Classics of Literature

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Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family with facts, he bans fancy and...

Anthony and Gloria are the essence of Jazz Age glamour. A brilliant and magnetic couple, they fling themselves at life with an energy that is thrilling. New York is a...

One ill-fated evening at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg rashly bets his companions 20,000 pounds that he can travel around the entire globe in just eighty days - and he...

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write....

Nightmarish, witty and immaculately conceived, Invitation to a Beheading unsparingly teases out the illogic of tyranny and will establish Nabokov in readers' minds as a serious and intelligent writer Written...

Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafes...

Flann O'Brien's first novel is a brilliant impressionistic jumble of ideas, mythology and nonsense. Operating on many levels it incorporates plots within plots, giving full rein to O'Brien's dancing intellect...

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah...

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs...

Pushkin's masterpieces in prose, translated by the award-winning Pevear and Volokhonsky The father of Russian literature, Pushkin is beloved not only for his poetry but also for his brilliant stories,...

Andrei Bely's masterpiece; a vivid, memorable and striking story set at the heart of the 1905 Russian revolution Andrei Bely's Petersburg is a colourful evocation of Russia's capital during the...

The fierce, irreverent novel of aspiration and rebellion that is both a cornerstone of Australian literature and a feminist classic Miles Franklin began the candid, passionate, and contrary My Brilliant...

This bawdy novel from Ancient Rome is given new significance by renowned Australian philosopher Peter Singer. Peter Singer has breathed new life into Apuleius's The Golden Ass-a hilarious, bawdy tale...

Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about...

Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling tales of the supernatural Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings,...

Poet and translator Steve Ellis completes his new version of Dante's Divine Comedy, the astonishing epic that has shaped art and culture since the 14th century Discover this fresh, pacy,...

'Virginia Woolf wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it' Jeanette Winterson, from her introduction to The Waves 'Virginia Woolf wanted...

Now a feature film based on the Booker Prize-winning novel. As he flees the police, Ned Kelly scribbles his narrative in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose. To his pursuers he...

Albert Camus's world-renowned fable of fear and courage The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death....

One of the finest American novels ever written, Norman Mailer's classic account of the Philippines campaign of WW2. Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during...

A classic 1960s novel of J.G. Ballard-ian strangeness, from one of Britain's most haunting and unforgettable voices The world is threatened by encroaching ice, creeping down day by day from...

A visit from an old school-friend leads Maigret to a murderous affair When a long lost friend pays a visit to Maigret's office, he is shocked to learn that the...

When a colleague is injured in an undercover operation Maigret takes over and becomes embroiled in the dark underbelly of the Parisian art scene During an undercover case Inspector Lognon...

Thirteen strangely wrought stories make up Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, mangled by it, with nowhere to escape to....

A gripping novel about the corrupt and avaricious world of politics, newly translated as part of the Maigret series. Was Maigret wrong? From one point of view, certainly, because he...

A gripping, vivid novel which brings to life Europe in the Middle Ages, in all its beauty and horror One of Hermann Hesse's greatest novels, Narcissus and Goldmund is an...

One of Japan's most treasured novels, new to Penguin Classics Botchan is a modern young man from the Tokyo metropolis, sent to the ultra-traditional Matsuyama district as a Maths teacher...

"Nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" First published in...

Famously associated with the term 'magical realism', Marquez is probably South America's most famous literary export An acknowledged masterpiece, this is the story of seven generations of the Buendia family...

'Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange' Vladimir Nabokov Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and...

The original handbook of decadence - has enjoyed a cult readership since its publication, with fans including Oscar Wilde and Marianne Faithfull The hero of this curious novel is des...

Penguin Classics relaunch Aesop was probably a prisoner of war, sold into slavery in the early sixth century BC, who represented his masters in court and negotiations, and relied on...

With new introduction by Cynthia Wall, chronology further reading, glossary, and explanatory notes. In 1665 the plague swept through London, claiming over 97,000 lives. Daniel Defoe was just five at...

Returns to the text of the first volume edition of 1848. Dombey and Son is both a firm and a family and the ambiguous connection between public and private life...

Penguin Classics relaunch The hero of Charlotte Bronte's first novel escapes a dreary clerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher in Belgium. There, however, his entanglement...

A bold new translation of this shockingly modern classic work by Forward Prize-winning poet, Robin Robertson THE ACCLAIMED TRANSLATION BY ROBIN ROBERTSON (FORWARD PRIZE, MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST 2018) Euripides'...

The first novel in Mishima's masterful Sea of Fertility tetraology Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich...

When a professional gambler is shot dead all except Maigret suspect his mistress is to blame Maigret is called to the home of professional gambler, Felix Nahour, who has been...

Maigret is determined to track down the murderer of a burglar who he had known for thirty years Set against a high-profile hunt for the latest criminal gang to hit...

The Penguin English Library Edition of A Room with a View by E. M. Forster '"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body...

The new paperback series- Penguin English Library 'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else,...

Launching a major new paperback series- Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens 'A parish child - the orphan of a workhouse -...

The first of the well-loved Chronicles of Barsetshire, The Warden reveals Trollope's ability to write satirically and hopefully about his society The tranquil atmosphere of the cathedral town of Barchester...

'God's teeth!' Unfailingly exciting and a complete joy to read, this new translation of The Three Musketeers is published to coincide with the lavish BBC adaptation to be aired this...

'I love Melville' Donna Tartt 'The ultimate fish story' Bob Dylan 'The ultimate fish story' Bob Dylan When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day,...

Oscar Wilde's only novel- dark, captivating and intensely Victorian WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IRVINE WELSH Dorian is a good-natured young man until he discovers the power of his own exceptional...

A selection of ground-breaking short stories, from the author of Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf tested the boundaries of fiction in these short stories, developing a new language of sensation, feeling...