"The most consistent of all series in terms of language control, length, and quality of story."

'I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books...I want to kick up my heels & be off.'Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman;...

'Tom was a glittering hero once more - the pet of the old, and the envy of the young... There were some that believed he would be President yet, if he escaped hanging.' In this enduring and internationally popular novel, Mark ogaincombines social satire...

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...

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", but that ain't no matter.So begins, in characteristic fashion, one of the greatest American novels. Narrated by a poor, illiterate white boy living in...

"He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention." Pride and Prejudice , one of the most famous love stories of all time, has also proven itself as a treasured mainstay of the English literary canon. With the arrival of eligible...

Thomas Hardy's haunting study of guilt and lost love, now in a beautiful new hardcover edition designed by Coralie Bickford-SmithIn a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of...

'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...

'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...

'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;...

Daniel Defoe's great masterpiece, in a gorgeous new clothbound edition designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. These delectable and collectible Penguin editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.'I walk'd about on the shore, lifting up my hands,...

"One death, in exchange for thousands of lives - it's simple arithmetic!"A new translation of Dostoevsky's epic masterpiece, Crime and Punishment (1866). The impoverished student Raskolnikov decides to free himself from debt by killing an old moneylender, an act he sees as elevating himself above conventional...

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...

Hamlet's combination of violence and introspection is unusual among Shakespeare's tragedies. It is also full of curious riddles and fascinating paradoxes, making it one of his most widely discussed plays. Professor Hibbard's illuminating and original introduction explains the process by which variant texts were...

"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...

Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardcover Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against...

Her first major literary success, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is an exalted view of her Objectivist philosophy, portraying a visionary artist struggling against the dull, conformist dogma of his peers; a book of ambition, power, gold and love, published in Penguin Modern Classics. Architect Howard Roark...

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,...

In Gulliver's Travels, the narrator represents himself as a reliable reporter of the fantastic adventures he has just experienced. But how far can we rely on a narrator who has been impersonated by someone else? The work purports to be a travel book, and describes...

Hard Times--Dickens's shortest novel and one of his triumphs--tells the tragic story of Louisa Gradgrind and her father and has had lasting appeal to generations of readers.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the...

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...

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...

'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...

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...

`... 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...

'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...

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...

A timeless selection of brilliant short stories that won William Saroyan a position among the foremost, most widely popular writers of America when it first appeared in 1934. With the greatest of ease William Saroyan flew across the literary skies in 1934 with the...

'Clennam rose softly, opened and closed the door without a sound, and passed from the prison, carrying the quiet with him into the turbulent streets.'Introspective and dreamy, Arthur Clennam returns to England from many years abroad to find a people gripped in their self-made...

'What dark history is this?'This is the question that hangs over Dickens's brooding novel of mayhem and murder in the eighteenth century. Set in London at the time of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, Barnaby Rudge tells a story of individuals caught up in the mindless violence...

'There is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe' So proclaims Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren and the man with a commission to build seven London churches to stand as beacons of the enlightenment.  But Dyer plans to conceal a...

The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the plays for modern readers.- a new, modern-spelling text, based on the 1623 First Folio- detailed introduction considers composition, sources, historical events, performances and changing critical attitudes to...

Henry V, the climax of Shakespeare's sequence of English history plays, is an inspiring, often comic celebration of a young warrior-king. But it is also a study of the costly exhilarations of war, and of the penalties as well as the glories of human...

Sparkling with the witty dialogue between Beatrice and Benedicts, Much Ado About Nothing is one of Shakespeare's most enjoyable and theatrically successful comedies.This edition offers a newly edited text and an exceptionally helpful and critically aware introduction. Paying particular attention to analysis of the play's minor...

'One of the strangest and angriest novels of the twentieth century.' Lauren Groff'An extraordinary, savage novel.' Olivia Laing'I love this novel.' Patricia LockwoodShe would not feel safe until the beautiful animal was dead.Ralph and Molly are inseparable siblings: united against the stupidity of daily routines, their prim...

An orphan girl's progress from the custody of cruel relatives to an oppressive boarding school culminates in a troubled career as a governess. Jane's first assignment at Thornfield, where the proud and cynical master harbors a scandalous secret, draws readers ever deeper into a...

'Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science'For more than a century the Holmes stories have held a strange, almost inexplicable grip on the popular imagination. They are intimately associated with late Victorian and Edwardian society, yet curiously timeless in their appeal. The...

"Dom-bey and Son"...Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light.The hopes of Mr Dombey for the future of his...

This authoritative edition was formerly published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Wordsworth's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by important letters, prefaces, and essays - to...

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is the series of short stories that made the fortunes of the Strand magazine, in which they were first published, and won immense popularity for Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. The detective is at the height of his powers and the volume...

Audiences have always delighted in the robust comedy and verbal inventiveness of The Taming of the Shrew. It has survived many adaptations ranging from, probably, the play printed in 1594 as The Taming of the Shrew through several eighteenth-century versions to modern-dress productions and transformations into ballet,...

The Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative texts from leading scholars in editions designed to interpret and illuminate the works for modern readers- a new, modern-spelling text, based on the 1623 Folio text- on-page commentary and notes explain meaning, staging, language and allusions- detailed introduction considers...

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realized tragi- comedy, as notable for its tragic intensity as for its comic grace and, throughout, for the richness and complexity of its poetry. It concludes, moreover, with the most daring and moving reconciliation scene in all Shakespeare's...