogma. The Penguin Classics edition is edited with an...

“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...

'The foremost work on the key democratic task: helping people to identify and challenge the sources of their oppression ... a transformative text' George Monbiot, Guardian. Arguing that 'education is freedom', Paulo Freire's radical international...

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...