Classics

With Waugh's trademark combination of tragedy, satire and piercing social observation, A Handful of Dust is a masterful portrait of the breakdown of a marriage as the lady of the manor forsakes her husband for a shallow socialite in interwar England...

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...

Discover our collectable Puffin Clothbound Classic edition of David Copperfield. Puffin Clothbound Classics are stunning collectable gift editions of some of the best-loved classics in the world - including this irresistible 175th anniversary edition of...

Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish...

Part love story, part historical novel, part satire, and an evocative tale youthful passion, Gustave Flaubert's A Sentimental Education is translated by Robert Baldick and revised with an introduction by Geoffrey Wall in Penguin Classics. Frederic...

Desiderio, an employee of the city under a bizarre reality attack from Doctor Hoffman's mysterious machines, has fallen in love with Albertina, the Doctor's daughter. But Albertina, a beautiful woman made of glass, seems only to appear to him in his...

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined...

Join the Moomins in their very first adventure, crossing a huge flood to search for missing Moominpappa!Moominmamma and Moomintroll need to find a home for the winter, someplace where sun is plentiful and safe from the dangers of the unknown. But before...

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother, a celebrated figure, lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, news filters...

George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon. George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with...

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Larry McMurtry comes the final book in the Lonesome Dove tetralogy—an exhilarating tale of legend and heroism, Streets of Laredo is classic Texas and Western literature at its finest.Captain Woodrow...

Crossley-Holland—the widely acclaimed translator of Old English texts—introduces the Anglo-Saxons through their chronicles, laws, letters, charters, and poetry, with many of the greatest surviving poems printed in their entirety.About the...

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...

From the self-described 'black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet', these soaring, urgent essays on the power of women, poetry and anger are filled with darkness and light. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic...

Xenophon was acknowledged in Antiquity as a philosopher, a historian (third in the triad of great Classical historians, alongside Herodotus and Thucydides), and a literary artist. His narrative was appreciated for its literary qualities including its...

This is a new verse translation of Lucretius's only known work, a didactic poem written in six books of hexameters. Melville's particularly literal translation of the use of metaphor is especially helpful to those looking at the text from a scientific or...

'That was how things stood in the city at the time. With no one in charge, murders were taking place almost every day and the elections could not be held.'Books 36-40 of the Roman History by Cassius Dio (born ca. 163 CE), covers 69-50 BCE, the last...

The novel that put the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments on the literary map. The Booker Prize winner's first novel is both a scathingly funny satire of consumerism and a heady exploration of emotional cannibalism...

The ancient Chinese military classic that is widely admired today by both military and business strategists—in a new translation, with new notes and commentary.For more than two thousand years, The Art of War has provided leaders with essential...

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for three centuries and transitions into a woman. With a new introduction by Jeanette Winterson.Woolf’s most lighthearted novel...