Classics

Soon to be a BritBox limited series written and directed by Hugh Laurie!   A dying man’s bewildering last words pull an inquisitive young man and his beautiful companion into a dangerous web of lethal secrets in Agatha Christie’s classic mystery, Why...

The work of Shakespeare is virtually infinite' -- Jorge Luis BorgesA jealous king, convinced that his wife has been unfaithful and is having another man's baby, imprisons her and puts her on trial. The child is abandoned to die, but when she is found and...

This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury...

Masterfully atmospheric and chilling to the core, Hill’s pitch-perfect horror story about a mysterious woman all dressed in black who haunts an English village surrounded by marshes and sea fog is a gloriously ghostly read. Arthur Kipps, a...

Introduction and Notes by R.T. Jones, Honorary Fellow of the University of York. This novel, based on George Eliot's own experiences of provincial life, is a masterpiece of ambiguity in which moral choice is subjected to the hypocrisy of the Victorian...

Maggie Tulliver is a brilliant woman who finds herself at the center of a love triangle between her childhood crush and a cousin’s potential fiancé. The controversial romance makes her a town pariah, damaging her most beloved relationships.   Maggie...

'Was her life to be always like this? - always bringing some new source of inward strife?'When the miller Mr Tulliver becomes entangled in lawsuits, he sets off a chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of his family and bring into conflict...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Mill on the Floss by George EliotIf life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie?Tragic and moving, The Mill on the Floss is a novel of grand passions and tormented lives. As the rebellious Maggie's...

Be irresistibly drawn into Barchester's clerical skirmishes as Archdeacon Grantly declares war on Bishop Proudie and his retinue in Trollope's most popular novel.This 1857 sequel to The Warden wryly chronicles the struggle for control of the English...

'Nevill Coghill's easy, seductive translation ensures that this, the most popular work in English Literature - now 600 years old - will run through yet more centuries' -- Melvyn BraggIn The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of...

'Whoever best acquits himself, and tells The most amusing and instructive tale,Shall have a dinner, paid for by us all...'In Chaucer's most ambitious poem, The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), a group of pilgrims assembles in an inn just outside London and...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle"Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"The terrible spectacle of the beast, the fog of the moor, the discovery of a body: this classic horror...

The second novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a passionate portrait of the artist as a young womanThea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado has a great gift - her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera...

A thrilling and exhilarating exploration of U.S. politics in Central America from Joan Didion, the hugely acclaimed author of The Year of Magical Thinking. It is 1984. Journalist Elena McMahon, watching her evasive, gruff father's life ebbing away before...

“The surprise ‘must-read’ for people facing the Covid-19 epidemic.” —The TelegraphIn 1665 the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Daniel Defoe was just five at the time of the plague, but he later called on his own memories, as well...

Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year is an extraordinary account of the devastation and human suffering inflicted on the city of London by the Great Plague of 1665. Purporting to be an eye-witness, Defoe's fictional narrator recounts in vivid detail the...

At the age of eighteen, in that first golden Oxford summer, Milly was up for anything. Rupert and his American lover, Allan, were an important part of her new, exciting life, so when Rupert suggested to her that she and Allan should get married to keep...

A woman trapped in a loveless engagement joins forces with a mysterious man bent on vengeance against her fiancé in The Proposition, a lively tale of intrigue, revenge, and romance.What would you propose?Clemency Fry has always been certain that marriage...

A powerful love story set in the class-conscious Tsarist Russia of the early 19th century. It embraces every level of that society – serf, provincial, aristocrat – in verse which is by turns beautiful, witty, wickedly perceptive and always readable.   It...

Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons explores the ageless conflict between generations through a period in Russian history when a new generation of revolutionary intellectuals threatened the state. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian...