Classics

Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up, coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives from the First World War to Greenham Common and beyond. This is the ‘edited’ diary of an individual woman, born in 1901, and a story of the...

Based on the true experiences of Bao Ninh and banned by the communist party, The Sorrow of War is revered as the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front for our era’. Kien’s job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. He knows...

When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can see: everyone else, doctors and patients alike, have been blinded by a meteor...

Jane Austen's Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility' Observer Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances' love affairs...

In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her crônicas—short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces—are the delicious canapés. The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They...

Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny novel of the Roaring Twenties, with an introduction by Simon James. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair,...

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round...

Elevating a picaresque farce into a hilarious literary gem, Waugh’s anarchic debut novel is a biting satire on 1920s society that places a disgraced Oxford student in an ill-advised teaching position at an obscure Welsh school. Just work, good...

Horace (65-8 B.C.) is one of the most important and brilliant poets of the Augustan Age of Latin literature whose influence on European literature is unparalleled. Steeped in allusion to contemporary affairs, Horace's verse is best read in terms of his...

New translation of Frigate Pallada by Ivan Goncharov, written in 1854–1856 and based on a diary that he kept as a secretary for Admiral Yevfimy Putyatin during his 1852–1854 on board of the ship. In the autumn of 1852, Ivan Goncharov, then...

Gustav Hackendahl's will is law. Known as 'Iron Gustav', he runs his family and his Berlin carriage business with stern, unyielding discipline. But his children have wills of their own, and soon they slip from his control - some to better lives, some...

'No matter which way you look at us, you'll find that we're in all respects; Remarkably wasp-like in our habits, in every aspect of our lives.'Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, an exuberant form of festival drama...

Aristophanes is the only surviving representative of Greek Old Comedy, an exuberant form of festival drama which flourished in Athens during the fifth century BC. One of the most original playwrights in the entire Western tradition, his comedies are...

“A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.”—Kansas City Star.Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American...

Restoration-era poet, playwright and novelist Aphra Behn was the first truly professional woman writer in English, and Oroonoko is her sophisticated and insightful condemnation of slavery. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by...

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...

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...

'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...

'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...