Must Read Classics

Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions—sexual, racial, political, artistic.Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this "brilliantly and fiercely told" book (The New...

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 fine version, with David Cronenberg’s inspired introduction and the new translator’s beguiling afterword, is, I suspect, the most disturbing though the most comforting of all so far; others will follow, but don’t hesitate: this is the transforming...

The landmark novel that inspired Verdi’s opera La Traviata, in a sparkling new translation"One of the greatest love stories of all time," according to Henry James, and the inspiration for Verdi’s opera La Traviata, the...

Frances Burnett Hodgson's novel The Secret Garden is both intriguing and uplifting. It is regarded as one of the best children's books written in the twentieth century. Mary Lennox, a sickly ten year old girl, adrift in the world after both her mother...

'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from...

'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts' The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through...

While fulfilling his dead father's dream of creating a prosperous farm in California, Joseph Wayne comes to believe that a magnificent tree on the farm embodies his father's spirit. His brothers and their families share in Joseph's prosperity andthe farm...

'Can't you see that I don't care what anybody says?' Charity Royall lives in the small New England village of North Dormer. Born among outcasts from the Mountain beyond, she is rescued by lawyer Royall and lives with him as his ward. Never allowed to...

(Available after 3-20 days)From the first person many aspiring women want to hear from every morning, a collection of curated quotes, poems, and indelible messages that will help you heal and grow, daily.Known for delivering "pep-talks you didn't know...

A heartbreaking portrayal of a woman faced by an impossible choice in the pursuit of happiness When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her...

Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus...

'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 to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly...

Two small masterpieces in one volume. First, The Double, a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare that foreshadows Kafka and Sartre. A minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger - a man who has his name and his face...

The illegitimate son of a landowner and his common-law peasant wife, Arkady Dolgoruky has scarcely seen these parents during his nineteen years of life. In a narrative combining farce and pathos, Dostoevsky describes Arkady's visit to St Petersburg in...

Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny novel of the Roaring Twenties, with an introduction by Simon James. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter. The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair,...

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round...

With Waugh's trademark combination of tragedy, satire and piercing social observation, A Handful of Dust is a masterful portrait of the breakdown of a marriage as the lady of the manor forsakes her husband for a shallow socialite in interwar England...

Elevating a picaresque farce into a hilarious literary gem, Waugh’s anarchic debut novel is a biting satire on 1920s society that places a disgraced Oxford student in an ill-advised teaching position at an obscure Welsh school. Just work, good...

"Everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies."In these eight extraordinary stories of love, conflict, desperation and fear, James Baldwin...