Summer Reads

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent...

The original 'Great American Novel', Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is a masterful study of obsession. This Penguin Classics edition contains an introduction by Andrew Delblanco, with explanatory commentary by Tom Quirk. Call me Ishmael. So begins Herman...

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of 'Poetry Review'.Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg...

Arthur Miller's classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 - 'one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history' - and the American anti-communist purges led by Senator McCarthy in the...

'Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial'Fearful that Caesar will become a tyrant, his friends plot to assassinate him in order to save Rome. But the conspirators' high...

Often described as the first ‘Non-Fiction novel’, Truman Capote’s infamous account of the appalling murder of a Kansas family which shocked America in the ‘50s is also a classic of the true crime genre, a fastidious piece of investigative journalism,...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''Rhys took one of the works of genius of the 19th Century and turned it inside-out to create one of the works of genius of the 20th Century' -- Michele RobertsJean Rhys's masterpiece tells the story...

With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University,Bakersfield. Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a...

Discover this groundbreaking work of twentieth-century literary fiction about one day in the life of a woman preparing to give a party.In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a...

Rediscover one of Virginia Woolf's greatest works in this beautiful new gift edition from Vintage Classics.Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. The novel's opening...

As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, 36-year-old woman and three centuries...

'Virginia Woolf wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it' Jeanette Winterson, from her introduction to The WavesThe Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing...

'Brilliant interweaving of personal experience, imaginative musing and political clarity' -- Kate MosseThis volume combines two books which were among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form a brilliant attack...

This volume brings together Virginia Woolf's last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer...

Discover the most popular of Woolf's books during her lifetime - a powerful portrait of a family coping with changes wrought by the new twentieth century.The Years follows the lives of the Pargiters, a large middle-class London family, from an uncertain...

'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...

'I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...'At a dinner party in 1922, Virginia Woolf met the renowned author, aristocrat - and...

A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Chateau d'If. There he learns...

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...