Classics

A new translation by David Bellos of the last great novel by France’s greatest novelistIn the turmoil of the French Revolution, the year 1793 represented the peak of bloody revolutionary violence. Victor Hugo plunges into this tumultuous period...

‘Feminism is hated because women are hated’Why do some women support Right-wing movements, even though they curtail their freedoms? Andrea Dworkin’s timeless, visionary analysis goes to the heart of this contradiction, exploring the...

A sliver of limpid, chilling prose set in the heart of the scorching Mediterranean, Spark’s jet-black novella marches compellingly to a shocking nihilistic end that we know is coming from the first chapter. One of the great Scottish writer’s...

Curzio Malaparte was a disaffected supporter of Mussolini with a taste for danger and high living. Sent by an Italian paper during World War II to cover the fighting on the Eastern Front, Malaparte secretly wrote this terrifying report from the abyss,...

Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological...

When World War I breaks out, a young architecture student in Munich does everything in his power to avoid being enlisted into the German military in this perceptive, wickedly humorous novel by a prominent twentieth-century writer, journalist, and film...

A follow-up to her ground-breaking translations of Rumi in Gold, poet and musician Haleh Liza Gafori translates a new selection of work by the great Persian mystic that will muster the soul and stir the spirit.“Gafori’s selection boasts...

A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking translations by an American poet of Persian descent.Rumi’s poems were meant to induce a sense of ecstatic illumination and liberation in his audience, bringing its...

Building can be seen as a master metaphor for modernity, which some great irresistible force, be it Fascism or Communism or capitalism, is always busy rebuilding, and Houses is a book about a man, Arsénie Negovan, who has devoted...

Doting, the last of Henry Green’s novels, is, as its title would suggest, a story of yearning and lusting and aging in which a wife and a brash young woman run hilarious circles around a hapless hardworking civil servant suddenly seized by...

'One of the great British novels of the twentieth century: a narrative of extraordinary reach, power and beauty' Sarah WatersThe nuns who enter a medieval Norfolk convent are told to renounce the world, but the world still finds ways to trouble them,...

A Dickensian tale of ambition, family, and financial ruin by the most important Spanish novelist after Cervantes, this tragicomic novel about a patriarch struggling to keep his ungrateful family from ruin is at turns scathing and hilarious.Ramón...

Only edition in printOn his way back to Russia after some years spent in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired official of merchant stock, stops over in Baden-Baden to meet his fiancee Tatyana. However, a chance encounter with his...

Pretty, unworldly Sophia is twenty-one years old and hastily married to a young painter called Charles. An artist's model with an eccentric collection of pets, she is ill-equipped to cope with the bohemian London of the 1930s, where poverty, babies...

This collection of over forty of Andersen's most popular stories includes The Mermaid, The Real Princess, The Snow Queen, The Tinder Box, The Ugly Duckling, The Red Shoes and The Little Match Girl.

Black Beauty is a perennial children's favourite, one which has never been out of print since its publication in 1877. It is a moralistic tale of the life of the horse related in the form of an autobiography, describing the world through the eyes of the...

Children of the New Forest by Frederick Marryat Cavalier and Roundhead battle it out in the turbulent setting of the English Civil war and provide the background for this classic tale of four orphans as they face adversity, survival in the forest,...

Little Princess by Frances Burnett is a story of motherless Sara Crewe who was sent home from India to school at Miss Minchin’s. Her father was immensely rich and she became “show pupil” – a little princess. Then her father dies...

Five Children and It by Edith NesbitIts eyes were on long horns like a snail's eyes... it had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick, soft fur... and it had hands and feet like a monkey's. 'It' was...

In the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, a huge cyclone transports the orphan Dorothy and her little dog Toto from Kansas to the Land of Oz, and she fears that she will never see Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ever again. But she meets the Munchkins, and they tell...