Must Read Classics

In this classic social commentary from Dickens, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired business man and confirmed bachelor, is determined that after a quiet life of enterprise the time has come to go out into the world. Together with the other members of the...

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'Vividly interweaving epic historical drama with personal tragedy, Dickens's gripping novel depicts the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney...

Introduction and Notes by Dinny Thorold, University of Westminster. Illustrated by F. Walker and Maurice Greiffenhagen.Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with...

Set in mid 19th-century Russia, Demons examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers. Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor...

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.’ Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of...

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...

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers with its depiction of a dark criminal underworld peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger,...

The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal...

With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, University of Kent at Canterbury. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).Bleak House is one of Dickens' finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a...

Four-volume boxed-set edition of The Lord of the Rings in hardback, featuring Tolkien’s original unused dust-jacket designs, together with fourth hardback volume, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion. Includes special features and the...

Deluxe boxed gift set of pocket edition hardbacks featuring J.R.R. Tolkien’s most popular works, which together tell the tale of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and of the War of the Ring. When they were first published, The Hobbit and The Lord of the...

In 1849 the young Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years' hard labour in a Siberian prison camp for advocating socialism. Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead), the novel he wrote on his release, tells of shocking...

A beautiful, display-worthy collector’s hardcover of one of the most beloved novels ever written, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. No novel in English has given more pleasure than Pride and Prejudice. Because it is one of the great...

Famously banned for indecency, Lawrence’s final novel is one of the most notorious and passionate love stories in literature.Constance Reid, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds...

Described by The Times on its first publication in 1865 as an excellent piece of nonsense, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has gone on to become one of the most popular books ever written, loved by children and adults alike and...

Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of...

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through the centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, this...

Marshalling wit and sharp political insight to deliver a passionate polemic calling for women’s intellectual and financial independence, Woolf’s seminal 1929 essay remains one of the twentieth century’s most influential pieces of...

Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is the only translation that counts. They are the only translators who succeed in making Dostoevsky accessible to a 21st century audience, thanks to their ruthless attention to detail at the expense of alterations...

A breathtaking melange of political satire, playful invention and sparkling fantasy, Marquez's bewitching chronicle of seven generations of the Buendia family is a cornerstone of the magical realist tradition. Equally tragic, joyful and comical,...