Secondhand Classics Bargain Book Box SP2615

Secondhand Classics Bargain Book Box SP2846

Twenty-one canonical classics from both sides of the Atlantic — Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Hardy, Fitzgerald, Nabokov, Orwell, and more, all in quality paperback editions. A single box that could fill half a reading list.

1. The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde (Vintage) — Wilde's only novel, in which a beautiful young man sells his soul for eternal youth while his portrait does the ageing for him — still as witty, decadent, and morally charged as the day he wrote it.
2. As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner (Vintage) — Fifteen narrators carry a coffin across Mississippi in the summer heat — Faulkner's most formally daring novel, and arguably his most darkly comic.
3. Tender is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald (Vintage) — Fitzgerald's most personal novel, following the glamorous Divers on the French Riviera as money, ambition, and mental illness slowly unravel everything they've built.
4. Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson — Long John Silver, the Hispaniola, and the hunt for buried gold — the adventure novel against which all others are measured, as propulsive now as it was in 1883.
5. Villette — Charlotte Brontë (Penguin Classics) — The most psychologically intense of Brontë's novels, following Lucy Snowe into exile in a Belgian school, where suppressed feeling and unreliable narration keep the reader permanently off-balance.
6. The Pearl — John Steinbeck (Penguin) — A fisherman finds the pearl of the world and it destroys everything he loves — Steinbeck's spare parable of greed and loss, devastating in its simplicity.
7. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens — Pip, Miss Havisham, Estella, and Magwitch — Dickens's most tightly constructed novel, and the one where his comic genius and his instinct for darkness are most perfectly balanced.
8. Tess of the D'Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy (Penguin) — Hardy's great novel of a woman destroyed by the double standards of Victorian society — harrowing, beautiful, and still furious on her behalf.
9. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino (Vintage) — Marco Polo describes fifty-five impossible cities to Kublai Khan, each one a meditation on memory, desire, and the limits of imagination — Calvino at his most crystalline.
10. Little Women — Louisa May Alcott (Scholastic Classics) — The March sisters grow up in Civil War America — funny, unsentimental, and still surprisingly radical in what it says about women's ambition and creative life.
11. Lolita — Vladimir Nabokov (Penguin) — Humbert Humbert tells his story in the most beautiful, damning prose in American fiction — a novel about the violence of self-deception, whatever its narrator insists it's about.
12. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen (Penguin Classics) — Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy remain the most perfectly matched couple in the history of the novel — Austen's plot mechanics are so elegant they still look effortless.
13. Breakfast at Tiffany's — Truman Capote (Modern Classics) — Holly Golightly drifts through New York on charm, nerve, and sheer refusal to be pinned down — Capote's novella is slim, stylish, and much sadder than the film.
14. Hard Times — Charles Dickens (Penguin Classics) — Dickens's shortest and angriest novel, set in the industrial north and aimed squarely at the utilitarian ideology that reduced human beings to economic units.
15. The Color Purple — Alice Walker — Celie's letters to God and to her sister — Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of survival, love, and self-reclamation in the American South, told in a voice unlike any other in American fiction.
16. Lady Oracle — Margaret Atwood (Virago Modern Classics) — Joan Foster fakes her own death and reflects on the elaborate deceptions of her past — Atwood's most gleefully comic novel, and a sharp dissection of female identity and romantic fantasy.
17. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë (Scholastic Classics) — Heathcliff and Catherine tear each other and everyone around them apart across two generations of the Yorkshire moors — the most savage and romantically extreme novel in English.
18. Emma — Jane Austen (Penguin English Library) — Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, is also completely wrong about everyone she knows — Austen's most intricately plotted comedy, and a masterclass in free indirect style.
19. Uncle Silas — Sheridan Le Fanu (Penguin Classics) — A young heiress is sent to live with her mysterious uncle in a decaying country house — Le Fanu's Gothic masterpiece, full of genuine dread and atmosphere.
20. 1984 — George Orwell (Penguin) — Winston Smith, the Thought Police, Room 101, and Big Brother — Orwell's dystopian nightmare has only become more relevant, and more uncomfortable to read, with each passing decade.
21. The End of the Affair — Graham Greene — Set in wartime London, Greene's most personal novel follows a love affair that ends without explanation — a book about jealousy, loss, and the terrifying possibility that God might actually exist.