Classic General Fiction

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this powerful novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime. Published in 1867, this is Zola's most important work...

A compelling novel about the requirement to be perfect, without losing sight of yourself — by the greatest feminist of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir. The Image of Her follows Laurence, a woman who appears to live an ideal life. Her weekends are spent in the country, weekdays in Paris, encapsulating all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She...

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne is the author's most famous adventure, now available in a beautiful clothbound edition. One night at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg makes a bold wager with his companions, claiming that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking away from the well-established routine of his daily life, he...

Arturo Bandini arrives in Los Angeles with big dreams. But the reality he finds is a city gripped by poverty. When he makes a small fortune from the publication of a short story, he reinvents himself, indulging in expensive clothes, fine food, and downtown strip clubs. But Bandini's delusions take a worrying turn when he is drawn into a relationship...

Aesop's Illustrated Fables features more than 400 fables, beautifully illustrated with engravings and colour plates by Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane, and Ernest Griset. It includes all of the classic fables whose titles and morals have become part of our common cultural vocabulary, among them The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Tortoise and the Hare, The City Mouse and the Country...

One of the very best must-read novels of all time - with a new introduction by Roddy Doyle 'A well told tale signifying a good deal; one to be read again and again' THE TIMES 'The book I wish I had written ... It's so far away from my own imagination, I'd love to sit at my desk one day...

Discover the fate of the original black Magician, Pug, as prophecy becomes truth in the last book of the Riftwar Cycle. The Final Volume in the Epic Riftwar Cycle. The dragons are calling… Civil war is tearing apart the Kingdom of the Isles, for the throne lies empty and rivals are converging. Having spirited his beloved Princess Stephané safely out...

Published for the very first time in its own volume, Tolkien’s remarkable tale about a painter whose obsession with detail prevents him from finishing his great work. Leaf by Niggle is the story of Niggle, a painter. Not a very successful one, partly because he has so many other things to do. For some time, he has been obsessed with...

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope...

Part of the Penguin Classics' fresh new editions of Tolstoy's major works - including Antony Briggs' stunning new translation of War and Peace. In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years that followed were among the most significant in his life, and deeply influenced the...

Penguin Classics relaunch Mary Barton, the daughter of disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem Wilson in the hope of marrying Henry Carson, the mill owner's son, and making a better life for herself and her father. But when Henry is shot down in the street and Jem becomes the main suspect, Mary finds herself painfully torn between the...

Stabbed in the backA piece of lead piping nearbyIt should be a simple case... Poirot is summoned to France, but arrives too late to save his client, whose body now lies face down in a shallow grave on a golf course. Why is the dead man wearing his son’s overcoat? And who was the intended recipient of the love-letter in...

Agatha Christie's world-famous serial killer mystery, reissued with a striking new cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers. There's a serial killer on the loose, bent on working his way through the alphabet. As a macabre calling card, he leaves beside each victim’s corpse the ABC Railway Guide open at the name...

Agatha Christie’s most famous murder mystery, reissued with a striking new cover with special finishes. Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train is surprisingly full for the time of the year, but by the morning it is one passenger fewer. An American tycoon lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times,...

The Penguin English Library Edition of A Room with a View by E. M. Forster "But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..." Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with...

Agatha Christie's most daring crime mystery – an early and particularly brilliant outing of Hercule Poirot, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, with its legendary twist, changed the detective fiction genre forever. Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Now, tragically,...

The first modern dystopian novel which inspired both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. Special futuristic 3D cover edition! Comes with 3D glasses! As relevant today as when it was first published, We is the first modern dystopian novel which inspired both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. The citizens of the One State live in a condition of 'mathematically...

Roald Dahl's canon of family stories and poetry with collectable new covers features Quentin Blake's iconic illustrations and archive material provided by the Roald Dahl Museum. As far as children are concerned, a REAL WITCH is easily the most dangerous of all the living creatures on Earth. This beautiful edition of The Witches, part of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection,...

Roald Dahl's canon of family stories and poetry comes with collectable new covers featuring Quentin Blake's iconic illustrations and archive material provided by the Roald Dahl Museum. Mr Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And, now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever. This beautiful edition of The Twits, part of The...

Roald Dahl's canon of family stories and poetry comes with collectable new covers featuring Quentin Blake's iconic illustrations and archive material provided by the Roald Dahl Museum. I have secret plans and clever tricks. This beautiful edition of The Enormous Crocodile, part of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, features official archive material from the Roald Dahl Museum and is perfect...

Roald Dahl's canon of family stories and poetry now comes with collectable new covers featuring Quentin Blake's iconic illustrations and archival material provided by the Roald Dahl Museum. 'The greatest moment of my life is coming up now! I mustn't bish it! I mustn't bosh it!' This beautiful edition of Esio Trot, part of The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, includes...

An outrageous adventure across the stars from the master of witty science fiction. Announced in a thunderclap out of another day's tedium, hapless New Yorker Tom Carmody learns that he is the winner of the Intergalactic Sweepstake. Accepting with a shrug, he is whipped across the universe to collect his prize. The catch? There's no way home. Enlisting the help...

Vintage Quarterbound Classics - Bound to be beautiful A beautiful hardback edition of Huxley's iconic dystopian classic, introduced by Yuval Noah Harari. 'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' - Margaret Atwood 'If you have time for just one book, this would be my top choice' - Yuval Noah...

A classic of intergalactic, metaphysical science fiction and one of Philip Pullman's favourite books. After journeying across the stars, a man from Earth finds himself lost among the scarlet deserts, black cliffs, and semi-sentient oceans of Tormance, a world lit by the star Arcturus. Pulled northward by the sound of drums, and undergoing strange physical transformations, the Earthman's adventures with...

The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens's tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters - the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing...

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels...

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race, and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction, and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In The Tell...

This is the novel Dickens regarded as his favourite child and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experience from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the 'umble Uriah Heep, along...

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics — irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Arguably America's most influential short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe's tales of suspense never fail to spook and amaze. Gathered in this selection are his very best horror stories, including the gothic tour de force...

Launching a major new paperback series - Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 'I'm unfavourable to killin' a man as long as you can git around it; it ain't good sense, it ain't good morals. Ain't I right?' The original Great American Novel, an incomparable adventure story and a...

"May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then." - Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Rediscover Emily Brontë's powerful tale of love, violence, and obsession. "May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then." Wuthering Heights is the tale of two...

Wild Places is a gorgeous hardback collection of Katherine Mansfield's best stories, selected by her biographer Claire Harman. This beautiful new hardback edition captures Mansfield's most vivid and distinctive tales. Katherine Mansfield was the only writer whom Virginia Woolf envied. She transformed the short story genre with her work, creating stories that are miraculous in their intensity yet seemingly so...

This indispensable translation is as close to the original as it is possible to get while at the same time being a clear and fluid translation. If you've never read it, now is the moment. This translation will show that you don't read War and Peace, you live it - The Times Tolstoy's enthralling epic depicts Russia's war with Napoleon...

The Bright Young Things of 1920s Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade, whether it is promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. A vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously...

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta is in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti, ragged children beg for coins to buy skulls made of chocolate, and ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him. As the...

A haunting portrayal of addiction and a troubled young woman. She understands Karma, she says- "What I do, I reap" Her name means sadness, yet Tristessa, a prostitute and morphine addict, lives without cares in her shabby room with a menagerie of pets and an altar to the Virgin Mary. Based on Jack Kerouac's own real-life love affair in Mexico...

This novel is an extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever. In this, her most autobiographical novel, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting...

A stunning new series look for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in Penguin Modern Classics. Steinbeck's first major critical and commercial success, Tortilla Flat is also his funniest novel. Danny is a paisano, descended from the original Spanish settlers who arrived in Monterey, California, centuries before. He values friendship above money and possessions, so that when...

Gertrude Stein, as a college student at Radcliffe and a medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School, was a privileged woman. Yet, she was surrounded by women who were trapped by poverty, class, and race into lives that offered little choice. Her portraits of Anna and Lena are examples of realistic depictions of immigrant women who had no occupational choice...

A compulsive novel from one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. A recently divorced actor and a no less lonely woman meet by chance in a New York diner. The city—its bars, its cheap motels, and its rented rooms—becomes the cinematic setting of the couple's escalating and mysterious relationship. A move against desperation and drift, their affair...

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the life of Amory Blaine, a young man rebelling against his staid, Midwestern upbringing with an ambition to acquire the patina of Eastern sophistication. In his quest for sexual and intellectual enlightenment, Amory progresses through a series of relationships, ultimately finding himself cast out into the real world.

A story of a frustrated, confined woman who becomes lost in a psychological maze of her own creation—a labyrinth of jealousy, loneliness, and longing. Etsuko is a trapped woman who lays traps for others... After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law's house, where she numbly submits to the old man's advances. Meanwhile, she develops...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, the seminal work of gay literature that sparked a notorious legal trial. The Well of Loneliness tells the story of tomboyish Stephen, who hunts, wears trousers and cuts her hair short - and who gradually comes to realise that she is attracted to women. Charting her romantic and professional adventures during the First World War...

Virginia Woolf wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it — Jeanette Winterson, from her introduction to The Waves The Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up, experiencing friendship, love,...

A collection of vibrant and incisive short stories depicting the sometimes humorous, but more often tragic interactions between Black people and white people in America in the 1920s and '30s. The Ways of White Folks is the celebrated short story collection from the American poet and writer often called the 'Poet Laureate of Harlem'. A black maid forms a close...

The sequel to one of the most powerful novels of the First World War and a keystone title on the Vintage Classics list. The sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front, one of the most powerful novels of the First World War and a twentieth-century classic. After four gruelling years, the survivors of the Great War finally make their...

The Waves is Woolf's innovative modernist novel. Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social events, individual achievements, and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters—their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness...

A shimmering collection of stories from the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated into English for the first time. A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these precisely observed tales of love, marriage and family life in mid-century...

VINTAGE CLASSICS FRENCH SERIES - stunning flapped paperback editions showcasing the bestselling, most acclaimed French writers of the twentieth century. All for one, and one for all! The young D'Artagnan and the legendary musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are 'the inseparables' - ready to sacrifice everything in a duel or game of dice in order to defend their honour or...

Considered one of Mishima's masterpieces, this novel is a fictionalised version of real events - the torching of a Kyoto temple by a disturbed Buddhist acolyte in 1950. This is Mishima's novel about the pressure of living an idealised life. It tells a fictionalised account of real events - the lonely acolyte who destroyed a famous Kyoto temple. Mizoguchi grows...

The third novel in Mishima's masterful Sea of Fertility tetralogy, The Temple of Dawn showcases Mishima's literary powers in a meditation on reincarnation and Buddhist philosophy. Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business. He is granted an audience with a young Thai princess known as 'Moonlight', an encounter that radically alters the...

A new translation of Simenon's visceral, critically acclaimed classic. And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage. The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth. Most people struggle to get by...

A beautiful paperback edition of Elizabeth Bowen's short stories, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley. 'Bowen's stories are novels that have been split open like rocks and reveal the glitter of the naked crystals which have formed them' - Vogue Selected and with a new introduction by Tessa Hadley. A girl shares her secret den. A couple stroll through a...

Spine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics. VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES The Scarlet Letter introduces us to Hester Prynne, a beautiful young woman who is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours, she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter, Pearl,...

Jody Tiflin has the urge for rebellion, but he also wants to be loved. In The Red Pony, Jody begins to learn about adulthood—its pain, its responsibilities, and its problems—through his acceptance of his father's gifts. First, he is given a red pony, and later he is promised the colt of a bay mare. Yet both of these gifts bring...

A stunning new series look for one of the greatest writers of the 20th century in Penguin Modern Classics. The Pearl is Steinbeck's flawless parable about wealth and the evil it can bring. When Kino, an Indian pearl-diver, finds the Pearl of the world he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana in church and...

One of the finest American novels ever written, Norman Mailer's classic account of the Philippines campaign of WW2. Based on Mailer's own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in...

Le Carre's singular story of a cautious man plunged into recklessness, published in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time. Aldo Cassidy is the naive and sentimental lover. A successful, judicious man, he is wrenched away from the ordered certainties of his life by a sudden encounter with Shamus, a wild, carousing artist, and Helen, his nakedly alluring wife. Cassidy,...

The Makioka Sisters is part of the Vintage Japanese Classics series, which follows the success of Vintage Russian Classics and European Classics. These editions feature the best Japanese writers on the Vintage list. 'An exquisite novel about four sisters living through a turbulent decade...I'd put it in the 10 greatest books of the 20th century' — David Mitchell 'A near-perfect...

The Magic Mountain is a European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner, exploring the lure and degeneration of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of World War I. As Seen on BBC Between the Covers The Magic Mountain presents Hans Castorp as 'a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man' when he visits his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in...

A searing coming-of-age tale by one of the greatest Spanish writers of the 20th century, set on the island of Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War. "This is an old and wicked island. An island of Phoenicians and merchants, of bloodsuckers and frauds." Ana María Matute's 1959 novel, Primera memoria (translated as The Island), is a stifling story of rebellious...

“To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.” - André Gide Michel had been a blindfolded scholar until, newly married, he contracted tuberculosis. His will to recover brings self-discovery and the growing desire to rebel against his background of culture, decency, and morality. But the freedom from constraints...

New to Penguin Classics, this is the funny and deeply moving story of the apocalypse - as seen from one small village in England. Self-important and more or less friendless, retired teacher Edgar Hopkins lives for the thrill of winning poultry prizes. But his narrow world is shattered when he discovers that the moon is about to come crashing to...

A superb comic masterpiece and fierce parable of the Russian Revolution by the author of The Master and Margarita. WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY ANDREY KURKOV A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A distinctly worryingly human animal is...

The bestselling dystopian classic that became a cultural phenomenon and inspired an award-winning TV series. THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER Go back to where it all began with the dystopian novel behind the award-winning TV series. 'As relevant today as it was when Atwood wrote it.' Guardian I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no...

The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's glittering Jazz Age masterpiece. Jay Gatsby is a self-made man, famed for his decadent champagne-drenched parties. Despite being surrounded by Long Island's bright and beautiful, Gatsby longs only for Daisy Buchanan. In shimmering prose, Fitzgerald shows Gatsby pursue his dream to its tragic conclusion. The Great Gatsby is an elegiac and exquisite portrait of the...

A new hardback edition of Fitzgerald's brilliant and most famous novel. The Great Gatsby is the tale of Jay Gatsby, a man who seemingly has everything, yet one thing remains forever beyond his grasp. His glittering parties are the talk of the town, attended by everyone who is anyone. Day and night, his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young...

Hartley's classic novel of innocence lost, now reissued with a new jacket. When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of...

A brilliant exploration of power and dysfunction in Victorian England Pillar of society and stern upholder of Victorian values, god-fearing Norfolk merchant John Barnard presides over a large and largely unhappy family. This is their story - his brandy-swilling wife, their hapless offspring and their changing fortunes - over the decades. Sylvia Townsend Warner's last novel, The Flint Anchor gloriously...

The First Man offers an incredibly moving account of Camus' poverty-stricken childhood in Algeria, the love of his silent mother, and the remarkable figure of an old schoolteacher who saved him from ignorance. Camus was working on a manuscript version of the book when he was killed in a car accident with his publisher Michel Gallimard. The First Man was...

VINTAGE DECO - Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on. Now she had taken off her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy. Mrs Wilkins and Mrs Arbuthnot, cowed and neglected by their husbands, make a daring plan—they will have a holiday. Leaving a drab...

Another addition to Penguin Modern Classics' key Kerouac holdings. The Dharma Bums appeared just one year after the author's explosive On the Road had put the Beat Generation on the literary map and Kerouac on the best-seller list. The same expansiveness, humour, and contagious zest for life that sparked the earlier novels sparks this one too, but through a more...

The Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka showcases the brilliance of the 20th century's greatest visionary. This collection is universally acknowledged as highlighting Kafka’s profound impact on literature and modern thought. As W. H. Auden famously stated, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man." His works encapsulate the existential challenges of contemporary life,...

"In oldentimes, when wishing still helped, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful..." - 'The Frog King', The Complete Fairy Tales. Your favourite fantastic Grimm fairy tales and bedtime stories in the only complete edition of this classic collection. Wolves and grandmothers, ugly sisters, a house made of bread, a goose made of gold... the folk tales collected...

Available in English for the first time, The Chandelier is one of Lispector's most radical books and a key part of what made her a Brazilian legend. 'She found the best clay that one could desire- white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world' Like the clay from...

The Castle is Kafka's last great, unfinished novel— the book that hangs over the whole modern era like a nightmare. The Castle tells the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and...

An exhilarating satire of Eighties excess that captures the effervescent spirit of New York, from one of the greatest writers of modern American prose. The Bonfire of the Vanities follows the story of Sherman McCoy, a WASP, bond trader, and self-appointed 'Master of the Universe'. He enjoys a fashionable lifestyle with a wife, a Park Avenue apartment, and a Southern...

Anthony and Gloria are the essence of Jazz Age glamour. A brilliant and magnetic couple, they fling themselves at life with an energy that is thrilling. New York is a playground where they dance and drink for days on end. Their marriage is a passionate theatrical performance; they are young, rich, alive and lovely and they intend to inherit the...

Brilliant ... a panorama of a remarkable talent ... McCullers's finest stories — The New York Times A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella The Ballad of the Sad Café. A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers...