Must Read Classics

One of Steinbeck’s touchstone novels, East of Eden is a grand family saga which explores themes almost biblical in their intensity. Through multiple generations of two families, Steinbeck crafts a brooding masterpiece of familial rivalry and...

'My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life?'A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer.One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first...

Marshalling wit and sharp political insight to deliver a passionate polemic calling for women’s intellectual and financial independence, Woolf’s seminal 1929 essay remains one of the twentieth century’s most influential pieces of...

When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend’s return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened – while...

Truly groundbreaking in its treatment of homosexual relationships and the stigma surrounding them in the 1950s, Baldwin's concise masterpiece focuses on David and Hella's separation in Paris and David's subsequent entanglement with the passionate...

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster?...

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With...

California's fertile Salinas Valley is home to two families whose destinies are fruitfully, and fatally, intertwined. Over the generations, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the end of the First World War, the Trasks and the Hamiltons...

A magnificent new translation of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, which when first published in 1991 was described by the TIMES as 'a miracle' and by THE INDEPENDENT as a near 'ideal translation'. The BROTHERS KARAMAZOV - Dostoevsky's most widely read novel -...

Dostoesky's drama of sin, guilt and redemption transmutes the sordid story of an old woman's murder by a desperate student into the nineteenth century's profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Grim in theme and setting, the book nevertheless...

The inspiration for the new film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny,...

A classic among the dark academia genre, The Secret History is a captivating thriller about a group of college students who slowly lose their morality as they search to transcend the triviality of their own lives. Tartt’s writing is lyrically...

You have to read this. Everyone has to. It has all feels, from funny to devastating, and every word is practically breathing with life. Pick it up if you haven't read it, and pick it up if you have, it's an immortal classic."One Hundred Years of...

An erotic masterpiece of twentieth century fiction - a tale of sensual obsession and bloodlust in eighteenth century Paris'An astonishing tour de force both in concept and execution' --  GuardianIn eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one...

"Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light." Enraptured by a young woman's account of the landscapes of Greece, Henry Miller set off to explore the Grecian...

Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writerKafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was...

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through the centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, this...

Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller's first novel Tropic of Canceris one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century -- new to Penguin Modern Classics with a cover by Tracey EminTropic of...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics,...

'Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears' --Guardian. Lev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian émigrés. Alone in his room, he dreams of...