Non-Secondhand Books

The sole survivor of a shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe is stranded on an uninhabited island far from any shipping routes. At first he is in despair, but slowly, with patience and...

A barbed attack on the British class system, Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza...

Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become and iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, freethinking ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls...

Edgar Allan Poe is not only the finest, most terrifying writer of Gothic horror tales ever to have lived, he also wrote extraordinary poems. Here, Poe writes of the torments...

Dorothy thinks she's lost forever when a tornado whirls her and her dog, Toto, into a magical world. To get home, she must find the wonderful wizard in the Emerald...

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...

In his final years, Freud devoted most of his energies to a series of highly ambitious works on the broadest issues of religion and society. Here, he argues that civilized...

Originally designed as a story for boys, Stevenson's novel is narrated by the teenage Jim Hawkins, who outwits a gang of murderous pirates led by that unforgettable avatar of amorality,...

Over the course of his short life, John Keats (1795-1821) honed a raw talent into a brilliant poetic maturity. This wide-ranging selection of Keats's poetry contains youthful verse, such as...

Describing the surreal hallucinations, insomnia and nightmarish visions he experienced while consuming daily large amounts of laudanum, Thomas De Quincey's legendary account of the pleasures and pains of opium forged...

On the banks of the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer and his friends seek out adventure at every turn. Then one fateful night they witness a murder. The boys swear never to...

With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin, the new guest at The Coach and Horses, is at first...

The Communist Manifesto changed the face of the twentieth century beyond recognition, inspiring millions to revolution, forming the basis of political systems that still dominate countless lives and continuing to...

Life is good for Buck in Santa Clara Valley, where he spends his days eating and sleeping in the golden sunshine. But one day a treacherous act of betrayal leads...

Beowulf tells the story of the heroic Beowulf and of his battles, first with the monster Grendel, then with Grendel's avenging mother, and finally with a dragon that threatens to...

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances- flirtatious Isabella, who introduces Catherine to...

Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of a young writer, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern...

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its...

Moral allegory and spiritual autobiography, The Little Prince is the most translated book in the French language. With a timeless charm it tells the story of a little boy who...

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set...

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...

Dickens's story of solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of Christmas by a series of ghostly visitors, has proved one of his most well-loved works. Ever...

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....

Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat,...

'Somebody must have laid false information against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong.' From this first sentence onwards, Josef K. is on trial...

In these three tales from the first major translation into English of The Arabian Nights in more than 100 years, the endless inventiveness of the vizier's daughter Shahrazad is revealed,...

First published in the 1920's, The Prophet, Gibran's hugely popular guide to living, has sold millions of copies worldwide and is the most famous work of religious fiction of the...

Larry McMurtry's hilarious and touching novel, in Penguin Modern Classics for the very first time Sam the Lion runs the pool-hall, the picture house and the all-night cafe. Coach Popper...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, the seminal work of gay literature that sparked a notorious legal trial The Well of Loneliness tells the story of tomboyish Stephen, who hunts, wears...

A View from the Bridge is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unravelling of a man Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of...

The first part in a trilogy of novels, Cities of the Red Night satirizes modern society in a shocking story of sex, drugs, disease and adventure An opium addict is...

Burroughs' first novel, Junky remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and...

Sci-fi meets the Old West in this obscene and hilarious novel from Naked Lunch author and Beat icon William S. Burroughs This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features...

For the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, the first novel in Burroughs' prophetic and revolutionary 'cut-up trilogy', now in a newly restored edition With a dangerous blend of chemistry...

For the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, the third and final novel in Burroughs' prophetic and revolutionary 'cut-up trilogy', now in a newly restored edition Inspector Lee and the...

New to PMC for this reissue in Modern Classics, with a NEW preface by Paul Theroux The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's account of his epic journey by rail...

'There is a depth and clarity to his writing that captivates the reader' - Sunday Times When Joel Knox's mother dies, he is sent into the exotic unknown of the...

I'm a God boy, Sister, 'I said. 'You don t have to worry about me, I'm a God boy.' Jimmy Sullivan believed he was protected by God until his parents...

A witty, incisive classic of road-trip literature, from one of the great champions and critics of the American identity 'Delightful. This is a book to be read slowly for its...

Years in insurance and marriage to the joyless Hilda have been no more than death in life to George Bowling. This and fear of another war take his mind back...

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...

Amory Blaine, intent on rebelling against his staid, Midwestern upbringing, longs to acquire the patina of Eastern sophistication. In his quest for sexual and intellectual enlightenment, he progresses through a...

Originally published at the zenith of Nazi Germany's power, Steinbeck's fable THE MOON IS DOWN explores the effects of invasion on both the conquered and the conquerors. Occupied by enemy...

In Monterey, on the California Coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that's just naturally bad. Returning to the...

From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims. As their spokesman...

With a new introduction by Emma Larkin Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when...

For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and 'it was like a kaleidoscope slowly...

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...