Classic fiction Books 661 results

Jean Rhys

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...

Vladimir Nabokov

Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are continually parted and reunited, come to learn the strange truth about their singular relationship and, decades later, put their extraordinary experiences into words. ...

Ernest Hemingway

Traditional Chinese edition of The Old Man and The Sea edited for young adults. The story is told with text and graphics and accompanied with Zhuying (phonetic annotation). A reading guide of this Hemingway classic helps young readers develop their writing skills. In Traditional Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc. ...

James Clavell

Set in the days of the founding of Hong Kong, this work presents the story of Dirk Struan, the ruler - the Tai-Pan - of the trading company in the Far East, who is also a pirate, an opium smuggler, and a master manipulator of men. It presents the story of his fight to establish himself and his dynasty as the undisputed masters of the Orient. ...

James Clavell

Whirlwind is the story of three weeks in Tehran in February 1979: three weeks of fanaticism, passion, self-sacrifice and heartbreak. Caught between the revolutionaries and the forces of international intrigue is a team of professional pilots. They are ordered to flee to safety with their helicopters. Two of them, both Europeans, have Iranian wives whom they love beyond safety a...

James Clavell

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 ...

Louis De Bernières

25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION - WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR'A true diamond of a novel, glinting with comedy and tragedy' Daily MailIt is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals but over time he proves himself to be civilised, humorous - a...

James Baldwin

"Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin's story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers ex...

Elizabeth Gaskell / Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Patsy Stoneman, University of Hull. Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the vital but turbulent north. Elizabeth Gaskell's skilful narrative uses an unusual love story to show ho...

Emily Dickinson

With an Introduction by Emma Hartnoll. Initially a vivacious, outgoing person, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) progressively withdrew into a reclusive existence. An undiscovered genius during her lifetime, only seven out of her total of 1,775 poems were published prior to her death. She had an immense breadth of vision and a passionate intensity and awe for life, love, nature, time...

Robert Louis Stevenson

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Tim Middleton, Head of English Studies, University of Ripon and York. In seeking to discover his inner self, the brilliant Dr Jekyll discovers a monster. First published to critical acclaim in 1886, this mesmerising thriller is a terrifying study of the duality of man's nature, and it is the book which established Stevenson's reputation as a...

Bram Stoker

Introduction and Notes by Dr David Rogers, Kingston University. 'There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and...

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley / Mary Shelley

Frankenstein is the classic gothic horror novel which has thrilled and engrossed readers for two centuries. Written by Mary Shelley, it is a story which she intended would 'curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.' The tale is a superb blend of science fiction, mystery and thriller. Victor Frankenstein driven by the mad dream of creating his own creature, experim...

James Joyce

"Since its publication in 1914, Dubliners has been arguably the most famous collection of short stories written in English. Through what James Joyce described as their "style of scrupulous meanness," the stories collectively present a direct, sometimes searing view of the city of Dublin in the twentieth century. This Norton Critical Edition is based on Hans Walter Gabler's scho...

Charlotte Brontë

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Sally Minogue, Department of English, Canterbury Christ Church University College. Based on Charlotte Brontë's personal experience as a teacher in Brussels, Villette is a moving tale of repressed feelings and subjection to cruel circumstance and position, borne with heroic fortitude. Rising above the frustrations of confinement within a rigi...

Alexandre Dumas

With an Introduction and Notes by Keith Wren. University of Kent at Canterbury. One of the most celebrated and popular historical romances ever written, The Three Musketeers tells the story of the early adventures of the young Gascon gentleman, D'Artagnan and his three friends from the regiment of the King's Musketeers - Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Under the watchful eye of thei...

Herman Melville

With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of 'Poetry Review'. Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democra...

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"'Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me.' With these chilling words a husband claims his wife after a two-year absence. But the child she clutches is not his, and Hester must wear a scarlet 'A' upon her breast, the sin of adultery visible to all. Under an assumed name her husband begins his search for her lover, determined to expose what Hester is equally determined to pr...

James Joyce

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr. Jacqueline Belanger, University of Cardiff. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man represents the transitional stage between the realism of Joyce's Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses, and is essential to the understanding of the later work. This novel is a highly autobiographical account of the adolescence of Stephen Dedalus, who reapp...

Virginia Woolf

An immaculately-observed social comedy that explores the boundaries between personal freedom and the demands of love Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney, and her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles to decide, the lives of tw...

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is "a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century" (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, ...

Benito Pérez Galdós

Galdos's four-part Fortunata and Jacinta (1886-7), the masterpiece among his almost 80 novels, tells the turbulent story of two women, their husbands and their lovers, set against the intricate web of dynastic alliances and class contrasts of Madrid in the 1870s. ...

Leo Tolstoy

Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession (1879) is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. By the time he was fifty, Tolstoy had already written the novels that would assure him of literary immortality; he had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was 'a happy man' and in good health - yet life had los...

One of the finest of epic poems, and the only one to have survived from medieval Spain, The Poem of the Cid recounts the adventures of the warlord and nobleman Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar - 'Mio Cid'. A forceful combination of heroic fiction and historical fact, the tale seethes with the restless, adventurous spirit of Castille, telling of the Cid's unjust banishment from the court o...

James Clavell

Presents an epic saga of one Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, and his integration into the struggles and strife of feudal Japan. Starting with his shipwreck on this most alien of shores, this novel charts Blackthorne's rise from the status of reviled foreigner up to the heights of trusted advisor and eventually, Samurai. ...

Samuel Butler

Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. But their visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal community has its faults—here crime is treated indulgently as a malady to be cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly...

Samuel Butler

'I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.' With The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler threw a subversive brick at the smug face of Victorian domesticity. Published in 1903, a year after Butler's death, the nove...

Virginia Woolf

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This edition features an afterword by editor and publisher ...

Herman Melville

Herman Melville towers among American writers not only for his powerful novels, but also for the stirring novellas and short stories that flowed from his pen. Two of the most admired of these "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno" first appeared as magazine piece and were then published in 1856 as part of a collection of short stories entitled "The Piazza Tales.""Bartleby" (also known ...

Mary Shelley

Chiltern creates the most beautiful editions of the World's finest literature. Your favourite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before; the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colours of these remarkable covers make these titles feel extra special and will look striking on any shelf. This book has matching lined and blank journals (sold separately)....