Classic fiction Books 733 results

Gustave Flaubert

Penguin

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

Penguin

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

Penguin

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

Penguin

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

Vintage

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

Ladybird

"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

Penguin

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

Oxford Worlds Classics

'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

Penguin

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...

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Wordsworth Classics

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

Harper

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...

Henry Rider Haggard

Harper

'Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere.' An amazing adventure set in Africa, against the backdrop of endless deserts and snowy mountains, Kings Solomon's Mines follows Allan Quartermain, in his quest to find h...

Emily Bronte

Penguin

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. In a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere ... As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the...

Jane Austen

Penguin

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. Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignor...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Oxford Worlds Classics

In The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes we read the last twelve stories Conan Doyle was to write about Holmes and Watson. They reflect the disillusioned world of the 1920s in which they were written, and he can be seen to take advantage of new, more open conventions in fiction. Suicide as a murder weapon and homosexual incest are some of the psychological tragedies whose consequenc...

Leo Tolstoy

Oxford Worlds Classics

Resurrection (1899) is the last of Tolstoy's major novels. It tells the story of a nobleman's attempt to redeem the suffering his youthful philandering inflicted on a peasant girl who ends up a prisoner in Siberia. Tolstoy's vision of redemption achieved through loving forgiveness, and his condemnation of violence, dominate the novel. An intimate, psychological tale of guilt, a...

Hans Christian Andersen

Oxford Worlds Classics

Includes: The Tinder-Box; The Princess and the Pea; Thumbelina; The Little Mermaid; The Emperor's New Clothes; The Steadfast Soldier; The Ugly Duckling; The Snow Queen; The Little Match-Girl ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to ...

Alexandre Dumas, (Père)

Oxford Worlds Classics

The Three Musketeers (1844) is one of the most famous historical novels ever written. It is also one of the world's greatest historical adventure stories, and its heroes have become symbols for the spirit of youth, daring, and comradeship. The action takes place in the 1620s at the court of Louis XIII, where the musketeers, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, with their companion, the ...

Louisa May Alcott

Wordsworth Classics

The two American classics here together in one volume, Little Men and Jo's Boys, are worthy sequels to Little Women, one of the best-loved children's stories of all time, and its continuation, Good Wives. In Little Men, Louisa May Alcott takes up the story of the everyday dramas and exploits of the naughty but easy-going boys at Plumfield, now a boarding-school run by Professor...

Alexandre Dumas

Wordsworth Classics

With an Introduction by A. M. de Medeiros, University of Kent at Canterbury. A year after the publication of The Three Musketeers, /em>, Alexandre Dumas produced a sequel worthy in every respect of the original. In Twenty Years After the much beloved D'Artaganan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis reunite to fight the forces of evil. In the original novel they defeated Milady, a formida...

Edith Wharton

Oxford Worlds Classics

Edith Wharton's satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century appeared in 1913; it both appalled and fascinated its first reviewers, and established her as a major novelist. The Saturday Review wrote that she had 'assembled as many detestable people as it is possible to pack between the covers of a six-hundred page novel', but concluded that t...

Jules Verne

Oxford Worlds Classics

Having assured the members of London's exclusive Reform Club that he will circumnavigate the world in 80 days, Fogg - stiff, repressed, English - starts by joining forces with an irrepressible Frenchman, Passepartout, and then with a ravishing Indian beauty, Aouda. Together they slice through jungles, over snowbound passes, even across an entire isthmus - only to get back five ...

Sydney Owenson, (Lady Morgan)

Oxford Worlds Classics

`I long to study the purely national, natural character of an Irishwoman' When Horatio, the son of an English lord, is banished to his father's Irish estate as punishment for gambling debts and dissipated living, he adopts the persona of knight errant and goes off in search of adventure. On the wild west coast of Connaught he finds remnants of a romantic Gaelic past a dilapidat...

Thomas Hardy

Oxford Worlds Classics

'She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air: "Tess- say it is not true! No, it is not true!"' Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich was...

George Orwell

Penguin

The perfect edition for any Orwell enthusiasts' collection, discover Orwell's classic dystopian masterpiece beautifully reimagined by renowned street artist Shepard Fairey 'All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.' Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership o...

George Orwell

Penguin

The perfect edition for any Orwell enthusiasts' collection, discover the classic dystopian masterpiece beautifully reimagined by renowned street artist Shepard Fairey Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, ...

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Oxford Worlds Classics

In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The inticate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to pa...

James Joyce

Oxford Worlds Classics

'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ' So begins one of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative. Its originality shocked contemporary readers on its publication in 1916 who found...

Samuel Richardson

Oxford Worlds Classics

'Pamela under the Notion of being a Virtuous Modest Girl will be introduced into all Familes,and when she gets there, what Scenes does she represent? Why a fine young Gentleman endeavouring to debauch a beautiful young Girl of Sixteen.' (Pamela Censured, 1741) One of the most spectacular successes of the burgeoning literary marketplace of eighteeent-century London, Pamela also ...

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Oxford Worlds Classics

Notes from the Underground (1864) is one of the most profound works of nineteenth-century literature. A probing, speculative book, often regarded as a forerunner of the Existentialist movement, it examines the important political and philosophical questions that were current in Russia and Europe at the time. The Gambler (1866), set in the fictional town of Roulettenberg, explor...