Classic fiction Books 661 results

Agatha Christie

The old children's game now seemed rather tasteless. The real Mrs McGinty was killed by a crushing blow to the back of the head and her pitifully small savings were stolen.Suspicion falls immediately on her lodger, hard up and out of a job. Hercule Poirot has other ideas - unaware that his own life is now in great danger... ...

Agatha Christie

A charity murder game at a Devon house turns into the real thing. Sir George and Lady Stubbs, the hosts of a village fete, hit upon the novel idea of staging a mock murder mystery. In good faith, Ariadne Oliver, the well known crime writer, agrees to organise their murder hunt. Despite weeks of meticulous planning, at the last minute Ariadne calls her friend Hercule Poirot for ...

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Penguin English Library Edition The deadly hand of Professor Moriarty once more reaches out to commit a vile and ingenious crime, but a mole in Moriarty's criminal organization alerts Sherlock Holmes of the evil deed by means of a cipher . . . When Holmes and Watson arrive at a Sussex manor house they appear to be too late. The discovery of a body suggests that Moriarty's h...

Leo Tolstoy

The judge Ivan Ilyich Golovin has spent his life in the pursuit of wealth and status, devoting himself obsessively to work and often neglecting his family in the process. When, after a small accident, he fails to make the expected recovery, it gradually becomes clear that he is soon to die. Ivan Ilyich then starts to question the futility and barrenness of his previous existenc...

Albert Camus

'My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.'In The Outsider (1942), his classic existentialist novel, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of vi...

Niccolò Machiavelli

At the end of an industrious political career in conflictriven Italy, the Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli composed his masterpiece The Prince, a classic study of power and politics, and a manual of ruthlessness for any ambitious ruler. Controversial in his own time, The Prince made Machiavelli's name a byword for manipulative scheming, and had an impact on such major fi...

Arthur Conan Doyle

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle"Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"The terrible spectacle of the beast, the fog of the moor, the discovery of a body: this classic horror story pits detective against dog, rationalism against the supernatural, good against evil. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found ...

Charles Dickens

The Penguin English Library Edition of Hard Times by Charles Dickens'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else'Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family with facts...

Oscar Wilde

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde'I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me ... Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day - mock me horribly!'A story of evil, debauchery and scandal, Oscar Wilde's only novel tells of Dorian Gray, a beautiful yet corrupt man. When ...

Charles Dickens

The Penguin English Library Edition of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens'Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!'Described by Dickens as 'the best story I have written', A Tale of Two Cities interweaves thrilling historical drama with heartbreaking personal tragedy. It vividly depicts a revolutionary Paris running red...

Elizabeth Gaskell

The Penguin English Library edition of North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell'How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?'Elizabeth Gaskell's compassionate, richly dramatic novel features one of the most original and fully-rounded female characters in Victorian fiction, Margaret Hale. It shows how, forced to move fr...

Wilkie Collins

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins'Here was our quiet English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond - bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man'When Rachel Verinder's birthday present - the Moonstone, a large Indian diamond - is stolen at her party, suspicion and the diamond'...

Charlotte Bronte

The Penguin English Library Edition of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë'The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself'Passionate, poetic and revolutionary, Jane Eyre is a novel of naked emotional power. Its story of a defiant, fiercely intelligent woman who refuses to accept her appointed place in society - and instead finds love...

Agatha Christie

Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully adapted versions are shorter with the language targeted at upper-intermediate learners (CEF level B2). Each reader...

William Golding

Lord of the Flies is a novel that has captivated schoolchildren ever since it was first published in 1954. A teacher himself, Golding clearly understood what excites and interests children. It is not only a gripping story, with strong, sympathetic characters, but it also raises timeless and profound questions. Part of its lasting appeal, particularly in schools, surely arises ...

Sir Richard Burton

No library's complete without the classics! This new, enhanced leather-bound edition collects the beloved tales of Arabian Nights, translated by Sir Richard Burton.They are ancient stories, but they still enchant our imaginations today: "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," "Sinbad the Sailor," "Aladdin," and more. These and the other Middle Eastern stories collected in Arabian Nig...

Gustave Flaubert

The award-winning, nationally bestselling translation, by Lydia Davis, of one of the world's most celebrated novels"The best English version by far, because its deadpan reminds us that the book is both a great realist novel and a satire of realism." —Merve Emre, The New YorkerEmma Bovary is the original desperate housewife. Beautiful but bored, she spends lavishly on clothes an...

Henry James

Regarded by many as Henry James's finest work, and a lucid tragedy exploring the distance between money and happiness, The Portrait of a Lady contains an introduction by Philip Horne in Penguin Classics. When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy th...

Bram Stoker

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific disc...

G. K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday is a thrilling novel of deception, subterfuge, double-crossing and secret identities, and this Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction by Matthew Beaumont. The Central Anarchist Council is a secret society sworn to destroy the world. The council is governed by seven men, who hide their identities behind the names of the...

H. P. Lovecraft

An introduction to the weird and unsettling world of H.P. Lovecraft, master and pioneer of horror. Between these pages you will find things that lurk, things that scurry in the walls, things that move unseen, things that have learnt to walk that ought to crawl, unfathomable blackness, unconquerable evil, inhuman impulses, abnormal bodies, ancient rites, nameless lands best lef...

Raymond Chandler

"Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is blackmailing him. A broken, weary old man, Sternwood just wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. However, with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out. And that's before he stumbles over the...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

These sumptuous new hardback editions mark the 70th anniversary of Fitzgerald's death.Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alon...

Leo Tolstoy

'If life could write, it would write like Tolstoy.' Isaac Babel 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 and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, are intimately connected with the national history that is played out in parall...

Oscar Wilde

Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succès de scandale and the book w...

Homer

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western ...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction by A. D. P. Briggs. As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosh...

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction by A.D.P. Briggs. In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave a small group of violent revolutionaries, from which he had become alienated. Dostoevsky takes this real-life catastrophe as the subject and culmination of Devils, a title that refers the young rad...

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated by Constance Garnett with an introduction by Anthony Briggs. Dostoevsky's fascination for mental breakdown and violence (20 murders in his four main novels) was based on his own life, and these two unmistakably autobiographical works bear this out. The House of the Dead is fiction, but based on his four years in a Siberian prison. An educated upper-class man is conde...

Jane Austen

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. I wish as well as every body else to be perfectly happy; but like every body else it must be in my own way. When the Dashwood family are forced into more modest circumstances, sisters Marianne and Elinor also find themselves entangled in matters of the heart. Passionate and spirited, young Marianne f...