Classics

'One of the great writers of the twentieth century' GuardianIt is June in 1939, and the inhabitants of a country house prepare to host the annual village pageant in its grounds. It will tell the stories of English history, as it does every year. Yet the...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'The Penguin English Library Edition of Middlemarch by George Eliot'She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings -...

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality, colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Don...

Possibly the quintessential example of an espionage novel transcending genre boundaries to establish itself as a matchless literary classic, A Perfect Spy is a simply staggering achievement. Interrogating the notion of the archetypal secret agent, le...

THE THIRD GEORGE SMILEY NOVEL.Alec Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in the shadow of the Berlin Wall for his British masters. Now Control wants to bring him in at last - but only after one final assignment. He...

THE SIXTH GEORGE SMILEY NOVELGeorge Smiley, now acting head of the Circus, must rebuild its shattered reputation after one of the biggest betrayals in its history. Using the talents of journalist and occasional spy Jerry Westerby, Smiley launches a risky...

Proving as adept at the global eco thriller as he was at Cold War page turners, The Constant Gardener combines probing character study with precision plotted and gripping storytelling. Tracking a bereaved husband’s path through a web of international...

'A work of rare brilliance' --  The TimesCharmer, fabulist and tailor to Panama's rich and powerful, Harry Pendel loves to tell stories. But when the British spy Andrew Osnard - a man of large appetites, for women, information and above all money - walks...

…It’s a dangerous world out there, Perry. Perhaps you haven’t heard about that, but the rest of us have, and we endeavour to live with it. With all due respect, I would strongly advise you to go with the flow. Britain is in the depths of recession...

'One of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet published' -- GuardianAn illegal Muslim immigrant arrives in Hamburg with a traumatic past and the key to a fortune held in a private bank. He says his name is Issa. To the...

THE FIRST GEORGE SMILEY NOVELAfter a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the death, he begins his own investigation, meeting...

…Smiley, his damp hand cupped round the end of his cigarette, watching and hating, triumphed that he knew his enemy. Dead men receive no calls. Dead men write no letters. After a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan...

THE FIFTH GEORGE SMILEY NOVEL.A mole, implanted by Moscow Centre, has infiltrated the highest ranks of the British Intelligence Service, almost destroying it in the process. And so former spymaster George Smiley has been brought out of retirement in...

He was a compact man but tentative, with a smile of apologetic self-protection. Even his Englishness was a well-kept secret… At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on...

Undoubtedly one of the decade’s most anticipated novels. Le Carré expertly draws the dark secrets of the Cold War into the present. A masterful thriller that considers the terrible price of history. 'It is a splendid novel...It is riveting, bitter...

'Shooting an Elephant' is Orwell's searing and painfully honest account of his experience as a police officer in imperial Burma; killing an escaped elephant in front of a crowd 'solely to avoid looking a fool'. The other masterly essays in this...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and somehow never can.John Flory, a white timber merchant in 1920s Burma, has unorthodox views. To him,...

'The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect and, while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.'The biting cold and the aching silence of the far North become an unforgettable backdrop for Jack London's...

For months, a gruesome killer has been plaguing the Midwest. The murderer's calling card? The bodies they leave behind are completely drained of blood. Aspiring journalist Michael Jensen, desperate to escape his small-town life, can hardly believe it...

A short, scalpel sharp novel, A Clockwork Orange takes the totalitarianism of Orwell and ramps up the nihilism and ultraviolence. Alex and his teenage droogs rampage around a futuristic dystopia, committing appalling acts of brutal cruelty. The unfolding...