Classics

In 1960, John Steinbeck set out in his pick-up truck with his dog Charley to rediscover and chronicle his native USA, from Maine to California.He felt that he might have lost touch with its sights, sounds and the essence of the American people. Moving...

For Arthur Rowe the charity fete was a trip back to childhood, to innocence, a welcome chance to escape the terror of the Blitz, to forget twenty years of his past and a murder. Then he guesses the weight of the cake, and from that moment on he's a...

A gripping tragicomedy of a bungled kidnapping in a provincial Argentinean town, considered to be one of Greene's finest novels. Charley Fortnum is the 'Honorary Consul', a whisky-sodden figure of dubious authority taken by a group of rebels. As Eduardo...

During a vicious persecution of the clergy in Mexico, a worldly priest, the 'whisky priest', is on the run. With the police closing in, his routes of escape are being shut off, his chances getting fewer. But compassion and humanity force him along the...

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury. Translation by James Carroll Beckwirth (1899). Set in 1482, Victor Hugo's powerful novel of 'imagination, caprice and fantasy' is a meditation on love, fate, architecture and...

Rejected by fifteenth-century Parisian society, the hideously deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo believes he is safe under the watchful eye of his master, the Archdeacon Claude Frollo. But after Quasimodo saves the beautiful Romani girl Esmeralda from the...

(Available after July 30th, 2022)Begin your journey into Middle-earth. A New Legend Begins on Prime Video, in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The first part of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic adventure THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In a quiet village in the...

Begin your journey into Middle-earth. A New Legend Begins on Prime Video, in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The third part of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic adventure THE LORD OF THE RINGS. The Dark Lord has risen, and as he unleashes hordes of Orcs...

'Bulgakov is one of the greatest Russian writers, perhaps the greatest' -- IndependentWritten in secret during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it,...

The Way We Live Now is Anthony Trollope's radical exploration of the dangers associated with speculative capitalism, edited with an introduction and notes by Frank Kermode in Penguin Classics.Augustus Melmotte is a fraudulent foreign financier who preys...

(Available after 3-20 days)With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Merchant. Canterbury Christ Church College. The tough-mindedness of the social satire in and its air of palpable integrity give this novel a special place in Anthony Trollope's Literary...

A celebrated journalist in his lifetime, Ambrose Bierce's began circulating his own sardonic, mischievous definitions of words in his various columns for San Francisco newspapers. Over several years these were then compiled and expanded into entries for...

One of Time’s All-Time 100 Best NovelsThe writer whom Fran Lebowitz called “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald” makes his Penguin Classics debut with this beautiful deluxe edition of his best-loved book.One of the great novels of small-town American...

"Those who have read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel comprised of only letters between the characters, will see how much that best-seller owes 84, Charing Cross Road." — Medium.comA heartwarming love story about people who love...

In these 'scientific romances' H. G. Wells sees the present reflected in the future and the future in the present. His aim is to provoke rather than predict. The Sleeper falls into a trance, waking up two centuries later as the richest man in a world of...

Charles Dickens's masterful assault on the injustices of the British legal system As the interminable case of 'Jarndyce and Jarndyce' grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare,...

The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into...

“The greatest novel to emerge out of the tragedy of South Africa, and one of the best novels of our time.” —The New Republic“A beautiful novel...its writing is so fresh, its projection of character so immediate and full, its events so compelling, and its...

'Full of the energies of discord - sibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion and vanity' Margaret DrabbleJane Austen's profound, ambiguous third novel is the story of Fanny Price, who is accustomed to being the poor relation at Mansfield...

Introduction and Notes by David Blair, University of Kent. Northanger Abbey tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1790s. Austen observes with...