Must Read Classics

'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...

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...

Through a series of connected monologues, The Waves tells the story of six very different friends - Bernard, Louis, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda - as they progress from childhood to middle age. Interspersed with evocative descriptions of the...

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.At...

Inspired by Dostoevsky's own gambling addiction and written under pressure in order to pay off his creditors and retain his rights to his literary legacy, The Gambler is set in the casino of the fictional German spa town of Roulettenburg and follows the...

Chiltern Publishing creates the most beautiful editions of the World's finest literature.Your favourite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before; the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colours of these remarkable covers make these...

Immerse yourself in Middle-earth with Tolkien's classic masterpiece, telling the complete story of Bilbo Baggins and the Hobbits' epic encounters with Gandalf, Gollum, dragons and monsters, in the quest to destroy the One Ring. When they were first...

Frankenstein is the classic gothic horror novel which has thrilled and engrossed readers for two centuries. Written by Mary Shelley, it is a story which she intended would 'curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.' The tale is a superb...

Among Dostoevsky's later novels, The Adolescent occupies a very special place: published three years after The Devils and five years before his final masterpiece, The Karamazov Brothers, the novel charts the story of nineteen-year-old Arkady – the...

Ethan Allen Hawley has lost the acquisitive spirit of his wealthy and enterprising forebears, a long line of proud New England sea captains and Pilgrims. Scarred by failure, Ethan works as a grocery clerk in a store his family once owned. But his wife is...

Chinua Achebe is considered the father of African literature in English, the writer who 'opened the magic casements of African fiction' for an international readership. Following the 50th anniversary of the publication of his ground-breaking Things Fall...

An intimate journey across America, as told by one of its most beloved writers To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of...

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 designWhen...

The one and only from Emily Brontë, and it is a gut punch. A tragic story of class divides and revenge, Wuthering Heights is a classic tale of the power of love, and the devastation of love lost."May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I...

(Available after 3-20 days)A brilliant translation of one of the most important novels of the twentiety century, revealing a tale that is as full of energy and power as it was when it was first written.Written in 1914, The Trial is the terrifying tale of...

“The great plague novel.” —The New YorkerSet in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for...

At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties - to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that...

'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through...

While fulfilling his dead father's dream of creating a prosperous farm in California, Joseph Wayne comes to believe that a magnificent tree on the farm embodies his father's spirit. His brothers and their families share in Joseph's prosperity andthe farm...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton'It was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions'A searing, shocking tale of women as consumer...