Classics

Introduction and Notes by John S. Whitley, University of Sussex. Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father.After Mr Earnshaw's...

One of the most enchanting books about cats ever written, Minka and Curdy describes the adventures - and misadventures - of two very different kittens.Victoria, a real tyrant of a cat, spent so many years training her owner to be the ideal hostess that...

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), Rome's greatest orator, had a career of intense activity in politics, the law courts and the administration, mostly in Rome. His fortunes, however, followed those of Rome, and he found himself driven into exile in 58...

Elegies of Chu (in Chinese, Chuci), one of the two surviving collections of ancient Chinese poetry, is a key source for the whole tradition of Chinese poetry. Because the elegies contain passionate expressions of political protest as well as shamanistic...

Selected by Gwyn Jones—the eminent Celtic scholar—for their excellence and variety, these nine Icelandic sagas include "Hen-Thorir," "The Vapnfjord Men," "Thorstein Staff-Struck," "Hrafnkel the Priest of Frey," "Thidrandi whom the Goddesses...

For much of his life, Pascal (1623-62) worked on a magnum opus which was never published in its intended form. Instead, he left a mass of fragments which became known as the Pensées, and they occupy a crucial place in Western philosophy and...

After the apocalypse, society is divided into three endlessly warring factions. The Professors and Soldiers maintain what is left of civilization while the superstitious Barbarians constantly attack them. The Barbarians are in turn attacked by the...

In these letters to his friends and relations, Pliny the Younger, lawyer, author, and natural philosopher, provides a fascinating insight into Roman life in the period 97 to 112 AD. Part autobiography, part social history, they document the career and...

'Who would you say knows himself?'In 399 BCE Socrates was tried in Athens on charges of irreligion and corruption of the young, convicted, and sentenced to death. Like Plato, an almost exact contemporary, in his youth Xenophon (c. 430-c. 354 BCE) was one...

Drawing on recent advances in Egyptology, R. B. Parkinson's new translations bring to life for the modern reader the golden age of Egyptian fictional literature, the Middle Kingdom (c. 1940-1640 BC). The book features The Tale of Sinuhe, acclaimed as the...

Agatha Christie’s first Tommy & Tuppence book is a thrill-packed novel of international intrigue, murder and suspense. Tommy and Tuppence, two young people short of money and restless for excitement, embark on a daring business scheme –...

Seneca's letters to his friend Lucilius are powerful moral essays that also yield illuminating insight into Seneca's personal life and the truly turbulent times in which he lived. One of the great Stoic philosophers, Seneca here guides Lucilius' struggle...

A country house.A murder.A Belgian detective. After the Great War, life can never be the same again. Captain Arthur Hastings is invited to Styles To recuperate from injuries sustained at the Front. It is the last place he expects to encounter murder...

It may only be Hercule Poirot’s second outing but the great detective is already fully formed in this marvellously labyrinthine whodunnit set in a French golfing resort. Personal avarice, illicit love affairs and a neighbour who must be too good to...

One of Cuba’s—and Latin America’s—greatest historical novels, about imperial conquest carried out under the guise of liberation, in its first new English translation in sixty years and featuring a new foreword by Alejandro ZambraA...

For classic murder mystery readers, a scintillating anthology of lost treasures to read alongside Edgar Allan Poe and Sherlock HolmesA Penguin ClassicFor The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries, writer and anthologist Michael Sims did not summon the usual...

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), like his friend Ezra Pound, never finished his magnum opus, a poem as impossibly ambitious as the Cantos, but richly invested in the present world. It was published over a period of a dozen years...

New York Times bestselling author Natalie Haynes returns to the world of ancient Greek myth in this scintillating follow-up to Pandora’s Jar. Few writers today have reshaped our view of the ancient Greek myths more than revered...

The magical Peter Pan comes to the night nursery of the Darling children, Wendy, John and Michael. He teaches them to fly, then takes them through the sky to Never-Never Land, where they find Red Indians, Wolves, Mermaids and... Pirates.The leader of the...

The novel that made the literary icon’s name, Fiesta reeks of the macho, bohemian Spain of the interwar years and contains some of the best writing about bullfighting in twentieth century literature. Crisp, intense and unmistakably...