#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERWINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZEAMAZON EDITORS’ PICK FOR THE BEST BOOK OF 2019The Testaments is a modern masterpiece, a powerful novel that can be read on its own or as a companion to Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Handmaid’s Tale.More than fifteen years after the...

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls...

What was Shakespeare's attitude to Semitism? The Introduction to this edition of The Merchant of Venice opens by addressing this vital issue raised by the play, and goes on to study the sources, background, and date, includuing a discussion of Sigmund Freud's essay on...

One of the most important and influential invasion narratives ever written, The War of the Worlds (1897) describes the coming of the Martians, who land in Woking, and make their way remorselessly towards the capital, wreaking chaos, death, and destruction. The novel is closely...

'What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?' Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge's frozen...

Gold! - his own gold - brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been taken away! Falsely accused of theft, Silas Marner is cut off from his community but finds refuge in the village of Raveloe, where he is eyed with distant...

The finest of all Conrad's tales, 'Heart of Darkness' is set in an atmosphere of mystery and menace, and tells of Marlow's perilous journey up the Congo River to relieve his employer's agent, the renowned and formidable Mr Kurtz. What he sees on his...

'Pray, pray be composed,' cried Elinor, 'and do not betray what you feel to every body present. Perhaps he has not observed you yet.' For Elinor Dashwood, sensible and sensitive, and her romantic, impetuous younger sister Marianne, the prospect of marrying the men they...

'I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life...I likewise taught him to say Master' Robinson Crusoe's seafaring adventures are abruptly ended when he is shipwrecked, the solitary survivor on a deserted island. He gradually creates...

'...in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty.' Northanger Abbey is about the misadventures of Catherine Morland, young, ingenuous, and mettlesome, and an indefatigable reader of gothic novels. Their...

'there were only seven out of the twenty-six on whom we knew we could rely; and out of those seven one was a boy ...' When a mysterious seafarer puts up at the Admiral Benbow, young Jim Hawkins is haunted by his frightening tales;...

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster...

Performed variously as escapist fantasy, celebratory fiction, and political allegory, The Tempest is one of the plays in which Shakespeare's genius as a poetic dramatist found its fullest expression. Significantly, it was placed first when published in the First Folio of 1623, and is...

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!" Throughout the hardships of her childhood - spent with a severe aunt and abusive cousin, and later at the austere Lowood charity school - Jane Eyre clings to a sense of self-worth, despite of...

As You Like It is Shakespeare's most light-hearted comedy, and its witty heroine Rosalind has his longest female role. In this edition, Alan Brissenden reassesses both its textual and performance history, showing how interpretations have changed since the first recorded production in 1740. He...

"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . Mr. Garcia Marquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of...

For more than 2,000 years, Sun Tzu's The Art of War has provided leaders with essential advice on battlefield tactics, managing troops and terrain, and employing cunning and deception. An elemental part of Chinese culture, it has also become a touchstone for the Western...

'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves'Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply because...

Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in Penguin Classics. Born into the oppressive, colonialist society...

'A brilliantly and preposterously funny book' Guardian'A flawless comic novel ... I loved it then, as I do now. It has always made me laugh out loud' Helen Dunmore, The TimesJim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities....

Jagua Nana, no longer young but still irresistible, lives a life of hedonism in Lagos: men, parties, fights, wild nights in the Tropicana with her handsome young boyfriend Freddie. Rushing from one experience to the next in search of something she can't quite grasp,...

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best loved of Shakepeare's plays. It brings together aristocrats, workers, and fairies in a wood outside Athens, and from there the enchantment begins.Simple and engaging on the surface, it is none the less a highly original and sophisticated...

'It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.'The Road to Wigan Pier is George Orwell's 1937 study of poverty and working-class life in northern England. It is the book...

'Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!'The mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville brings Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to Dartmoor in the most famous of all of Arthur Conan Doyle's books. Is Sir Charles the latest victim of the ancestral...

This major new edition, originally commissioned for the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode, brings together a unique combination of Shelley's poetry and prose - the lyric poems, plays, longer poems, criticism, and essays - to give the essence...

Prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life roles of billy pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse slaughterhouse 5 is one of the worlds great anti-war books centring on the infamous fire-bombing of...

'Yes, what is Dionysian? - This book provides an answer - "a man who knows" speaks in it, the initiate and disciple of his god.'The Birth of Tragedy (1872) is a book about the origins of Greek tragedy and its relevance to the German culture...

'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.'According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its...

'She sees, coming up a second time,Earth from the ocean, eternally green;the waterfalls plunge, an eagle soars above them,over the mountain hunting fish.'After the terrible conflagration of Ragnarok, the earth rises serenely again from the ocean, and life is renewed. The Poetic Edda begins with The Seeress's...

Ossyane, a young Lebanese man and his Jewish wife Clara return to live in Haifa after World War II. Just as war breaks out in the new-born state of Israel, Ossayne is forced to go to Beirut. The border with Israel closes behind him...

An intimate account of Edward Saïd’s life and thoughtEdward Said is a personal, literary portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most influential scholars, written by his close friend and confidante. Here, Lebanese novelist and essayist Dominique Eddé offers a fascinating and fresh presentation of his oeuvre from...

'And low, stole o'er the stillness the heartbeats of sleep'In Chapelizod, a suburb of Dublin, an innkeeper and his family are sleeping. Around them and their dreams there swirls a vortex of world history, of ambition and failure, desire and transgression, pride and shame,...

'And O, Angelica, what has become of you, this present Sunday morning when I can't attend to the sermon; and, more difficult question than that, what has become of Me as I was when I sat by your side?'At the height of his career,...

The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday - but never jam to-day.Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There was first published in December 1871 (dated 1872). Although Carroll intended Looking-Glass to be a follow-up piece to the immediately successful Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), he created...

'The Moving Finger writes; and, having writMoves on: nor all thy Piety nor WitShall lure it back to cancel half a lineNor all thy tears wash out a word of it.'In the 'rubáiyát' (short epigrammatic poems) of the medieval Persian poet, mathematician, and philosopher...

As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the `present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and...

This edition of one of Dickens's earlier novels is based on the accurate Clarendon edition of the text and includes the prefaces to the 1850 and 1867 editions and Dickens's Number Plans. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made...

Of all Jack London's fictions none have been so popular as his dog stories. In addition to The Call of the Wild, the epic tale of a Californian dog's adventures during the Klondike gold rush, this edition includes White Fang, and five famous short stories -...

`... holding her solitary way among a crowd of wild, grotesque companions; the only pure, fresh, youthful object in the throng.'`Little Nell' cares for her grandfather in the gloomy surroundings of his curiosity shop. Reduced to poverty the pair flee London, pursued by the...

'The woman is no good to me. Who'll have her?'Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife Susan and baby daughter. Eighteen years later Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover...

'My next clear recollection is that we were prisoners at we knew not what depth beneath the moon's surface ...At the village of Lympne, on the south coast of England, the 'most uneventful place in the world' the failed playwright Mr Bedford meets the...

`I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child. And his name is DAVID COPPERFIELD,' wrote Dickens of what is the most personal, certainly one of the most popular, of all his novels.Dickens wrote the book after the completion of a fragment of...

During the 1790s, with Ireland in political crisis, Maria Edgeworth made a surprisingly rebellious choice: in Castle Rackrent, her first novel, she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate the decline of a family from her own Anglo-Irish class.  Castle Rackrent's narrator, Thady Quirk, gives...

The Three Musketeers (1844) is one of the most famous historical novels ever written. It is also one of the world's greatest historical adventure stories, and its heroes have become symbols for the spirit of youth, daring, and comradeship. The action takes place in the...

Bleak House, Dickens's most daring experiment in the narration of a complex plot, challenges the reader to make connections - -between the fashionable and the outcast, the beautiful and the ugly, the powerful and the victims. Nowhere in Dickens's later novels is his attack...

'Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor...'In these two classic essays of feminist literature, Woolf argues passionately for women's intellectual freedom and their role in challenging the drive towards fascism and conflict. In A Room...

`Anyone who wants to gain a quick idea of how before me everything was topsy-turvy should make a start with this work. That which is called idol on the title-page is quite simply that which was called truth hitherto. Twilight of the Idols - in plain words: the...

'It is some years now since I realized how many false opinions I had accepted as true from childhood onwards...I saw that at some stage in my life the whole structure would have to be utterly demolished'In Descartes's Meditations, one of the key texts of...

'So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers...'At a Victorian dinner party, in Richmond, London, the Time Traveller returns to tell his extraordinary tale of mankind's future in...

'About things that are within our power and those that are not.'Epictetus's Discourses have been the most widely read and influential of all writings of Stoic philosophy, from antiquity onwards. They set out the core ethical principles of Stoicism in a form designed to help people...