Must Read Classics

It is 1880: after visiting his mistress in the London suburbs, Colonel Pargiter returns home to his children and his dying wife. In a series of snapshots we meet all the Pargiter siblings: twenty-year-old Eleanor, whose concern is to help the poor; her...

From his childhood on the wild, windswept shores of Cornwall and his college days at Cambridge to his life as a lawyer in London and a fateful journey to the Mediterranean, Jacob Flanders's story is told by the women in his life, whether through his...

(Available after February 30th, 2022)As Katherine Hilbery is helping her mother write the biography of her grandfather, a famous man of letters buried in Poets' Corner, she becomes engaged to William Rodney, a budding writer with an exaggerated opinion...

George, a disillusioned academic, and Martha, his caustic wife, have just come home from a faculty party. When a handsome young professor and his mousy wife stop by for a nightcap, an innocent night of fun and games quickly turns dark and dangerous...

Introduction and Notes by Michael Irwin, Professor of English Literature, University of Kent at Canterbury. Set in Hardy's Wessex, Tess is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. Its challenging sub-title, A Pure Woman, infuriated critics when...

The disturbing post-apocalyptic novel The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes and dramatised on BBC Radio 4. David Strorm's father doesn't approve of Angus Morton's unusually large horses, calling them...

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain'I'm unfavorable to killin' a man as long as you can git around it; it ain't good sense, it ain't good morals. Ain't I right?'The original Great American Novel, an...

'The prose . . . is so gloriously funny you can relish the book over and over again.' -- The Times (five best comic novels)'If you haven't read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whiskey and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven't lived...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray'Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?'No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and...

Set on the Nebraska prairie where Willa Cather (1873–1947) grew up, this powerful early novel tells the story of the young Alexandra Bergson, whose dying father leaves her in charge of the family and of the lands they have struggled to farm. In...

'Tom was a glittering hero once more - the pet of the old, and the envy of the young...There were some that believed he would be President yet, if he escaped hanging.'In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark ogaincombines social satire...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.'Now he found out a new thing - namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.'An idyllic...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a...

This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians... don't make the mistake of bothering me. Meet the fat,...

(Available after 3-20 days)One the greatest literary dystopias ever written, Orwell’s brilliantly bleak future vision of totalitarianism remains eerily relevant to our day.   George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most famous and...

(Available after 3-20 days)Trapped in a stifling marriage, Anna Karenina is swept off her feet by dashing Count Vronsky. Rejected by society, the two lovers flee to Italy, where Anna finds herself isolated from all except the man she loves, and who loves...

With an Introduction by Dr Pamela Knights, Department of English Studies, Durham University. With this intensely moving short novel, Edith Wharton set out 'to draw life as it really was' in the lonely villages and desolate farms of the harsh New England...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton'He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface'Ethan Frome works his...

Chiltern Publishing creates the most beautiful editions of the World's finest literature.Your favourite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before; the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colours of these remarkable covers make these...

A young woman learns about life, and love found and lost, in this thought-provoking debut novel by one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and prolific writers—with an introduction by Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory “Absolutely...