Must Read Classics

Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny novel of the Roaring Twenties, with an introduction by Simon James. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair,...

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round...

Elevating a picaresque farce into a hilarious literary gem, Waugh’s anarchic debut novel is a biting satire on 1920s society that places a disgraced Oxford student in an ill-advised teaching position at an obscure Welsh school. Just work, good...

From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidenceand then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman's...

In this classic social commentary from Dickens, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired business man and confirmed bachelor, is determined that after a quiet life of enterprise the time has come to go out into the world. Together with the other members of the...

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'Vividly interweaving epic historical drama with personal tragedy, Dickens's gripping novel depicts the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney...

Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster. Illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen.Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with...

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.’ Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of...

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 dark criminal underworld peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger,...

The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal...

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, University of Kent at Canterbury. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a...

Four-volume boxed-set edition of The Lord of the Rings in hardback, featuring Tolkien’s original unused dust-jacket designs, together with fourth hardback volume, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion. Includes special features and the...

Deluxe boxed gift set of pocket edition hardbacks featuring J.R.R. Tolkien’s most popular works, which together tell the tale of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and of the War of the Ring. When they were first published, The Hobbit and The Lord of the...

Famously banned for indecency, Lawrence’s final novel is one of the most notorious and passionate love stories in literature.Constance Reid, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds...

George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon. George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with...

Twenty-four hours in the life of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s Dublin-set modernist masterclass is playful, sly, bawdy and humane and deserving of a much broader audience.   'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the...

Okonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and his fame spreads throughout West Africa like a bush-fire. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial...

Occupied by enemy troops, a small, peaceable town comes face-to-face with evil imposed from the outside—and betrayal born within the close-knit community.A Penguin ClassicIn this masterful tale set in Norway during World War II, Steinbeck explores...

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.Now a Hulu limited series starring Christopher Abbott, George Clooney, Kyle Chandler, and Hugh Laurie.Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22...

Experience the magic of literature with the ‘World's Greatest Classics’ set. This captivating collection includes four timeless masterpieces: Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, and The Picture of Dorian Gray offering an...