Must Read Classics

Based on lectures given at Cambridge colleges and first published by the Hogarth Press in 1929, A Room of One's Own is an extended essay about the predicament of female writers and a stirring call for autonomy and recognition. As well as settling scores...

Discover Virginia Woolf's landmark essay on women's struggle for independence and creative opportunity A Room of One's Own is one of Virginia Woolf's most influential works and widely recognized for its extraordinary contribution to the women's movement...

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...

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during...

J.R.R. Tolkien’s grand masterwork in a new hardcover illustrated with the art created by Tolkien himself as he envisioned Middle-earthOne Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.In...

"Upon the whole, he added nothing to his own happiness by all the dangers, the fatigues, and the perpetual anxiety which he had incurred in the pursuit of unlimited power," - Suetonius on Julius Caesar. "Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob,...

Orlando, a young nobleman and one of Queen Elizabeth I's court favourites, is the object of many ladies' attentions, but after suffering heartbreak he prefers literary pursuits to entertaining any thoughts of marriage. Having obtained an ambassadorial...

Gillian Cross's brilliant retellings and Neil Packer's clever illustrations bring to life Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, two of the greatest stories ever told. When first published Walker's versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey attracted attention both for...

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially successful version of himself, who abuses and victimizes the...

'They lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.'Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a...

Mark Twain's witty, satirical tale of childhood rebellion against hypocritical adult authority, the Penguin Classics edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is edited with a critical introduction by Peter Coveney.Mark Twain's story of a boy's...

'A strange, tragic, inspired book ... It is absolutely unafraid' -- E. M. ForsterA party of English people are aboard the Euphrosyne, bound for South America. Among them is a young girl, Rachel Vinrace, innocent and wholly ignorant of the world of...

'If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it' -- The TimesTolstoy's enthralling epic depicts Russia's war with Napoleon and its effects on the lives of those caught up in the...

Penguin's commemorative hardback reissue of One Hundred Years of Solitude by late Nobel laureate and author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a timeless classic and the perfect Christmas gift for any booklover.Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been one of the...

This gorgeous 30th anniversary edition of Tartt’s classic – an impeccably crafted reverse-murder mystery steeped in evocative suspense and allusions to the ancient classics – is an essential addition to any The Secret History fan’s bookshelf.   Truly...

Part of the Penguin's Clothbound Classics range. A stunning Penguin clothbound edition of Homer's great epic, in E. V. Rieu's classic translation. The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization - an epic poem without...

The Jane Austen brand is well established. Satire, love, quippy dialogue—and it’s all here in her final novel. It’s the story of Anne and Frederick, once engaged, now meeting again nearly a decade later. Will love win out? Probably...

The best translation of Crime and Punishment currently available... An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy... Don't miss it' -- Washington Post. Consumed by the idea of his own special destiny, immured in poverty and...

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...

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...