"Me!" cried Fanny..."Indeed you must excuse me. I could not act any thing if you were to give me the world. No, indeed, I cannot act."At the age of ten, Fanny Price leaves the poverty of her Portsmouth home to be brought up among...

'I wonder what will become of her!'So speculate the friends and neighbours of Emma Woodhouse, the lovely, lively, wilful,and fallible heroine of Jane Austen's fourth published novel. Confident that she knows best, Emma schemes to find a suitable husband for her pliant friend Harriet,...

'Someone must have been telling tales about Josef K. for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.'A successful professional man wakes up one morning to find himself under arrest for an offence which is never explained. The mysterious court which conducts...

'K. kept feeling that he had lost himself, or was further away in a strange land than anyone had ever been before'A remote village covered almost permanently in snow and dominated by a castle and its staff of dictatorial, sexually predatory bureaucrats - this...

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.George Orwell was one of the most celebrated essayists in the English language, and there are quite a few of his essays which...

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...

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...

'What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages — oh, here is Jacob's room.'Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, follows this elusive title character from a sunlit...

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...

"Poverty is what I am writing about".In the late 1920s, Eric Blair resigned his post as a colonial policeman in Burma, immersed himself in the slums of Paris and London, and reinvented himself as George Orwell, one of the most revered prose stylists in...

'If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: "To fight against Fascism," and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: "Common decency."'Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of the Spanish...

'In recent decades, interest in hunger artists has greatly diminished.'Kafka published two collections of short stories in his lifetime, A Country Doctor: Little Tales (1919) and A Hunger Artist: Four Stories (1924). Both collections are included in their entirety in this edition, which also contains other, uncollected stories...

'...behind them all was New York, looking at Karl with the hundred thousand windows of its skyscrapers'Entering New York harbour, the young immigrant Karl Rossmann sees the Statue of Liberty, 'her arm with the sword stretched upward'. This forbidding introduction sets the tone for...

A classic of early modernism, Capital combines vivid historical detail with economic analysis to produce a bitter denunciation of mid-Victorian capitalist society. It has also proved to be the most influential work in social science in the twentieth century; Marx did for social science what Darwin...

From the New York Times bestselling author of You Should Have Known and Admission, a twisty new novel about a college president, a baffling student protest, and some of the most hot-button issues on today's college campuses.   Naomi Roth is the first female president of Webster College, a...

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...

'Where is my nephew?, asked Mr Jasper, wildly. 'Where is your nephew?' repeated Neveille. 'Why do you ask me?' 'I ask you,' retorted Jasper, 'because you were the last person in his company, and he is not to be found.'  The Mystery of Edwin...

'The last man! I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.' Mary Shelley, Journal (May 1824).Best remembered as the author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man eight years later, on returning to...

`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...

'It is impossible to explain why Yevgeny chose Liza Annenskaya, as it is always impossible to explain why a man chooses this and not that woman.'This collection of eleven stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. While each is unique in form,...

“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...

“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...

In 1836 the 23-year-old Dickens was invited by his publishers to write `a monthly something' illustrated by sporting plates. Thus the Pickwick Club was born: its supposed `papers' soom outgrew their origins and became a brilliantly comic novel, still among Dicken's most popular works....

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...

'those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means'Mahatma Gandhi was a profound and original thinker as well as one of the most influential figures in the history of the twentieth century. A religious and social...

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...

'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...

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...

Before the war! How long shall we go on saying that, I wonder? How long before the answer will be 'Which war?'The approach of the Second World War finds suburban insurance agent George Bowling in a reflective mood. As he thinks back to the...

'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older - the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.'Anne Elliot seems to have given up on present happiness and has resigned herself to living off her memories. More than...

'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...

'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...

'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...

'Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.'So says Rat to Mole, as he introduces him to the delights of the river and his friends Toad, the spirit of rebellion, and...

'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 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, collated and edited from all existing printings- on-page and facing-page commentary and notes explain language and allusions- detailed introductions...

A stunning collection of all 80 exquisite Little Black Classics from PenguinThis spectacular box set of the 80 books in the Little Black Classics series showcases the many wonderful and varied writers in Penguin Black Classics. From India to Greece, Denmark to Iran, the...

Victory, don't forget, has come out of my innermost self.Victory was the last of Conrad's novels to be set in the Malay Archipelago. Sub-titled 'An Island Tale', it tells the story of Axel Heyst who, damaged by his dead father's nihilistic philosophy, has retreated from...

Laughable Loves is a collection of stories that first appeared in print in Prague before 1968, but was then was subsequently banned. The seven stories are all concerned with love, or rather with the complex erotic games and stratagems employed by women and especially men...

'An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.'Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is...

'I shall do one thing in this life - one thing for certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.'Gabriel Oak is only one of three suitors for the hand of the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene....

'I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon.'Intensely visionary yet absorbed with the everyday; experimental, daring and challenging, The Waves is regarded by many as Virginia Woolf's greatest achievement....

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...

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...

#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...

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 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 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...