Series: Alma Classics Evergreens

Under the feckless husbandry of Mr Jones, Manor Farm has fallen into disrepair. Pushed into hardship, the animals decide to stage a revolt, and led by two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, they overthrow Mr Jones and drive him away from the farm. In the subsequent struggle for power, it is Napoleon that emerges as a victor: he renames the...

Ravaged by years of war and civil conflict, Britain has changed its name to Airstrip One and become part of Oceania – one of the three totalitarian blocks dominating the world – ruled by a mysterious leader called Big Brother who keeps the population in thrall through strict surveillance and brutal police repression. In a society where the individual is...

For two and a half thousand years, The Art of War has been the core text of military strategy and planning, providing leaders with enduring insights into tactics, psychology, discipline, and the nature of power. Favoured by countless great generals and military tacticians throughout history, the book has found a new lease of life over the last century. It has...

Despite hailing from a comfortable family background, budding poet Gordon Comstock decides to declare war on money and all the middle-class trappings that wealth can buy. Working in a small bookshop and living in a bedsit in London, he dreams of completing an ambitious poem in rhyme royal and devoting his entire life to literature. But when poverty begins to...

Having lived in the city of Orphalese for twelve years, the revered Prophet is about to board a ship taking him back to the isle of his birth. Before he departs, a group of people gather round and ask him to share his wisdom. Written as a collection of poetic essays, and detailing such diverse and sprawling topics as love,...

The pampered daughter of a wealthy Georgian plantation owner of Irish descent, sixteen-year-old Scarlett O’Hara soon realises that young men can’t resist her charms, despite her forthright manners and her refusal to embrace her mother’s ladylike ways. Her romantic intrigues lead her to an early marriage, but when the war between the Union and the Southern States breaks out and...

A tale of unbridled greed and an insatiable thirst for power set in eleventh-century Scotland, Macbeth has long been recognised as Shakespeare’s fastest-moving tragedy. It combines relentless narrative momentum with a profound examination of how psychological coercion mixed with personal ambition can lead to murder – and how individual impulses can shape both a man’s own destiny and the course...

Only edition in print First published in 1963 and representing Burroughs’s literary breakthrough in the UK, Dead Fingers Talk is, in the words of Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, “a prophetic work of haunting power”, and is perhaps the most commercial and accessible of his works. Combining new material with selections from Naked Lunch and his cut-up novels The Soft Machine...

As the ageing Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author who has recently been ennobled in recognition of his literary achievements, arrives in Venice for a holiday and checks into his Lido hotel, he is struck by the arresting good looks of Tadzio, an aristocratic Polish youth of around fourteen who is sojourning there with his family. Gradually, what starts as...

Having just moved into a fine, six-roomed residence, “the Laurels”, the Pooters are ready to begin a new life. Charles, the paterfamilias, a lowly clerk in a City of London firm, begins to keep a diary. Over the next fifteen months, this diary will provide a record of the small trials and tribulations, as well as the preoccupations, aspirations and...

Poverty-stricken and cut off from society, former law student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov leads a desolate life in a dreary little room in St Petersburg. Having abandoned all hopes of sustaining himself through work, he now obsesses over the idea of changing his fortunes through an act of extreme violence: the killing of an elderly pawnbroker. His mind baulks at the...

The shop owner Adolf Verloc, a member of an anarchist group and secret agent for a foreign government, is summoned to meet Mr Vladimir, the country’s ambassador. He is told of a plot that involves him planting a bomb at a famous London landmark. Verloc has misgivings, but Mr Vladimir knows how to make people do what he wants. When...