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 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...

'Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?'Jude Fawley, poor and working-class, longs to study at the University of Christminster, but he is rebuffed, and trapped in a loveless marriage. He falls in love with...

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...

'The creatures I had seen were not men, had never been men. They were animals, humanised animals...'A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain,...

The Professor (1845-6), written before Jane Eyre, challenged contemporary expectations of the novel by its brevity, realism, and insistence on a working career both before and after marriage for its hero and heroine. Strikingly up to date for its period, the action begins against a background...

'Was her life to be always like this? - always bringing some new source of inward strife?'When the miller Mr Tulliver becomes entangled in lawsuits, he sets off a chain of events that will profoundly affect the lives of his family and bring into...

'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...

After a miserable childhood, the offer of a job at Thornfield Hall seems to promise Jane Eyre a brighter future. But joyless laughter echoes along its corridors. Strange things happen in the dead of night. Secrets lurk in the attic. When Jane 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...

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...

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...

Maggie, a young girl from the Bowery, is driven to unfortunate circumstances by poverty and solitude.

"A breathless, exhilarating crash course in the low morality of high finance" (Independent) Serious Money is perhaps Caryl Churchill's most notorious play. A satirical study of the effects of the Big Bang, it premiered at the Royal Court in 1987 and transferred to the...

In The Sea-Wolf, London's most gripping novel, Humphrey Van Weyden is rescued from the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay by a demonic sea captain and introduced to fates far worse that death. Through this story London recalls his own adventures on a sealing vessel...

“This richly filled Norton Critical Edition contains a reliably edited and annotated text of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; extracts from some of Joyce’s other works; historical, religious, aesthetic, and literary writings from the novel’s time period; and recent critical essays...

For many centuries, Aristotle's Physics was the essential starting point for anyone who wished to study the natural sciences.This book begins with an analysis of change, which introduces us to Aristotle's central concepts of matter and form, before moving on to an account of explanation in...

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...

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...

The Woman in White (1859-60) is the first and greatest `Sensation Novel'. Walter Hartright's mysterious midnight encounter with the woman in white draws him into a vortex of crime, poison, kidnapping, and international intrigue.The novel is dominated by two of the finest creations in all...

The night that Heathcliff, an unkempt orphan, arrives at the Heights, Cathy's life will change for ever but theirs will not be a happy love story. From a harsh childhood to a foolish marriage, a troubled path of pain and punishment lies ahead. Yet...

'She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air: "Tess- say it is not true! No, it is not true!"'Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore...

'- What is your nation if I may ask, says the citizen.- Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.'Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the...

'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...

'One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael CunninghamClarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink...

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 of 1930s Jamaica, white...

'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...

A lawyer by day and a creator of a world of fantasy by night, Hoffman (1776-1822) lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence. Many of the characters in his stories are subject to a similar split personality. The duality of his nature is frequently reflected in...

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 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...

`the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks with influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear.'Headed by the larger than life figure of Professor Challenger, a scientific expedition...

'I regret to see that my book has turned out un fiasco solenne'James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else,...

'We are looking for the things that enable us to live a noble and happy life...and what prospects decent people will have of acquiring any of them.'The Eudemian Ethics is a major treatise on moral philosophy whose central concern is what makes life worth living....

[T]he present groundwork is nothing more than the identification and vindication of the supreme principle of morality.'In the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Immanuel Kant makes clear his two central intentions: first, to uncover the principle that underpins morality, and secondly to defend its...

Befriend a budding poet and his adoring mother in this seductive early novel - winner of the Prix Médicis - by the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the greatest to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'Kundera's achievement has...

A heady, existential tale of seduction and romance by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. ‘An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.’ Salman Rushdie‘Kundera designs fictions of the highest order.’ Ian McEwan‘Audacity, wit and sheer brilliance.’ New York Times Book...

“A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight-errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” In this thought-provoking, endlessly enlightening, and entertaining essay on the...

Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett, experience one new mother's psychological journey in this lost 1930 foremother of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.'Extraordinary. A fascinating and unexpected delight.' Lucy Ellmann'Haunting and evocative, this is a timeless portrayal of madness.' Catherine Cho'A startling, luminous and magnetic novel about the complexity...

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...

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to World War II.Set...

THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER Discover the dystopian novel that started a phenomenon before you read the Booker Prize-winning sequel The Testaments. NOW AN AWARD-WINNING TV SERIES STARRING ELISABETH MOSS Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state...

The Great Gatsby is a dazzling social satire, F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece and a milestone in twentieth-century literature, now beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. 'There was music from my neighbour's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men...

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the tale of an ancient curse suddenly given a terrifying modern application. The grey towers of Baskerville Hall and the wild open country of Dartmoor hold many secrets for Holmes and Watson to unravel. The detective is contemptuous...

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

In a gloomy, neglected house Miss Havisham sits, as she has sat year after year, in a wedding dress and veil that were once white, and are now faded and yellow with age. Her face is like a death's head; her dark eyes burn...

'All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others' When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But...

A controversial tale of friendship and tragedy during the Great Depression They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' 'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past' Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit...

A new series of beautiful hardcover nonfiction classics, with covers designed by Coralie Bickford-SmithWorld-changing ideas meet eye-catching design: the best titles of the extraordinarily successful Great Ideas series are now packaged in Coralie Bickford-Smith’s distinctive, award-winning covers. Whether on a well-curated shelf or in...

The infamous and controversial work that made a lasting impression on both modern Protestant theology and existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and CamusWriting under the pseudonym of "Johannes de silentio," Kierkegaard expounds his personal view of religion through a discussion of the scene in...