Classics

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...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Carole Jones, freelance writer and researcher. George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), follows the intertwining lives of the beautiful but spoiled and selfish Gwendolene Harleth and the selfless yet...

As Daniel Deronda opens, Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table, prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is observed by Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes. And while Gwendolen loses...

A sensitive and moving portrait of a Victorian town, captured at a transitional period in English society, Cranford first appeared serially in Charles Dickens's magazine Household Words from 1851 to 1853, and in book form in 1853. Author Elizabeth...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Pamela Knights, Department of English Studies, Durham University. Lorna Doone, a Romance of Exmoor is an historical novel of high adventure set in the South West of England during the turbulent time of Monmouth's...

'Every woman clutched her child, and every man turned pale at the very name of "Doone"'John Ridd, an unsophisticated farmer, falls in love with the beautiful and aristocratic Lorna Doone, kidnapped as a child by the outlaw Doones on Exmoor. Ridd's...

In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came his early masterpiece, A Farewell to Arms.In an unforgettable depiction of...

WITH A FOREWORD BY PATRICK HEMINGWAY AND AN INTRODUCTION BY SEAN HEMINGWAYIn 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experience came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's...

Frederic Henry is an American Lieutenant serving in the ambulance corps of the Italian army during the First World War. While stationed in northern Italy, he falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. Theirs is an intense, tender and...

The definitive edition of the classic novel of love during wartime, featuring all of the alternate endings: 'Fascinating serves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an author's...

'The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude'When 'The Awakening' was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign...

This is the first paperback edition to bring out in one volume Kate Chopin's extraordinary novel The Awakening (1899), along with the complete text of her two collections of short stories, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and twelve...

In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for participating in a socialist discussion group. The novel he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, not only brought him fame, but also founded...

Bringing into harsh focus the daily struggle for existence in a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is translated by Ralph Parker in Penguin Modern Classics.This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions...

The Eternal Husband and Other Stories brings together five of Dostoevsky’s short masterpieces rendered into English by two of the most celebrated Dostoevsky translators of our time. Filled with many of the themes and concerns central to his great novels,...

The Penguin English Library edition of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James'She knew of no wrong that he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel; she simply believed that he hated her'When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought...

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Reading. Transplanted to Europe from her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An...

Regarded by many as Henry James's finest work, and a lucid tragedy exploring the distance between money and happiness, The Portrait of a Lady contains an introduction by Philip Horne in Penguin Classics. When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited...

A later, posthumously published classic following the adventures of a painter in the midst of World War II.First published in 1970, nine years after Hemingway's death, this is the story of an artist and adventurer—a man much like Hemingway himself...

Featuring huge names from across the literary spectrum - including Leigh Bardugo, Lucy Foley and Val McDermid - this irresistible collection of short mysteries reimagines Agatha Christie's seminal sleuth through a dozen different pairs of eyes.   A...