Classics

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...

A group of pilgrims bound for Canterbury Cathedral agree to pass the weary miles by taking turns at storytelling. The travelers ― noble, coarse, jolly, and pious ― offer a vibrant portrait of fourteenth-century English life. Their narratives form 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 Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known by the title of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature.Divided into five volumes, The Story of the Stone charts the glory and decline of the illustrious Jia family...

Edited, Introduced and Annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex.The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, with Romeo and Juliet, Henry V and The Merchant of Venice as its inaugural volumes, presents a...

Introduced and Annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. Three Men in a Boat is a comic classic. When it first appeared in 1889 it became a best seller, and has remained popular ever since. This motley...

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...

With an Introduction by David Stuart Davies. The Hound of the Baskervilles is the classic detective chiller. It features the world's greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes, in his most challenging case.The Baskerville family is haunted by a phantom beast...

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...

Noli Me Tangere is Latin for "touch me not." In this modern classic of Filipino literature, Jose Rizal exposes "matters . . . so delicate that they cannot be touched by anybody," unfolding an epic history of the Philippines that has made it that...

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...

A sensational international bestseller, and winner of Frances' coveted Prix Goncourt, 'The Lover' is an unforgettable portrayal of the incandescent relationship between two lovers, and of the hate that slowly tears the girl's family apart. Saigon, 1930s:...

“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...

The haunting cry of "Bring out your dead!" by a bell-ringing collector of 17th-century plague victims has filled readers across the centuries with cold terror. The chilling cry survives in historical consciousness largely as a result of this classic 1722...

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...