Classics

A discrete advertisement in The Times, addressed to "those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine," is the prelude to a revelatory month for four very different women. High above a bay on the Italian Riviera stands the medieval castle San Salvatore...

The Golden Ass is a unique, entertaining, and thoroughly readable Latin novel - the only work of fiction in Latin to have survived in its entirety.It tells the story of Lucius, whose curiosity and fascination for sex and magic result in his...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels that Shaped the World' A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women Selection.A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas and one of the best-loved comic novels of all time, Cold Comfort Farm by...

A classic of fantastic literature, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet is the occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, published with an introduction by Ali Smith in Penguin Modern Classics.One of the first things ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby...

A missing plane resurfaces – and so do long-submerged secrets… An RAF Dakota, presumed lost at sea during World War Two, has just been discovered at the bottom of a drained lake over twenty years later – complete with the skeletal...

James Bond, the secret service’s most lethal agent, is a marked man. Deep inside the Soviet Union, a plot is taking shape. Under the fiendish Colonel Rosa Klebb, the Russian counter-intelligence organisation SMERSH are laying a trap that will not...

Who stole George Matthews’ life? ‘Doctor, I think I’m losing my mind…’. When a wealthy young man turns up at respected psychiatrist Dr George Matthews’ office uttering these words, it changes his safe existence...

To catch a criminal, he must become one. Jonathan Pine, night manager of a luxury Swiss hotel, has a secret. He knows that the guest he awaits, billionaire trader Richard Roper, is ‘the worst man in the world.’ And he knows why. Pine will do...

Private Detective Lew Archer doesn’t believe in coincidences… A forest fire has mysteriously broken out in the hills above southern California. Meanwhile, Lew Archer has been asked by a desperate mother to find her six-year-old son. Instead,...

Judge Dee is about to step into the shoes of a dead man… Most people would refuse the job of Magistrate at the lonely port town of Peng-lai – especially as the last occupant of the post has been found poisoned in his library, his papers...

What if you woke up to discover everyone thought you were somebody else? Pregnant and abandoned, all Helen Georgesson has is five dollars and a one-way ticket to San Francisco. Then she is involved in a train crash, and regains consciousness only to...

Can an ace detective outwit a thief with many faces? They call him ‘Gold Mask’: a fiendishly clever master of disguise whose crime spree has shocked Tokyo. The dogged detective Akechi Kogoro is on the trail, and soon the two become locked in...

Is Carl Andersen innocent of murder, or a very good liar? Detective Chief Inspector Maigret has been interrogating the enigmatic Danish aristocrat for seventeen hours. A diamond merchant was found dead, shot at point-blank range, in the garage of...

Eighteen-year-old Merricat may, or may not be, a mass murderer. Six years ago everyone in the Blackwood family was poisoned by sugar laced with arsenic – everyone, that is, apart from Merricat and her elder sister Constance. They live in peaceful,...

Occupied by enemy troops, a small, peaceable town comes face-to-face with evil imposed from the outside—and betrayal born within the close-knit community.A Penguin ClassicIn this masterful tale set in Norway during World War II, Steinbeck explores...

A new, definitive edition of Herman Melville’s virtuosic short stories—American classics wrought with scorching fury, grim humor, and profound beauty. Though best-known for his epic masterpiece Moby-Dick, Herman Melville also left a body...

"The overlooked American writer who blows apart modern thinking on race" -- TelegraphBorn to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Helga Crane has long had to fend for herself as a mixed-race woman in the Deep South of 1920’s America. She moves...

A new selection of E. M. Forster's exquisite short stories, now in the beautifully designed Penguin English Library Series 'We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the...

The inspiration for the new Netflix original series Ratched.Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin...

“The Joy Luck Club is one of my favorite books. From the moment I first started reading it, I knew it was going to be incredible. For me, it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime reading experiences that you cherish forever. It inspired me as a...