Must Read Classics

‘The power of Dickens is so amazing, that the reader at once becomes his captive' WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers with its depiction of a...

In this honest and stunning novel that inspired the award-winning major motion picture of the same name, James Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice."A major work of Black American fiction." –The New RepublicTold...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'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,...

An immaculate portrait of adolescent love from one of our most beloved novelists.'One of the last century's greatest woman writers' GuardianWhen sixteen-year-old Portia is orphaned, she is plunged into the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of...

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex.Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy's Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the...

A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens' greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens based his historical detail on Carlyle's great work - The French...

Continuing the story of The Hobbit, this three-volume boxed set of Tolkien's epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, features striking black covers based on Tolkien's own design, the definitive text, and three maps including a detailed map of...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.' Austen's best-loved tale of love, marriage and society...

The Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a rite of passage. When Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship she is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage.Virginia Woolf knew all too well the forms...

(Available after July 30th, 2022)Begin your journey into Middle-earth. A New Legend Begins on Prime Video, in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The first part of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic adventure THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In a quiet village in the...

The Way We Live Now is Anthony Trollope's radical exploration of the dangers associated with speculative capitalism, edited with an introduction and notes by Frank Kermode in Penguin Classics.Augustus Melmotte is a fraudulent foreign financier who preys...

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...

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,...

'Although he feared death, he could not stop. 'If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, they'd call me an idiot!'A pair of short stories about greed, charity, life and death from one of Russia's most influential writers and thinkers...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B.Cook. Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this...

Gems of literature in a luxurious and unique design by Marjolein Bastin.The Marjolein Bastin Classics Series is a chance to rediscover classic literature in collectible, luxuriously illustrated volumes. For the first time ever, the...

A deluxe collector’s edition of one of Jane Austen’s most critically acclaimed works, illustrated with the artwork of renowned fashion illustrator Bil Donovan.Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is arguably the forerunner of all...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue. The Professor is Charlotte Brontes first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - -between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later...