Series: Collins Modern Classics

In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters – beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighbourhood boys – commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love,...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their daughter fall ill. At first,...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. Open your eyes, and see what you can with them before they close forever. For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full...

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a profound exploration of love, migration, and identity in today's globalised world. Spanning three continents, it is a story that intertwines the lives of two young Nigerians, Ifemelu and Obinze, who come of age in a tumultuous political era, impacting their future and the decisions they make. As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school,...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. In 1950s London, novelist Anna Wulf struggles with writer’s block. Divorced with a young child, and fearful of going mad, Anna records her experiences in four...

Essential Modern Classics are relaunched in gorgeous new covers, bringing these timeless stories to a new generation. For Omri, it is a dream come true when the plastic American Indian he locks into the old cupboard comes to life. Little Bull is everything an Indian brave should be – proud, fearless, and defiant. But being in charge of a real,...

If in doubt, wash! What is it like to be a cat? Find out in this classic animal story from the renowned writer Paul Gallico. Peter Brown longs for a pet cat. One day, he is following a stray cat through the streets when he is knocked down and seriously hurt. On waking, he is astonished to find that he...

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREOscar Nominated For Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay Set amid the civil rights movement, the never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program. Before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as ‘Human Computers’, calculating the flight paths that would enable these...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News, a collection of short stories inspired by the harsh and unforgiving landscape of Wyoming. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. Inspired by the brutal and magnificent...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in...

The extraordinary story of the solving of a puzzle that has confounded mathematicians since the 17th century. The solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem is the most important mathematical development of the 20th century. In 1963, a schoolboy browsing in his local library stumbled across the world’s greatest mathematical problem: Fermat’s Last Theorem, a puzzle that every child can understand but...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. When No Logo was first published, it became an instant bestseller and international phenomenon. Its riveting exposé of the branded and corporate world in which we...

Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and Pen Faulkner Prize, made into an Oscar-winning film, The Hours is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and watched by her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make...

The worst storm in history seen from the wheelhouse of a doomed fishing trawler; a mesmerisingly vivid account of a natural hell from a perspective that offers no escape. The perfect storm is a once-in-a-hundred-years combination: a high pressure system from the Great Lakes, running into storm winds over an Atlantic island — Sable Island — and colliding with a...

Maria is always getting lost in the secret world of her imagination… A ghostly mystery and winner of the Whitbread Award, A Stitch in Time is republished in the Collins Modern Classics range. Maria likes to be alone with her thoughts. She talks to animals and objects, and generally prefers them to people. But whilst on holiday she begins to...

Essential Modern Classics are re-launched with gorgeous new covers bringing these timeless stories to a new generation. Come, sword, said the Wart. He took hold of the handles with both hands, and strained against the stone… but nothing moved… When the wizard Merlyn comes to tutor Sir Ector’s sons, Kay and the Wart, studying suddenly becomes much more exciting. After...

What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself – a...

A ruthless and unflinching examination of American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking. One thing in my defence, not that it matters: I know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth’s life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change. Based on J. G. Ballard’s own childhood, this is the extraordinary account...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience—classics which will endure for generations to come. Henry Skrimshander, newly arrived at college, shy and out of his depth, has a talent for baseball that borders on genius. But sometimes it seems that his only...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. ‘You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug – especially when it’s waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in...

The masterful, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary epic about the painful and complex realities of slave life on a Southern plantation. An utterly original exploration of race, trust, and the cruel truths of human nature, this is a landmark in modern American literature. Henry Townsend, previously enslaved and now a farmer and bootmaker, is one of the few Black masters in the...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. In the spring of 1666, a bolt of infected cloth carries the plague from London to the quiet village of Eyam. The villagers elect to isolate...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it...

The debut novel from the award-winning screenwriter of Bhaji on the Beach. The story of nine-year-old Meena, growing up in the only Punjabi family in the Black Country mining village of Tollington. Blonde, sassy and rebellious, Anita Rutter is everything nine-year-old Meena wants to be. Growing up in the only Punjabi family in the village, Meena is desperate to break...

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction Enter a whole new world in this thrilling debut novel set entirely within a beehive. Born into the lowest class of her society, Flora 717 is a sanitation bee, only fit to clean her orchard hive. Living to accept, obey, and serve, she is...

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience – classics which will endure for generations to come. Few books have had such an impact as Wild Swans: a popular bestseller which has sold more than 13 million copies and a critically acclaimed history...

First published by HarperCollinsUS in 1964, this classic children’s novel has sold over 4 million copies and was awarded the New York Times Outstanding Book Award. Sixth-grader Harriet attends school on New York's Upper East Side along with her two best pals, Sport and Janie. After school every day, she takes her notebook and proceeds through her spy route. Harriet...

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a heart-wrenching story of escape, love, and comic-book heroes set in Prague, New York, and the Arctic. One night in 1939, Josef Kavalier shuffles into his cousin Sam Clay’s cramped New York bedroom, his nerve-racking escape from Prague finally achieved. Little does he realise...