Classic General Fiction

By the author of Black Narcissus and The River 'One of our best and most captivating novelists' Philip Hensher 'Her craftsmanship is always sure; her understanding of character is compassionate and profound; her prose is pure, delicate, and gently witty' New York Times In a crumbling Calcutta mansion, with faded frescos and a jasmine-covered garden, the Lemarchant family live, clinging...

An acerbic tale of marital warfare and emotional estrangement, in a brilliant new translation. In the oppressive silence of the sitting room, the woman finally smoothed out the paper and, without putting on her glasses, read the two words her husband had written—The cat. Amidst the din of their Parisian neighbourhood, Émile and Marguerite live in total silence. After a...

A translation of the twelfth book of The Mahābhārata, an epic tale of history and kingship, reinforced with legends, romances, and metaphysical, theological, and ethical teachings written in Sanskrit 1700 or more years ago. A remarkable composition of 100,000 couplets, The Mahābhārata is the second-longest poem in world literature. In this volume, James L. Fitzgerald completes his translation of the...

A darkly comic and wildly transgressive fever dream of a book, following one lost rat on a fantastical odyssey through the strange and deranged underbelly of Paris; this is Ratatouille on acid. Welcome to the gutters of 1970s Paris - and the transgressive, darkly comic world of City of Rats. When pet rat Gouri finds himself locked out of his...

"I don't understand it; I don't in the least understand why men can't live without wars. How is it that we women don't want anything of the kind, don't need it?" Tolstoy's epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. The fortunes of the Rostovs...

"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 course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom...

I am making up To the Lighthouse - the sea is to be heard all through it Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolf produced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. It concerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye before and after the...

The Swann Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. The work is a portal to Proust's novel and an introduction to its unforgettable first-person narrator-protagonist. Immersed in themes of time, memory, identity, art, sensation, love, and jealousy, the narrator embarks on the story...

One of the central novels in the American canon with a new foreword by Tom Perrotta and an introduction by Hawthorne scholar Robert Milder. The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta. At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New...

"To be loved to madness - such was her great desire." Eustacia Vye criss-crosses the wild Egdon Heath, eager to experience life to the full in her quest for "music, poetry, passion, war". She marries Clym Yeobright, native of the heath, but his idealism frustrates her romantic ambitions. Her discontent draws others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness....

Thérèse Raquin is a clinically observed, sinister tale of adultery and murder among the lower orders in nineteenth-century Paris. Zola's dispassionate dissection of the motivations of his characters, mere human beasts who kill in order to satisfy their lust, is much more than an atmospheric Second Empire period-piece. Many readers were scandalised by an approach to character-drawing which seemed to...

In this vigorous and fast-moving novel of post-Napoleonic France, Julien Sorel's plans to reach the higher echelons of society through the priesthood are deflected by his realisation that the attainment of happiness is of greater consequence than the pursuit of ambition. Subtitled A Chronicle of 1830, Stendhal's depiction of a nation of smug hypocrites scandalised contemporary readers, who recognised themselves...

I am not an angel nor a genie nor a ghost...I am Erik! A mysterious Phantom haunts the depths of the Paris Opera House where he has fallen passionately in love with the beautiful singer Christine Daaé. Under his guidance, her singing rises to new heights and she is triumphantly acclaimed. But Christine is also loved by Raoul de Chagny,...

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 is the setting for Kafka's story about a man seeking both acceptance in the village...

'All his powers were in decline; the only thing growing stronger in him was the conviction that all this could not last much longer, that his demise was imminent.' The Buddenbrooks (1900) was Thomas Mann's first major success. It draws on his own family history and on his vivid memories of growing up in the commercial town of Lübeck in...

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023 "Haynes is master of her trade . . . She succeeds in breathing warm life into some of our oldest stories." -- Telegraph (UK) The national bestselling author of A Thousand Ships and Pandora's Jar returns with a fresh and stunningly perceptive Greek mythology retelling centred on the story of Medusa, the...

"Pray, pray be composed," cried Elinor, "and do not betray what you feel to everybody 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 love appears remote. In a world ruled by money and self-interest, the Dashwood sisters have neither fortune...

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. The story spans encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and explores a struggle...

The new Oxford World's Classics edition of Oliver Twist is based on the authoritative Clarendon edition, which uses Dickens's revised text of 1846. It includes his preface of 1841 in which he defended himself against hostile criticism, and includes all 24 original illustrations by George Cruikshank. Stephen Gill's groundbreaking introduction gives a fascinating new account of the novel. He also...

The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's prime movers, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, form an unholy alliance and turn seduction into a game - a game which they...

It was at the time when I was wandering around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one leaves before it has set its mark on them... Hunger is the first-person story of a young man desperately trying to establish himself in the city as a writer, living in shabby lodgings where he can seldom afford to pay the rent,...

'There's an east wind coming... such a wind as never blew on England yet.' Arthur Conan Doyle's His Last Bow features a selection of Sherlock Holmes stories written at a time of growing tensions in Europe. First published as a collection in 1917, against the backdrop of the First World War, the volume covers tales that deviate from the pattern...

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902, it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal!'. The central figure, Etienne Lantier, is an outsider who enters the...

A deluxe edition of Mary Shelley's haunting adventure about ambition and modernity run amok. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. Now a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova and cover art by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and...

"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. He must compete with the dashing young soldier Sergeant Troy and respectable, middle-aged...

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 morality. Like Napoleon, he will assert his will, and his crime will be...

'His rise testifies to the decline of a whole society.' Jean-Paul Sartre Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885), is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man, Georges Duroy, christened 'Bel-Ami' by his female admirers, making it to the top in fin-de-siècle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the...

Young Jim Hawkins has no reason to suspect that Billy Bones, the pensioner who has taken up residence in his father’s inn, is anything other than an ageing former mariner. But when violent altercations with visitors to the inn leave Billy on death’s doorstep, Jim discovers that they all are members of the crew of the notorious pirate Captain Flint,...

Sail the high seas and search for treasure in this paperback edition of the classic novel Treasure Island, but beware of pirates! Jim Hawkins sets sail with a treasure map in hand, but he eventually discovers that his crewmates are pirates-in-hiding, hungry for gold. Will Jim be able to safely find the treasure, or will the infamous Long John Silver...

Amory Blaine, a young Midwesterner, is convinced that he has an exceptionally promising future. The reader follows Amory as he falls in love with Isabelle Borge, a wealthy young debutante; a cruel and narcissistic flapper named Rosalind Connage; and Eleanor, a reckless eighteen-year-old atheist. An autobiographical novel and a portrait of the dawning Jazz Age, This Side of Paradise launched...

New friendships and new beginnings abound in The Secret Garden, now available as an unabridged paperback edition for today’s young readers. When Mary Lennox begins living with her uncle in the English countryside, she feels bored and lonely. Before long, however, she discovers many mysteries hiding within the walls of the estate. What will it take for Mary to unearth...

Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, this classic text is an enquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it. During the conversation, other questions are raised: what is goodness? What is reality? And what is knowledge? The Republic also addresses the purpose of education and the role...

This study of natural goodness is Dostoevsky's most touching novel. Prince Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once great family and regarded by many as an idiot, returns to Russia from a sanatorium in Switzerland in order to collect an inheritance. Before he has even arrived home, he becomes involved with Rogozhin, a rich merchant's son whose obsession with...

The beloved novel of manners featuring the romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, with a beautiful new design that's perfect for Jane Austen fans. Features eye-catching designs with foil covers with embossing, gilded pages, and a ribbon! Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy: two perfectly suited lovers who, at first, find each other insufferable. Despite Elizabeth's negative feelings about Darcy,...

Narrated by the sailor Ishmael, Moby-Dick is the tale of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, as he seeks vengeance against Moby-Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. More than an epic sea-story, the detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and the process of extracting...

You said I killed you - haunt me, then! Wuthering Heights is one of the most famous love stories in the English language. It is also one of the most potent revenge narratives. The intense and unbreakable bond between the fiery Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff has startled and fascinated readers since its first publication in 1847. Of uncertain...

A thrilling, profoundly moving, and utterly unique retelling of the legend of Achilles and the Trojan War from the bestselling author of Circe. This deluxe edition features: Elegant sprayed and stenciled edges Sparkling gold foil Endpapers featuring a map of Homer's Greece A guide to Greek gods, mortals, and heroes Essays by Madeline Miller and discussion questions A tale of...

One ought to choose something very deliberately, and be faithful to that. Isabel Archer is a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is...

He was deaf to the murmurs of conscience, and resolved to satisfy his desires at any price. The Monk (1796) is a sensational story of temptation and depravity, a masterpiece of Gothic fiction and the first horror novel in English literature. The respected monk Ambrosio, the Abbot of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, is overwhelmed with desire for a young...

"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) proclaims that it is "A Trivial Play for Serious People." In fact, collected here alongside Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), Salome (1891, 1894), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1895), Earnest shows that the questions...

Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions! The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the...

'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 love appears remote. In a world ruled by money and self-interest, the Dashwood sisters have neither...

Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of Austen's six remarkable novels. Full of crackling dialogue, it achieves the finest balance of comedy and reflection, liveliness and solemnity. While revealing the restrictive life of genteel women at the turn of the nineteenth century, it provides as the central consciousness the clever, witty, and flirtatious Elizabeth Bennet, arguably Austen's most alluring...

"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 young men in their neighbourhood, the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters are...

'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 seven years earlier she complied with duty: persuaded to view the match as imprudent and...

A powerful portrait of grief triumphantly overcome, Persuasion is Austen's most passionate work: more than any previous novel, it concentrates on the intense inner life of the heroine. It opens with Anne Elliot lamenting lost love in a painful reversal of the courtship novel; it then transforms into a rapturous romantic comedy. Against a dysfunctional gentry family corroded by snobbishness,...

This is the tragic story of a father whose obsessive love for his two daughters leads to his financial and personal ruin. It is set against the background of a whole society driven by social ambition and lust for money. The detailed descriptions of both affluence and squalor in the Paris of 1819 are an integral part of the drama...

The limited deluxe edition will include gorgeous designed edges, foil, spot gloss, and an inside cover design. From New York Times bestselling author Keri Lake comes a hardcover repackage of her TikTok sensation Nocticadia, a dark, atmospheric tale of deadly secrets and forbidden love. Mortui vivos docent. The dead teach the living. After watching my mother succumb to a mysterious...

"It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy.... Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing,...

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. The greatest 'state of the nation' novel in English, Middlemarch addresses ordinary life at a moment of great social change, in the years leading to the Reform Act of 1832. Through her portrait of a Midlands town, George Eliot addresses gender relations and class, self-knowledge and self-delusion, community...

"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 her treatment from those close to her. At the age of eighteen, sick of her narrow existence, she seeks work as...

By the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window-shutters, I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me. His jaws opened... Frankenstein is the most celebrated horror story ever written....

Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured nihilist who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook Russian society. Indeed, the image of humanity liberated by science from age-old conformities and prejudices is one...

Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s imperial Russia, Pushkin's novel in verse follows the emotions and destiny of three men - Onegin the bored fop, Lensky the minor elegiast, and a stylized Pushkin himself - and the fates and affections of three women - Tatyana...

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, only to discover that she understands the feelings of others as little as she...

"He thought it expedient and necessary that he should commence knight-errant, and wander through the world, with his horse and arms, in quest of adventures." Don Quixote de la Mancha, first published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is one of the world's greatest comic novels. Inspired by tales of chivalry, Don Quixote of La Mancha embarks on a...

Devils, also known in English as The Possessed and The Demons, was first published in 1871-72. The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, it is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray which follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. Dostoevsky compares infectious radicalism to...

One death, in exchange for thousands of lives - it's simple arithmetic! This is a new translation of Dostoevsky's epic masterpiece, Crime and Punishment (1866) by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, with editorial material by the UK's leading Dostoevsky expert, Dr Sarah J. Young. The impoverished student Raskolnikov decides to free himself from debt by killing an old moneylender, an act he...

"Love... it means too much to me, far more than you can understand." At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties – to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the...

Love... it means too much to me, far more than you can understand. At its simplest, Anna Karenina is a love story. It is a portrait of a beautiful and intelligent woman whose passionate love for a handsome officer sweeps aside all other ties— to her marriage and to the network of relationships and moral values that bind the society...

In 1872, the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This event provided Tolstoy with the inspiration he needed to compose what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing Anna Karenina, he moved away from the vast historical sweep of War and Peace to portray, with extraordinary...

'Tis the season for festive cosy colouring, so grab your pens and pencils and join Dr. Seuss's beloved Grinch in this brilliant Christmas colouring book, perfect for fans of all ages! Featuring intricate images and festive scenes, embrace the Christmas season in this colouring book inspired by Dr. Seuss’s classic story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Containing short quotations, glorious...

The writings of Frances Trollope have been subject to increasing academic interest in recent years and are now widely studied. This four-volume set includes scholarly editions of her four novels, in which her comical, yet subversive, treatment of Victorian marriage offers an interesting contrast to some of the more earnest but conventional fiction of the time. At the time of...

Reader, have you ever wondered who struck fear into the heart of H. P. Lovecraft? It was Robert Chambers. Now, the terror visits you. A wicked link in a terrifying lineage, the tales contained in The King in Yellow. Welcome, dear reader, to Carcosa. Edited with notes and an introduction by John Edgar Browning.

A brilliant evocation of a narrow, close-knit community—that of the streets of London's East End in the 1890s. Tales of Mean Streets by Arthur Morrison chronicles their adventures with sympathy, humour, and a sense of both the tragedies and comedies to be found in the "mean streets".

By the #1 New York Times bestselling author and unparalleled master of historical fiction, James Clavell's Shōgun is soon to be a major FX/Hulu TV series! Shōgun, the classic epic novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world, is now available for the first time in serial format. Part Two contains...

By the #1 New York Times bestselling author and unparalleled master of historical fiction, James Clavell's Shogun is soon to be a major FX/Hulu TV series! Shogun, the classic epic novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world, is now available for the first time in serial format. Part One contains...

The classic epic novel of feudal Japan that captured the heart of a culture and the imagination of the world, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author and unparalleled master of historical fiction, James Clavell. After Englishman John Blackthorne is lost at sea, he awakens in a place few Europeans know of and even fewer have seen—Nippon. Thrust into...

In 1880, Dostoevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov, the literary effort for which he had been preparing all his life. Compelling, profound, and complex, it is the story of a patricide and of the four sons who each had a motive for murder: Dmitry, the sensualist; Ivan, the intellectual; Alyosha, the mystic; and twisted, cunning Smerdyakov, the bastard child. Frequently lurid,...

A magnificent new translation of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, which when first published in 1991 was described by the Times as 'a miracle' and by The Independent as a nearly 'ideal translation'. The Brothers Karamazov—Dostoevsky's most widely read novel—is at once a murder mystery, a mordant comedy of family intrigue, a pioneering work of psychological realism, and an unblinking look into the...

Only edition in print The scene opens in a smouldering orchard in Flanders, where the French soldier Ferdinand, shell-shocked, badly wounded and surrounded on all sides by mud, corpses and destruction, tries to find his way to safety and make sense of what has happened to him since he lost consciousness. His hallucinatory wanderings eventually take him to the military...

Nathanael remains haunted by his childhood fear that the lawyer Coppelius, a strange night-time visitor who used to come to his house to conduct alchemical experiments with his father—the latter dying as a consequence of one of these sessions—was none other than the Sandman, a mythical figure who was said to steal the eyes of children who refused to go...

This elegant gift edition brings together Washington Irving's five Christmas stories in a single volume, presented with a delightful gold-embossed cover design, gilded page edges and original illustrations. Originally published in 1819-20 and illustrated by Randolph Caldecott, the five stories in Old Christmas describe English traditions of Christmas and recount the festivities that Irving experienced while visiting Aston Hall (here...

This luxurious, large-format gift edition presents Charles Dickens' best-loved Christmas stories, featuring gold cover embossing and stunning, illustrated page edges. A time of charity and choir, cosy gatherings around the fire, time spent with friends and family, and snow on the ground. All of these festive traditions along with many others were cemented in the public conscience by Charles Dickens'...

Inherited through the line of the berserker Angantr and his war-loving daughter Hervor, the ever-lethal, shining sword Tyrfing and its changes of hands frame the uncanny story of The Saga of Hervor and Heirek. A second heroic saga, Hrlf Kraki and His Champions, recounts the daring deeds of the members and entourage of the ancient Danish house of Skjoldung. Passed...

A literary sensation from its first publication, The Master and Margarita is considered a masterpiece of twentieth-century Russian literature. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine...

In an adorable box set, three of the greatest classics ever written are retold with a cast of guinea pigs in the starring roles. These little books contain all the wit and wonder of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, with added fluffiness! In Romeo & Juliet, two young dreamers must find true love against the odds, while Pride...

In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island,...

This new edition of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus offers the complete 1604 A-text with embedded selections from the 1616 B-text. Its innovative format will make it easier for readers to note differences between these texts and to consider what is gained and lost in viewing them both separately and together. A full introduction to the play, notes, and a rich...

HarperCollins is proud to present our range of timeless literary classics. ‘I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence.’ When lonely nineteen-year-old Laura welcomes an enigmatic stranger into her home in the heart of the Stryian forest, she has no idea that the beautiful Carmilla is not what she seems. Laura’s childhood nightmares have resurfaced,...