Classics

J.M. Barrie's classic tale of the "boy who would not grow up"Peter Pan originally appeared as a baby living a magical life among birds and fairies in J.M. Barrie’s sequence of stories, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. His later role as flying boy hero...

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly...

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is an inspiring and tragic account of an ordinary life lived in extraordinary circumstances that has enthralled readers for generations. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler,...

A brilliant new translation of a perennial favorite of Russian literature The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful...

Turgenev's timeless tale of generational collision, in a sparkling new translationWhen Arkady Petrovich returns home from college, his father finds his eager, naïve son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen...

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes's Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift - an...

What is it like to live with chronic insomnia? For Marie Darrieussecq, not sleeping began after the birth of her first child and continues more than twenty years later. She wonders if it is connected to her hypervigilance, to her fear of her children...

Friendship makes life worth living, and worth ending too. Eufrasia Vela is a caregiver―it’s not just her job. But when she begins working with Doña Carmen, a bedridden elderly woman who spends her days staring out the window at her...

“The most influential Colombian novel before Gabriel García Márquez.”―Times Literary Supplement A new translation of a Latin American classic, José Eustasio Rivera's The Vortex follows the young poet Arturo Cova...

A prophetic, darkly comic lost classic about down-and-outs in a fractured Berlin by the author of the Sunday Times bestselling rediscovery The Passenger 'A writer of great insight and talent' FT Berlin, 1920s: a beacon of culture and...

The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, and to rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biographies invite us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than those by Gaius Suetonius...

'Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was a groan of mortal terror ... the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul.'Stories about murder, mystery and madness, portraying the author's feverish imagination at its creative...

'I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.'In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide...

'... ever-present, phantom thing;My slave, my comrade, and my king'Some of Emily Brontë's most extraordinary poemsIntroducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and...

Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent 1920S and 1930s in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the...

Kingsley Amis's witty campus novel, Lucky Jim is a comedy that skewers the hypocrisies and vanities of 1950s academic life. This Penguin Modern Classics edition contains an introduction by David Lodge. Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one...

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account of T.E. Lawrence - also known as 'Lawrence of Arabia' - of his service in the Arab Revolt during the First World War, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Although 'continually and bitterly...

With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie...

A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyce's life. The Penguin Modern Classics edition of includes an...

Both a gripping tale of adventure and a poetic meditation, Antoine de Saint Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars is the lyrical autobiography of an aviation pioneer, from the author of The Little Prince. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is...