Classic fiction Books 661 results

Shirley Jackson

Mrs Halloran has inherited the great Halloran house on the death of her son, much to the disgust of her daughter-in-law, the delight of her wicked granddaughter, and the confusion of the rest of the household. But when the original owner - long dead - arrives to announce the world is ending and only the house and its occupants will be saved, they find themselves in a nightmare ...

Leo Tolstoy

With an Introduction by Anthony Briggs Translated by Louise Maude This powerful novel, Tolstoy's third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) all the more stunning for being based on a real-life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, charged with murd...

Michael Ende

"Small and insignificant Bastian Balthazar Bux is nobody's idea of a hero, least of all his own. One day, while immersed in the pages of an old book, he discovers a mysterious world of enchantment - but it's a world that is falling into decay. The great task of making things well again falls on Bastian and so begins a dazzling, magical adventure . . ."--Back cover. ...

George Orwell

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedi...

George Orwell

'An unrivalled picture of the rumours, suspicions and treachery of civil war' Antony BeevorEvery line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it'. Thus wrote Orwell following his experiences as a militiaman in the Spanish Civil War, chronicled in Homage to Catal...

Emilia Pardo Bazan

A rich and unforgettable tragic-comic novel of sexual intrigue and political scheming, The House of Ulloa is one of the greatest works of nineteenth-century Spanish literature. The House of Ulloa follows pure and pious Father Julián Alvarez, who is sent to a remote country estate to put the affairs of the marquis, an irresponsible libertine, in order. When he discovers moral de...

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's literary apprenticeship was served in journalism, a career that he pursued for over four decades. From his early work as a correspondent for the Toronto Star in Europe during the 1920s, through his inimitable articles for Esquire and his first-hand reports of the Spanish Civil War, to the mellow, ironic chronicle of his last African adventures, few correspond...

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman is a story of lurking disquiet and haunting disorientation, inspired by the real-life, unsolved disappearance of a female college student. 'Shirley Jackson's stories are among the most terrifying ever written' Donna Tartt, author of The Goldfinch Natalie Waite, daughter of a mediocre writer and a neurotic housewife, is increasingly unsure of her plac...

Agatha Christie

CRIME & MYSTERY. With impeccable timing Hercule Poirot, the renowned Belgian detective, makes his dramatic entrance on to the English crime stage. Recently, there had been some strange goings on at Styles St Mary. Evelyn, constant companion to old Mrs Inglethorp, had stormed out of the house muttering something about 'a lot of sharks'. And with her, something indefinable had go...

Sir Walter Scott

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'The Penguin English Library Edition of Ivanhoe by Walter Scott'Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives!'Banished from England for seeking to marry against his father's wishes, Ivanhoe joins Richard the Lion Heart on a crusade in the Holy Land. On his return, his passionate desire is to be reunited with the beautiful ...

Robert Louis Stevens

The Penguin English Library Edition of Treasure Island and The Ebb-Tide by Robert Louis Stevenson'"One more step, Mr Hands," said I, "and I'll blow your brains out"'In Treasure Island, a weathered old sailor known as Billy Bones arrives at the inn of young Jim Hawkins's parents - and it is the start of an adventure beyond anything he could have imagined. For when Bones dies mys...

Wilkie Collins

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop ... There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth ... stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road....

Emily Bronte

The Penguin English Library Edition of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë"May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then"Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that too...

Jane Austen

The Penguin English Library Edition of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen'No sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes ...'When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arro...

Jane Austen

The Penguin English Library Edition of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen'We have all been more or less to blame ... every one of us, excepting Fanny'Taken from the poverty of her parents' home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle's absence in A...

George Eliot

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'The Penguin English Library Edition of Middlemarch by George Eliot'She did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings - that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the blameless rigour of irresistible day'G...

E M Forster

The Penguin English Library Edition of A Room with a View by E. M. Forster'"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..."Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly order...

Jane Austen

The Penguin English Library Edition of Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen"The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!"Jane Austen's novel tells the story of Marianne Dashwood, who wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignore...

Anne Bronte

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'The Penguin English Library Edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë'She looked so like herself that I knew not how to bear it'In this sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall sees a mysterious tenant, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a 'wicked woman' as the local g...

James Joyce

The Penguin English Library Edition of Dubliners by James Joyce'Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears ... But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work'From a child gra...

Bram Stoker

The Penguin English Library Edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker'Alone with the dead! I dare not go out, for I can hear the low howl of the wolf through the broken window'A chilling masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula also illuminated dark corners of Victorian sexuality. When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to advise Count Dracula on a London home, he makes a horrifying d...

Charles Dickens

The Penguin English Library Edition of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens"What do you think that is?' she asked me, again pointing with her stick; 'that, where those cobwebs are?""I can't guess what it is, ma'am.""It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!"Great Expectations, Dickens's funny, frightening and tender portrayal of the orphan Pip's journey of self-discovery, is one ...

Edgar Allan Poe

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe'... an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity...'Horror, madness, violence and the dark forces hidden in humanity abound in this collection of Poe's brilliant tales, incl...

Charles Dickens

The Penguin English Library Edition of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens'A parish child - the orphan of a workhouse - the humble, half-starved drudge - to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none'Dark, mysterious and mordantly funny, Oliver Twist features some of the most memorably drawn villains in all of fiction - the treacherous gangmaster ...

Mary Shelley

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'The Penguin English Library Edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley'Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousness'A twisted, upside-down creation myth, Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all. It tells the story of V...

Charlotte Brontë

The Penguin English Library Edition of Villette by Charlotte Brontë'That evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol - blind, bloodless, and of granite core. I felt, too, that the trial God had appointed me was gaining its climax, and must now be turned by my own hands, hot, feeble, trembling as they were' Wit...

Philip K. Dick

"Grappling with many of the themes Philip K. Dick is best known for--identity, altered reality, drug use, and dystopias--Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is both a rollicking chase story and a meditation on reality. Jason Taverner--talk show host and man-about-town--wakes one day to find that no one knows who he is. In a society where lack of identification is a crime, Taverne...

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Penguin English Library Edition of The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne'Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, - stern and wild ones, - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss' Fiercely romantic and hugely influential, The Scarlet Letter is the tale of Hester Prynne, imprisoned, publicly shamed, and forced to wear a scarlet 'A' for commi...

Henry James

The Penguin English Library edition of The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James 'She knew of no wrong that he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel; she simply believed that he hated her' 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 her freedom,...

Roald Dahl

What could go wrong when a wife pawns the mink coat that her lover gave her as a parting gift? What happens when the priceless piece of furniture is the subject of a deceitful bargain? Can a wronged women take revenge on her dead husband? In these dark, disturbing stories Roald Dahl explores the sinister side of human nature: the cunning, sly, selfish part of each of us that le...