Must Read Classics

More commonly known as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo's Romantic novel of dark passions and unrequited love, Notre-Dame de Paris, is translated with an introduction by John Sturrock in Penguin Classics.In the vaulted Gothic towers of Notre-Dame...

Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English...

Adapted by the BBC in a lavish new television series for Christmas 2018, Les Misérables is a timeless story; a plot-driven epic of one man’s search for redemption and of lives swept up, made and broken in the tumultuous social and political changes of...

Winner of the Booker Prize 1981 Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with...

Introduction and Notes by Dr David Rogers, Kingston University. 'There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red...

A fine exclusive edition of one of literature's most beloved stories. Featuring a laser-cut jacket on a textured book with foil stamping, all titles in this series will be first editions. No more than 10,000 copies will be printed, and each will be...

The classic English children's novel of three young friends and one special garden, stunningly reimagined in a deluxe full-color edition, illustrated with beautiful artwork and unique interactive features created by the award-winning design studio behind...

Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of Milton. She is shocked by the poverty she encounters and dismayed by the unsympathetic attitude of the textile-mill owner John...

Anne Garland, who lives with her widowed mother in a mill owned by Miller Loveday, has three suitors: the local squire's nephew Festus and the miller's two sons, Robert and John. While Festus' aggressive pursuit deters the young woman from considering...

The arrival of two newcomers in the quiet village of Mellstock arouses a bitter feud and leaves a convoluted love affair in its wake. While the Reverend Maybold creates a furore among the village's musicians with his decision to abolish the church's...

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex. Jude Fawley is a rural stone mason with intellectual aspirations. Frustrated by poverty and the indifference of the academic institutions at the University of...

The bestselling author of Middle Englandreturns with the evocative story of a young woman with a thirst for life and a slighted Hollywood director consumed by the past. The dazzling new novel from the prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle...

Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except the clothes on their back - and a dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch in California's Salinas...

Discover this groundbreaking work of twentieth-century literary fiction about one day in the life of a woman preparing to give a party.In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a...

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...

'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...

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...