Must Read Classics

THE CLASSIC BOOK THAT HAS INSPIRED MILLIONS A penetrating examination of how we live and how to live better Few books transform a generation and then establish themselves as touchstones for the generations that follow. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle...

With an Introduction by Derek Matravers. In The Social Contract Rousseau (1712-1778) argues for the preservation of individual freedom in political society. An individual can only be free under the law, he says, by voluntarily embracing that law as his...

The Buddenbrook clan is everything you'd expect of a nineteenth-century German merchant family - wealthy, esteemed, established. Four generations later, a tide of twentieth-century modernism has gradually disintegrated the bourgeois values on which the...

In March of 1844, the Parisian paper The Century began publishing installments of a new tale by France's favorite author, Alexandre Dumas. Week after week readers thrilled to the adventures of the brave and clever d'Artagnan and his loyal comrades...

THE NUMBER 1 BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZEThe Republic of Gilead is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, two girls with radically different experiences of the regime come face to face with the legendary, ruthless Aunt Lydia...

Over the last fifteen years of his life, Tolstoy collected and published the maxims of some of the world's greatest masters of philosophy, religion and literature, adding his own contributions to various questions that preoccupied him in old age, such as...

From the legendary author of THE GODFATHER comes a novel of the original Italian crime family Fifteen-century Italy. The Renaissance is in full swing, heralding a new golden age for Europe. But where there is gold - and power - there are those who are...

Michael Corleone's exile in Sicily is ending, but on the instructions of his father, The Godfather, he must bring back to him the young man known as Salvatore Giuliano - if he can find him. At sea amid the treacheries of a brutal and unfamiliar land,...

George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time living among the desperately poor and destitute, Down and Out in Paris and London is a moving tour of the underworld of society.'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you...

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his...

George Orwell's searing account of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over timeOrwell's...

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it. Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil...

Albinus - rich, married middle-aged and respectable - is an art critic and aspiring filmmaker who lusts after the coquettish young cinema usherette Margot. Gradually he seduces her and convinces himself he is irresistible to her, but Margot has other...

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky...

One of Dahl’s most purely terrifying novels, this delightfully dark tale of a clandestine conference of witches and the boy and his grandma who foil their wicked plans remains a perennial favourite. Pulling out all the most grotesque stops and refusing...

"Welcome, my little friends! Welcome to the factory!” For Charlie Bucket, life isn’t very easy. He and his mother and father live in a very small house with Charlie’s four grandparents who all share one bed between them. There isn’t much to eat besides...

Roald Dahl's much-loved Matilda, now in a stunning large paperback format with Quentin Blake's original illustrations in full colour. Matilda Wormwood's father thinks she's a little scab. Matilda's mother spends all afternoon playing bingo. And Matilda's...

Occasionally, as he told his stories, my father would stride up and down waving his arms and waggling his fingers. But mostly he would sit close to me on the edge of my bunk and speak very softly. "The Big Friendly Giant makes his magic powers out of the...

With an Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at CanterburyThis selection of Carroll's works includes Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, both containing the...

Alice’s collected adventures in the blazingly surreal Wonderland constitute nothing less than the beginning of modern fiction for children. Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters from the White Rabbit to the Queen of Hearts, as well as an...