Classic fiction Books 661 results

Truman Capote

'Summer Crossing' is the story of a 17-year-old girl who has been left in New York while her parents spend the summer in Europe. It is a coming-of-age story, the heroine of which is very much a proto-Holly Golightly from 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'. ...

Ken Kesey

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy - the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on beha...

Michel De Montaigne

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves ? and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives ? and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ide...

Charlotte Brontë

"I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette..." —George EliotWith neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her ...

Fedor Mikhailovitch Dostoïevski / Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The most autobiographical novel by the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—and the namesake of Elif Batuman's debut novel, The Idiot Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naïve epileptic Prince Myshkin— known as the "idiot"—pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family...

John Fowles

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY EVIE WYLD 'There is not a page in this first novel which does not prove that its author is a master storyteller' New York Times Weird, withdrawn, and unloved, Fred is a young collector of butterflies. One day his eye alights on a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda, and an obsession starts to form. So when Fred wins some money he decides to use ...

Harper Lee

'Shoot all the Bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a Mockingbird.' Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with co...

Alexandre Dumas

"On what slender threads do life and fortune hang." Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadThrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unear...

Mary Shelley

The world's most famous work of horror fiction: a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadMary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes...

Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker's peerless tale of desperate battle against a powerful, ancient vampire When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries in his client's castle. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England: a ship runs aground on the shores of Whitby, its crew vanished; beautiful Lucy Westenra slowly ...

Henry James

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeSet amid the splendor of London drawing rooms and gilded Venetian palazzos, The Wings of the Dove is the story of Milly Theale, a naïve, doomed American heiress, and a pair of lovers, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, who conspire to obtain her fortune. In this witty tragedy of treachery, self-deception, and be...

Leo Tolstoy

Now the subject of a major new film adaptation from director Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice), Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is translated by award-winning duo Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in Penguin Classics.Starring Keira Knightley (A Dangerous Method) as Anna Karenina, Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes) as her husband Alexei, Aaron Johnson (Nowhere Boy) as Count V...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American ReadRaskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A collection of the most famous cases faced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's peerless creationThis collection of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes includes many of the famous cases - and great strokes of brilliance - that made the legendary detective one of fiction's most popular creations. With his devoted amanuensis Dr Watson, Holmes emerges from...

H. Rider Haggard

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...

Baldwin, James

'A masterwork... an almost unbearable, tumultuous, blood-pounding experience' Washinton Post When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draw...

Arthur Conan Doyle

As a dense yellow fog swirls through the streets of London, a deep melancholy has descended on Sherlock Holmes, who sits in a cocaine-induced haze at 221B Baker Street. His mood is only lifted by a visit from a beautiful but distressed young woman - Mary Morstan, whose father vanished ten years before. Four years later she began to receive an exquisite gift every year: a large,...

John Steinbeck

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.' ...

Alexandre Dumas

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren, University of Kent at Canterbury. The Man in the Iron Mask is the final episode in the cycle of novels featuring Dumas' celebrated foursome of D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis, who first appeared in The Three Musketeers. Some thirty-five years on, the bonds of comradeship are under strain as they end up on different sides in a ...

Carson Mccullers

A new trade paperback edition of McCullers' second novel, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, immortalized by the 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, and John Houston. Set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, REFLECTIONS tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Pen...

Tom Robbins

One of Robbins most popular novels, this is a sort of love story that takes place inside a pack of Camel cigarettes. It reveals the purpose of the moon, explains the difference between criminals and outlaws, and paints a portrait of contemporary society that includes powerful Arabs, exiled royalty, and pregnant cheerleaders. ...

Albert Camus

The unfinished manuscript of The First Man was discovered in the wreckage of car accident in which Camus died in 1960. Although it was not published for over thirty years, it was an instant bestseller when it finally appeared in 1994. The 'first man' is Jacques Cormery, whose poverty-stricken childhood in Algiers is made bearable by his love for his silent and illiterate mother...

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight is an unforgettable portrait of a woman bravely confronting loneliness and despair in her quest for self-determinationIn 1930s Paris, where one cheap hotel room is very like another, a young woman is teaching herself indifference. She has escaped personal tragedy and has come to France to find courage and seek independence. She tells herself to...

Jean Rhys

'A wonderful bitter-sweet book, written with disarming simplicity' Esther Freud'It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known,' says Anna Morgan, eighteen years old and catapulted to England from the West Indies after the death of her beloved father. Working as a chorus girl, Anna drifts into the demi-monde of Edwardian London. But there, dismayed by the...

Flann Obrien

Flann O'Brien's innovative metafictional work, whose unruly characters strike out their own paths in life to the frustration of their author, At Swim-Two-Birds is a brilliant impressionistic jumble of ideas, mythology and nonsense published in Penguin Modern Classics.Flann O'Brien's first novel tells the story of a young, indolent undergraduate, who lives with his curmudgeonly ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Now the subject of a major new film from director Baz Luhrmann (Romeo+Juliet, Moulin Rouge!), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant fable of the hedonistic excess and tragic reality of 1920s America. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Tony Tanner.Young, handsome and fabulously ri...

Truman Capote

With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, she is top notch in style and a sensation wherever she goes. He brownstone apartment vibrates with Martini-soaked parties as she plays hostess to millionaires and gangsters alike. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate goal - to find a real life place like Tiffany's that makes her feel at h...

William Shakespeare

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. The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's mos...

Jean Rhys

Set in a superficially romantic, between-wars Paris, QUARTET is a poignant tale of a lonely woman. Set against a background of winter-wet streets, Pernod in smoky cafes and cheap hotel rooms with mauve- flowered wallpaper, Marya tries to make something substantial of her life in order to withstand the unreality of her surroundings. Alone, her Polish husband in prison, she is ta...

Marguerite Yourcenar

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...