Classics of Literature

Penguin Classics relaunch Aphra Behn, the poet, playwright, novelist and political satirist was the first truly professional woman writer in English. This selection, edited and introduced by Professor Janet Todd,...

On a visit to the Mandarin Islands, Louis Trevelyan falls in love with Emily, the daughter of the governor, and they are swiftly married and return to live in London....

This edition of one of Trollope's most optimistic works includes a detailed introduction by Dinah Birch, exploring the key characters in the Palliser novels, and detailed notes. Plantagenet Palliser, the...

The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula Power inherits De Stancy Castle, an ancient castle in need of modernization. She commissions George Somerset, a young architect, to undertake the...

Galdos's four-part Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-7), the masterpiece among his almost 80 novels, tells the turbulent story of two women, their husbands and their lovers, set against the intricate web...

Complete with notes, introduction and bibliography by writer Ruth Rendell. Son of a bankrupt landowner, Frank Gresham is intent on marrying his beloved Mary Thorne, despite her illegitimacy and apparent...

The second of Trollope's Palliser novels tells of the career of a hot-blooded middle-class politician whose sexual energies bring him much success with women.

It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in...

Flora Poste, orphaned at twenty, decides to go and live with her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. Once there she discovers they exist in a state of chaos and feels...

A young and inexperienced sea captain finds that his first command leaves him with a ship stranded in tropical seas and a crew smitten with fever. As he wrestles with...

new to Modern Classics Jacob Flanders is a young man passing from adolescence to adulthood in a hazy rite of passage. From his boyhood on the windswept shores of Cornwall...

Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Karen Blixen. With warmth...

Part of the Chiltern Classics range. In 1843 Charles Dickens took up his pen to begin his 'ghostly little book' and so created A Christmas Carol and the mean-spirited Ebenezer...

An epic unicorn fairy tale filled with adventure, magic and a fight like no other... In a faraway kingdom, two girls live separate lives. Growing up in the wilderness of...

Nella Larsen's classic exploration of American race relations, new to the Penguin English Library. Fair, elegant, and ambitious, Clare is married to a white man unaware of her African American...

One of the great novels of the twentieth century, now with a gorgeous new cover The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated...

A generous selection of some of the strangest and most memorable of the Sherlock Holmes stories Many readers would claim that The Adventure of the Copper Beeches or The Man...

Darkly funny, searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, author of bestselling Alone in Berlin In these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking...

The new paperback series: Penguin English Library 'All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind,...

The new paperback series: Penguin English Library "God gave her to me because you turned your back upon her, and He looks upon her as mine: you've no right to...

One of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Ethan Frome tells a story of ill-starred lovers and their tragic destinies. The Penguin English Library Edition of Ethan Frome by...

The new paperback series: Penguin English Library 'To look almost pretty, is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of...

The new paperback series: Penguin English Library 'That evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol -...

The new paperback series: Penguin English Library 'I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it...

The new paperback series: Penguin English Library 'Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll move the world' In the only novel Conrad set in London, The...

The new paperback series: Penguin English Library 'Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?' No one...

Launching a major new paperback series: Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins 'Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a...

A launch title in a major new paperback series: the Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales by Edgar...

The new paperback series: Penguin English Library 'Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives!' Banished from England for seeking to marry against his father's wishes, Ivanhoe joins Richard...

A launch title in a major new paperback series: the Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot If life had...

Launching a major new paperback series: Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon 'Lady Audley uttered a long, low, wailing cry,...

Launching a major new paperback series: Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of Evelina by Frances Burney 'O Sir, how much uneasiness must I suffer, to counterbalance one...

The definitive annotated students' edition of one of the twentieth century's greatest novels For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 and 1921,...

Singer's haunting second novel, new to Penguin Modern Classics Yasha the magician - sword swallower, fire eater, acrobat and master of escape - is famed for his extraordinary Houdini-like skills....

A powerful 1931 portrayal of a German town on the brink of chaos, from bestselling author Hans Fallada It is summer, 1929, and in a small German town a storm...

The most famous of all of Hammett's tough, hard-bitten novels, in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time Ex-detective Nick Charles plans to spend a quiet Christmas holed up in...

Wilde's classic tale of corrupted innocence and debauchery, part of a new series of five Oscar Wilde titles Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for...

New, beautifully designed edition to mark the 1984 anniversary His best-known novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are two of the most famous, well-quoted and influential political satires ever written....

First time in Penguin Modern Classics for this collection of stories for adults, with a new foreword by Dom Joly These eighteen tales of the macabre show Dahl's dark brilliance...

Subtly brilliant comedy of social rivalry between the wars. Emmeline Lucas (known universally to her friends as Lucia) is an arch-snob of the highest order. In Miss Elizabeth Mapp of...

Romantics, adventurers, sensualists, melancholics and dreamers inhabit the bizarre and exotic world conjured up in these seven intricately interwoven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and Elsinore, to a dhow...

In this final volume of The Forsyte Saga Galsworthy writes about the lives and loves of the Cherrell family, cousins of the Forsytes. For centuries, the Cherrell sons have left...

School is 'wet and weedy', according to Nigel Molesworth, the 'goriller of 3B', 'curse of St Custard's' and superb chronicler of fifties English life. Nothing escapes his disaffected eye and...

This classic collection of short stories serves as the ideal introduction to Steinbeck's work. Set in the idyllic Salinas Valley in California, where simple people farm the land and struggle...

A nuanced, satirical portrayal of malevolent totalitarianism and sinister bureaucracy The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine 'Average Man' party. Under...

A delicate boy growing up in Paris, Jerome Palissier spends many summers at his uncle's house in the Normandy countryside, where the whole world seems 'steeped in azure'. There he...

A mysterious woman stands and smiles at Monroe Stahr, the last of the great Hollywood princes. Enchanted by one another, they begin a passionate but hopeless love affair.