Classic fiction Books 733 results

James Baldwin

Penguin

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World' Baldwin's ground-breaking second novel, which established him as one of the great American writers of his time David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three mon...

H. Rider Haggard

Penguin

A classic Victorian adventure into the realm of the unknown"She" is Ayesha, the mysterious white queen of a Central African Tribe and the goal of three English gentlemen, who must face shipwreck, fever, and cannibals in their quest to find her hidden realm. First published in 1887, She has enthralled the imaginations of many-from Freud, who prescribed the book to one of his pat...

John Steinbeck

Penguin

Steinbeck's last great novel focuses on the theme of success and what motivates men towards it. Reflecting back on his New England family's past fortune, and his father's loss of the family wealth, the hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, characterises successin every era and in all its forms as robbery, murder, even a kind of combat, operating under 'the laws of controlled savagery.' ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Penguin

Amory Blaine, intent on rebelling against his staid, Midwestern upbringing, longs to acquire the patina of Eastern sophistication. In his quest for sexual and intellectual enlightenment, he progresses through a series of relationships, until he is cast out into the real world. ...

Leo Tolstoy

Everyman

The world-famous Chopra Center for Well Being in La Jolla, California, is a healing place where people come from all over the world to learn how to prevent and heal stress and disease through nutrition, meditation, and spirituality. Chopra's co-authors for this cookbook are David Simon, MD, Medical Director of the Chopra Center for Well Being; and Leanne Backer, Executive Chef ...

James Joyce

Penguin

'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century' Anthony Burgess, ObserverFollowing the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed bl...

George Orwell

Penguin

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless élite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought...

James Joyce

Penguin

Playful and experimental, James Joyce's autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a vivid portrayal of emotional and intellectual development. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Seamus Deane.The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipatio...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky / Keith Carabine

Wordsworth Classics

Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury. Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder. From that...

William Shakespeare

Wordsworth Classics

Edited, introduced and annotated by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex. The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal. Romeo and Juliet is the world's most famous drama ...

George Orwell / John Shuttleworth

Longman

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." George Orwell's modern fable on the way power corrupts is as apt as ever in the twenty-first century. Educational edition of this much-loved classic from Longman. ...

John Steinbeck

Penguin

John Steinbeck's powerful evocation of the suffering and hardship caused by the Great Depression, and a panoramic vision of the struggle for the American Dream, The Grapes of Wrath includes a critical introduction by Robert DeMott in Penguin Modern Classics. 'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.' Shocking and controversial when it ...

Marguerite Yourcenar

Penguin

Framed as a letter from the Roman Emperor Hadrian to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian is translated from the French by Grace Frick with an introduction by Paul Bailey in Penguin Modern Classics. In her magnificent novel, Marguerite Yourcenor recreates the life and death of one of the great rulers of the ancient world. The Emperor Hadrian...

Jean Rhys

Penguin

Her grand attempt to tell what she felt was the story of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is edited with an introduction and notes by Angela Smith in Penguin Classics. Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent bea...

Robert Louis Stevenson

Penguin

The quintessential adventure story that first established pirates in the popular imagination When a mysterious sailor dies in sinister circumstances at the Admiral Benbow inn, young Jim Hawkins stumbles across a treasure map among the dead man's possessions. But Jim soon becomes only too aware that he is not the only one who knows of the map's existence, and his bravery and cun...

Matthew Lewis / Christopher Maclachlan

Penguin

‘Few could sustain the glance of his eye, at once fiery and penetrating'Savaged by critics for its supposed profanity and obscenity, and bought in large numbers by readers eager to see whether it lived up to its lurid reputation, The Monk became a succès de scandale when it was published in 1796 - not least because its author was a member of parliament and only twenty years old...

Maria Edgeworth

Penguin

Maria Edgeworth's sparkling satire about the Anglo-Irish family of an absentee landlord is also a landmark novel of morality and social realism.The Absentee centres around Lord and Lady Clonbrony, a couple more concerned with London society than their duties and responsibilities to those who live and work on their Irish estates. Recognizing this negligence, their son Lord Colam...

David Herbert Lawrence

Penguin

An intriguing account of Sicilian life that reveals as much about the writer as the place, people, and customs it describes Written after the First World War when he was living in Sicily, Sea and Sardinia records Lawrence's journey to Sardinia and back in January 1921. It reveals his delighted response to a new landscape and people and his uncanny ability to transmute the spiri...

Agatha Christie

Harper

At Last All The Poirot Short Stories In A Single Volume My Name Is Hercule Poirot And I Am Probably The Greatest Detective In The World. The Dapper, Moustache-Twirling Little Belgian With The Egg-Shaped Head, Curious Mannerisms And Inordinate Respect For His Own Little Grey Cells Has Solved Some Of The Most Puzzling Crimes Of The Century. Appearing In Agatha Christie S Very Fir...

James Clavell

Hodder

In Changi, the most notorious prisoner of war camp in Asia, only one man in fifteen had the strength, the luck and the cleverness to survive. Food was scarce and the conditions intolerable but there were ways to ease the suffering if you knew the right man. King was that man, but he had his price and in a camp notorious for cruelty, injustice and corruption, he was hated above ...

Thomas Hardy

Penguin

The arrival of two newcomers in the quiet village of Mellstock arouses a bitter feud and leaves a convoluted love affair in its wake. While the Reverend Maybold creates a furore among the village?s musicians with his decision to abolish the church?s traditional ?string choir? and replace it with a modern mechanical organ, the new schoolteacher, Fancy Day, causes an upheaval of ...

Aesop

Penguin

'Many people are not in the least disturbed at the harm that befalls them, provided they can see their enemies' downfall first' In a series of pithy, amusing vignettes, Aesop created a vivid cast of characters to demonstrate different aspects of human nature. Here we see a wily fox outwitted by a quick-thinking cicada, a tortoise triumphing over a self-confident hare and a fabl...

Homer

Penguin

The great epic of Western literature, translated by the acclaimed classicist Robert FaglesSoon to be a major motion picture directed by Christopher NolanA Penguin ClassicRobert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, presents us with Homer's best-loved and most accessible...

Italo Calvino

Vintage

'The Most Beautiful Of His Books Throws Up Ideas, Allusions, And Breathtaking Imaginative Insights On Almost Every Page. Each Time He Returns From His Travels, Marco Polo Is Invited By Kublai Khan To Describe The Cities He Has Visited-Although He Makes Marco Polo Summon Up Many Cities For The Khan'S Imagination To Feed On, Calvino Is Describing Only One City In This Book. Venic...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Wordsworth

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction and Notes by Agnes Cardinal, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in the frantic amatory and financial intrigues which centre around a cast of brilliantly realised characters and which ultimately l...

Milan Kundera

Faber & Faber

In this novel, Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy, towards his central question: 'how does a person, any person, live today?'. Towards his answer he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation and of their antidotes. ...

Virginia Woolf

Wordsworth

With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University, Bakersfield. Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the...

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Wordsworth

Translated by Irene Testot-Ferry. The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet - the Little Prince of the title - and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition. First ...

George Eliot

Wordsworth

Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury. Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr T...

Ernest Hemingway

Penguin

Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps f...