Must Read Classics

In 2020, we enjoyed Atwood’s latest poetry title, Dearly. Not unlike her poems, Atwood’s essays show how she is always looking, observing and questioning. She even has an essay about Zombies! And, what a perfect look back...

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, two French Jesuit priests travel to the American Southwest to establish a new Roman Catholic diocese. Upon arrival, Father Jean Marie Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant encounter an ethnically diverse...

From the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to...

Homer’s great epic The Odyssey—one of Western literature’s most enduring and important works—translated by Richmond Lattimore A classic for the ages, The Odyssey recounts Odysseus’ journey home after the...

Dating from around the 8th century BC, The Iliad is a prime example of an epic narrative poem and is one of Western literature's oldest works. It tells the story of the weeks during the Trojan war when King Agamemnon and the hero warrior Achilles were at...

Robert Graves's classic retelling of the Greek Myths is definitive, comprehensive and unparalleled - and available now in the Penguin Classics Deluxe series, featuring a new introduction from Rick Riordan (bestselling author of the Percy...

The Little Nugget (1913) is one of the novels in which Wodehouse found his feet, a light comic thriller set in an English prep school for the children of the nobility and gentry. Into their midst comes eleven-year-old Ogden Ford, the mouthy,...

For two and a half thousand years The Art of War has been the core text of military strategy and planning, providing leaders with enduring insights into tactics, psychology, discipline and the nature of power. Favoured by countless great generals and...

The most ambitious narrative of nineteenth-century realism, Middlemarch tells the story of an entire town in the years leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, a time when modern methods were starting to challenge old orthodoxies. Eliot's sophisticated and...

'It was as if the sea, breaking down the wall protecting all the homes of the town, had sent a wave over her head'One of Conrad's most powerful, gripping storiesIntroducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black...

'It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.'After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the...

An impoverished member of the privileged high society of old New York, Lily Bart is beautiful and socially agreeable, but she is almost thirty and still unmarried. Now she is keen to secure a wealthy husband to confirm her status, but the debts she...

Toole’s posthumous cult classic has developed a formidable – and thoroughly well-deserved - reputation for picaresque wit and lively character portraits. The rambling, hilarious saga of Ignatius J. Reilly and his battle against modernity and...

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...

An autobiographical work that describes firsthand the great tectonic shifts in English society following the First World War, Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That is a matchless evocation of the Great War's haunting legacy, published in Penguin...

The perfect companion to The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch , both published in Alma Classics' Evergreens series, Silas Marner portrays a changing society with realism.Having been accused of theft and hounded out of a religious community many years...

Jude Fawley, an intelligent and sensitive young Wessex schoolboy, dreams of studying at the famous university in Christminster, Hardy's fictional representation of Oxford. He embarks on years of private study, but his plans are thrown into disarray when...

Bathsheba Everdene is a headstrong young woman who attracts the attentions of a succession of ill-matched suitors: a quiet sheep farmer, a handsome soldier and an older, wealthy landowner. As the men vie for her affections, she struggles to retain her...

Set in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev during the chaotic winter of 1918-19, The White Guard, Bulgakov's first full-length novel, tells the story of a Russian-speaking family trapped in circumstances that threaten to destroy them. As in Tolstoy's War and...

A splendid new translation of an extraordinary work of modern literature—featuring facing-page commentary by Kafka’s acclaimed biographerIn 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of more than 100 aphorisms, known as the Zürau aphorisms,...