Fiction

Stunningly rejacketed as part of a major reinvention of this neglected 20th century master Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of Walter, a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong....

'Graham Greene's masterpiece' John Updike During a vicious persecution of the clergy in Mexico, a worldly priest, the 'whisky priest', is on the run. With the police closing in, his...

Bright, photographic, evocative new covers for Greene's backlist, to celebrate one of the keystone writers of the Vintage Classics list Discover Graham Greene's blackly comic and timely espionage thriller, set...

An ambitious novel by the formidable talent, Somerset Maugham Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some...

The book that won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature The book that won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature 'It's silly not to hope. It's a sin...

Virginia Woolf's final novel, now in Penguin Black Classics Outwardly a novel about life in a country-house in whose grounds there is to be a pageant, Between the Acts is...

Woolf's innovative modernist novel, in a new Black Classics edition Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social...

A playful mock 'biography' of a chameleonic historical figure, written for Virginia Woolf's intimate friend Vita Sackville-West. Orlando has always been an outsider . . . His longing for passion,...

Woolf's most autobiographical novel, now in Penguin Black Classics To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood...

An enthralling exploration of the human experience, from the author of To The Lighthouse On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her...

Kate Chopin's groundbreaking depiction of a woman who dares to defy the expectations of society in the pursuit of her desire When The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges...

Holly Golightly, glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while down. She's up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She's a shoplifter, a delight, a...

A new hardback edition of Fitzgerald's brilliant and most famous novel Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach ......

In this nightmare vision of a not-too-distant future, fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends rob, rape, torture and murder - for fun. Alex is jailed for his vicious crimes and...

A bold mix of realism, allegory, adventure, and progressive politics, this collection features Jack London's most profound and moving literary works The Call of the Wild, London's elemental masterpiece about...

Kafka meets The Thick Of It in a bitingly funny new political satire from Ian McEwan Kafka meets The Thick Of It in a bitingly funny new political satire from...

with an introduction by Lorna Sage Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set...

New to Modern Classics, published alongside The Ballad of Peckham Rye Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants' office for sixteen years. So she leaves...

This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series 'My guest was lying sprawled on his back. There was a long knife through his heart which...

A classic of postwar literature, a small masterpiece of humour, humanity and heroism from one of the best Czech writers For gauche young apprentice Milos Hrma, life at the small...

Regarded as little more than a stammering fool, the nobleman Claudius quietly survives the intrigues, bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the imperial Roman dynasties. Regarded as little more than...

Antoine de Saint-Exupery's timeless tale of love and loneliness, now widely available in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time Antoine de Saint-Exupery first published The Little Prince in 1943,...

Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where Jose Arcadio Buendia and his strong-willed wife, ersula, have started their...

Outcast and mute, Euchrid Eucrow of Ukulore inhabits a nightmarish Southern valley of preachers, incest and ignorance. When the God-fearing folk of the town declare a foundling child to be...

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is one of the best loved novellas of all time. Two drifters - small, shrewd George and huge, simple-minded Lennie - get work on...

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is a dark and daring story of obsessive love and transgression. Humbert Humbert's lust for his pubescent step-daughter, Lolita, shocked readers when it was first published in...

A new classics edition of this enduringly popular novel. It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part...

Australian literature's strangest novel, written by its most familiar novelist. It is the duty of a good child to let his parents know the second they turn into animals. Barbara...

Winner, Kiriyama Prize 2004 Winner, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2004 Winner, Best History Book, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards 2004 Dancing with Strangers is Inga Clendinnen's...

Listen, I told myself, and heard the waves against the harbour-wall, a gull being peevish, the white tapping stick of a blind man against the stones. Listen, I told myself,...

Kate Grenville's Orange-Prize winning novel The Idea of Perfection is the story of the small town of Karakarook, and of Douglas Cheeseman and Harley Savage-two people who seem the least...

The wind from Siberia as announced by the BBC came down Bayswater Road from the direction of Marble Arch...Searing skin, and petrifying metal and wood, it took possession of London...

Our minds are like those maps at the entrance to the Metro stations in Paris. They are full of unilluminated directions. But when we know where we want to go...

Introduced by Fiona McGregor Sharply observed, bitter and humorous, The Long Prospect is a story of life in an Australian industrial town. Growing up neglected in a seedy boarding house,...

Introduced by Michael McGirr 'The year I remember best from those days is 1929. This was the year I turned fourteen and went into the eighth grade; the year too...

Introduced by Brenda Niall This remarkable novel, first published to a chorus of acclaim in 1952, is one of the lost classics of Australian literature. Martin Boyd is a deeply...

Breaking their poses like trees snapping branches, the women urgently regarded each other, cleared away all signs of work in an instant, examined their souls for defects, in a sense...

Introduced byPeter Goldsworthy Winner, Nobel Prize for Literature 2003 She pouts. I was expecting more of a story, she says. It is difficult to get into the swing when the...

A wonderful novel by one of Australia's most loved and awarded writers, long out of print and now revived by the Text Classics series. Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary...

This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest: you have to begin somewhere, and...

Who the hell's Nino Culotta. That's what you asked yourself when you first picked up this book, wasn't it? Well I'm Nino Culotta. My father baptised me Giovanni-John-well Giovannino is...

Introduced bySonya Hartnett Winner, Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1956 Nearly everyone between the ages of eighteen and thirty turns against his family and wants to escape from it....

Architect Carmine and translator Ivana were once lovers. Their child died and their relationship ended but now, decades on, both with marriages and children of their own, they are friends....

Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, after a brief romance finds herself pregnant. To save her reputation, she marries an eccentric older family friend and...

In a hushed, Italian town after the Second World War Elsa lives with her parents in the house where she was born. Twenty-seven and unmarried, she is of constant concern...

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 In the title work, a loosely autobiographical narrative covers infancy to awkward adolescence, unearthing the moments of childhood that linger longest in...

In a small, inconsequential city in Japan, all that matters to 17-year-old Kensuke Yazaki and his friends is girls, rock music and, to a much lesser extent, school. Told at...