Classics

It’s terribly important that I get in touch with a gentleman who may have stopped in here to buy flowers this morning. Terribly important.Sometimes, the person you think you love isn’t who they seem. And sometimes, you can be your own...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksMuriel Spark claimed The Driver’s Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise – heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily...

One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century. Lewellyn Powys...

A young Russian man, engaged to be married, encounters his former love in a German spa town and is soon enmeshed in a torturous romantic tangle in this graceful, politically tinged love story by a Russian literary great.Ivan Turgenev's fifth...

This is Alcott as you have never seen her before - gothic, and gloriously unsettlingA young governess arrives at a grand country house and quickly wins the confidence of its family. Humble and modest, Jean Muir seems to embody every virtue expected of...

‘The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose–there’s no one like Edna O’Brien.’ Anne Enright‘Surprising and beautiful and courageous . . . A beacon.’ Megan Nolan We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of...

'Surprising and beautiful and courageous .. A beacon.' Megan Nolan'Novels of heart-breaking empathy, rigorous honesty and peerless beauty.' Eimear McBrideCaithleen 'Kate' Brady and Bridget 'Baba' Brennan are growing up in a repressive Irish...

'Surprising and beautiful and courageous .. A beacon.' Megan Nolan'Novels of heart-breaking empathy, rigorous honesty and peerless beauty.' Eimear McBrideCaithleen 'Kate' Brady and Bridget 'Baba' Brennan are growing up in a repressive Irish...

INTRODUCED BY SARAH WATERS 'Every one of her books is a treat and this is my favourite, because of its wonderful cast of characters, and because of the deftness with which Taylor's narrative moves between them ... A wonderful writer' SARAH...

Experience a BRIEF ENCOUNTER with Edith Wharton, grande dame of American letters, in these spectral tales of longing, loss, and the uncanny. Edith Wharton’s ghost stories whisper of passion, exile, and the things we cannot forget. In an old Dorset...

The classic 1920s story of a friendship torn apart by racism, Passing is Nella Larsen's devastating masterpiece Two childhood friends reconnect later in life. One, slightly more light-skinned than the other, lives her life passing for a white...

A magical, mystical novella about the art and power of storytelling, this is Italo Calvino's miniature masterpiece.A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then in a tavern. Having mysteriously lost their powers of speech, they must tell...

Prudence, at nineteen, is reckless, laughing, wild; the despair of her elderly guardians. With her best friend, the subversive but very female Peter, she rackets round the Irish countryside among her beloved horses and dogs. But she feels betrayed by...

Rilke is one of the leading poets of European Modernism, and one of the great twentieth-century lyric poets in German. From The Book of Hours in 1905 to the Sonnets of Orpheus written in 1922, he constantly probed the relationship...

Don Quixote, originally published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, stands as Cervantes' belated but colossal literary success. A work which has achieved mythic status, it is considered to have pioneered the modern novel. Don Quixote, a poor gentleman from...

'between the life we live and the life we feel...there is the invisible border, like a narrow gate'Set in a boarding school in a remote area of the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the last century, The Confusions of Young Torless is an intense...

A hilarious exploration of the relativism of identity from Italian novelist and playwright Luigi Pirandello, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature.This uproarious new translation of One, None, and a Hundred Grand delivers the defining...

'Thomas was born in the village of Gine at that time of year when a ripe apple thumps to the ground during an afternoon lull.' So a boy's life begins in a winding river valley on the Polish-Russian border where time is measured by seasonal rhythms...

From the author of The Door, selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2015An NYRB Classics OriginalLike Magda Szabó’s internationally acclaimed novel The Door, Iza’s...

"One death, in exchange for thousands of lives - it's simple arithmetic!"A new translation of Dostoevsky's epic masterpiece, Crime and Punishment (1866). The impoverished student Raskolnikov decides to free himself from debt by killing an old...