Must Read Classics

'Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears' --Guardian. Lev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian émigrés. Alone in his room, he dreams of...

Destroy and forget. But we still have an hour before tea… Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, as...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past...

George Orwell's paean to the end of an idyllic era in British history, Coming Up for Air is a poignant account of one man's attempt to recapture childhood innocence as war looms on the horizon. George Bowling, forty-five, mortgaged, married with...

Twenty-four hours in the life of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, James Joyce’s Dublin-set modernist masterclass is playful, sly, bawdy and humane and deserving of a much broader audience.   'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the...

Okonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and his fame spreads throughout West Africa like a bush-fire. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial...

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster?...

The inspiration for the new film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny,...

'It is only a bruise' A carefree Russian official has what seems to be a trivial accident... One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the...

Kafka's gripping work of psychological horror.A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K, an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once...

Most people are familiar, at least by repute, with Homer's two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, but few are aware that other poems survive that were attributed to Homer in ancient times. The Homeric Hymns are now known to be the work of various...

With striking new artwork to celebrate the Roald Dahl 100 celebrations and a keepsake slipcase featuring Quentin Blake's iconic illustrations, this 16-book collection brings together all the classic children's novels from the one and only Roald Dahl...

A formally innovative work of modernist fiction, Virginia Woolf's The Waves is edited with an introduction by Kate Flint in Penguin Modern Classics. More than any of Virginia Woolf's other novels, The Waves conveys the full complexity and richness of...

‘Everything everybody does is so—I don’t know—not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and—sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that,...

Orwell’s brilliantly bleak future vision of totalitarianism is arguably the greatest of all literary dystopias, contriving to look back to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s whilst simultaneously predicting with uncanny accuracy the worst excesses...

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else." Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic. With...

Occupied by enemy troops, a small, peaceable town comes face-to-face with evil imposed from the outside—and betrayal born within the close-knit community.A Penguin ClassicIn this masterful tale set in Norway during World War II, Steinbeck explores...

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback.A Penguin Classic.Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50...

“Marvelous . . . [Vonnegut] wheels out all the complaints about America and makes them seem fresh, funny, outrageous, hateful and lovable.”—The New York TimesIn Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s most beloved...

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.Now a Hulu limited series starring Christopher Abbott, George Clooney, Kyle Chandler, and Hugh Laurie.Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22...