Must Read Classics

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...

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...

Considered by many to be Dickens' finest novel, Great Expectations traces the growth of the book's narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. From its famous dramatic opening on the bleak Kentish...

As a quartet of wide-eyed evacuees encounter wicked witches and saintly lions, Lewis guides the reader expertly through the brilliantly imagined world of Narnia, entered through a wardrobe door.    A beautiful paperback edition of The Lion, the Witch...

When Mrs Ramsay tells her guests at her summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does she know that this trip will only be completed ten years later by her husband, and that a gulf...

'Politics and the English Language' is widely considered Orwell's most important essay on style. Style, for Orwell, was never simply a question of aesthetics; it was always inextricably linked to politics and to truth.'All issues are political issues,...

Hailed by The New York Times as a compelling dystopian look at paranoia from one of the most unique and perceptive writers of our time, this brief, captivating novel offers a cautionary tale. The story unfolds within a society in which all traces of...

During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These works culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Impassioned and...