Must Read Classics

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 -...

'Shooting an Elephant' is Orwell's searing and painfully honest account of his experience as a police officer in imperial Burma; killing an escaped elephant in front of a crowd 'solely to avoid looking a fool'. The other masterly essays in this...

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and somehow never can.John Flory, a white timber merchant in 1920s Burma, has unorthodox views. To him,...

Ezeulu, headstrong chief priest of the god Ulu, is worshipped by the six villages of Umuaro. But he is beginning to find his authority increasingly under threat - from his rivals in the tribe, from those in the white government and even from his own...

As Minister for Culture, the Honourable M. A. Nanga is 'a man of the people', as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish opportunist. At first, the contrast between Nanga and Odili, a former pupil who is visiting the ministry, appears huge. But in the...

Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage. Joseph Heller's bestselling novel is a hilarious and tragic satire on military...

With an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly, University of Reading. The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906) are world famous animal stories. Set in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, The Call of the Wild is about Buck,...

'The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect and, while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.'The biting cold and the aching silence of the far North become an unforgettable backdrop for Jack London's...

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during...

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. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's only novel, is...

The heart-rending origin story of Nemirovsky’s unfinished masterpiece sometimes threatens to overshadow the staggering achievement of the work itself. Collated from two separate but connected narratives of French life under the Nazi occupation, Suite...

'This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I've ever met' -- J K Rowling'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink' is the first line of this timeless, witty and enchanting novel about growing up. Cassandra Mortmain lives with her bohemian and...