Classics

Eduard and Charlotte are an aristocratic couple who live a harmonious but idle life in their estate. But the peace of their existence is thrown into chaos when two visitors - Eduard's friend the Captain and Charlotte's passionate young ward Ottilie -...

Goethe's account of his passage through Italy from 1786 to 1788 is a great travel chronicle as well as a candid self-portrait of a genius in the grip of spiritual crisis.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic...

"I can promise to be candid, not, however, to be impartial."A selection of the most insightful maxims and reflections from one of Germany's greatest ever thinkers.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black...

One of Voltaire's earliest tales, Zadig is set in the exotic East and is told in the comic spirit of Candide; L'Ingenu, written after Candide, is a darker tale in which an American Indian records his impressions of France

Inspired by Voltaire's two-year stay in England (1726-8), this is one of the key works of the Enlightment. Exactly contemporary with Gulliver's Travels and The Beggar's Opera, Voltaire's controversial pronouncements on politics, philosophy, religion, and...

Candide (1759) is a bright, colourful literary firework display of a novella. With sparkling wit and biting humour, Voltaire hits several targets with fierce and comic satire: organised religion, the overweening pride of aristocrats, merchants' greed,...

A Fabulous Find from the Moomin Archives.A classic Moomin Book with COLOUR ILLUSTRATIONS.And a beautiful FOLD-OUT PANORAMA.In 1961, at the request of her Italian publishers, Tove Jansson created a unique new edition of Moominland Midwinter, the tale...

'Did she know and if she knew would she speak?' The story of an unsolved literary mystery that explores what James referred to as "troubled artistic consciousness" Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black...

'Hoodwink'd in faery fancy...' This volume contains a selection of Keats's greatest verse - including his gothic story in verse, 'The Eve of St Agnes', and the mysterious 'Lamia' - exploring themes of love, enchantment, myth and magic. Introducing...

"An ass, clothed in the skin of a lion..."Aesop's animal fables are some of the earliest stories ever told, thought to have been composed by a slave in Greek antiquity and giving glimpses of a world that is harsh, pitiless and yet also eerily familiar...

'This is as much a mystery as the Immaculate Conception, which of itself must make a doctor an unbeliever.' A stunning pair of short stories about faith and sacrificial love. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little...

In this provocative and blackly funny essay, Thomas de Quincey considers murder in a purely aesthetic light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past two hundred years has been murdered - 'insomuch, that if a man calls himself a...

Four hilarious and provocative stories from Boccaccio's Decameron, featuring cuckolded husbands, cross-dressing wives and very bad priests. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge...

A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred tales of adventure, shipwrecks, storms at sea, creatures from the deep, and voyages that test human limits on the wild and limitless waters. Classic adventures stories by Joseph...

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), the novel he wrote on his release, tells of shocking...

Upon its original publication in 1969, Turkish Delight was a sensation and a scandal. Its graphic language and explicit sex scenes had an explosive effect, but just as revolutionary was its frank, colloquial style. The more straightlaced critics...

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined...

A beautiful, display-worthy collector’s hardcover of one of the most beloved novels ever written, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great...

Famously banned for indecency, Lawrence’s final novel is one of the most notorious and passionate love stories in literature.Constance Reid, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds...

Described by The Times on its first publication in 1865 as an excellent piece of nonsense, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has gone on to become one of the most popular books ever written, loved by children and adults alike and...