Classic General Fiction

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. When Basil Hallward paints the portrait of young, handsome Dorian Gray, he falls prey to his dazzling beauty. Afraid that his youth and looks will waste away, Dorian expresses a wish that his portrait, and...

Few literary masterpieces cast quite as awesome a shadow as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Captain Ahab’s quest for the white whale is a timeless epic – a thrilling tale of vengeance and obsession, and a searing parable about humanity lost in a universe of moral ambiguity. Inspired by true events, Moby Dick is a work of astonishing psychological depth. It...

HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. When Charles Marlow agrees to captain a steamer up the Congo in search of...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?’ When solicitor Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania to organise the estate of a mysterious client, his growing uneasiness quickly turns into terror. Count Dracula has something...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee…’ Few literary masterpieces cast quite as awesome a shadow as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Captain...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. The End 'They didn't seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn't take much interest in them myself.' From the master of...

Set in New York's opulent Gilded Age, The Age of Innocence follows Newland Archer, engaged to May Welland, as he grapples with his attraction to the scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska. Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, this timeless classic delves into desire and betrayal. Part of the Arcturus Classics series, it offers contemporary editions of literary masterpieces, perfect for any...

Like George Orwell, Franz Kafka has given his name to a world of nightmare, but in Kafka's world, it is never completely clear just what the nightmare is. The Trial, where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and if there is any help to be had, it will come from unexpected sources, is a chilling, blackly amusing...

A collection that includes Stevenson's masterpiece, Treasure Island, a thrilling adventure novel about a young boy's quest for buried treasure with a band of pirates. The collection also features the classic horror novella Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which explores the duality of human nature. Other notable works in the collection include the historical adventure Kidnapped. These...

Among the widely read and cherished writings of Charles Dickens are three works that stand out from the rest. They are timeless, and their characters are immortalised in people's imaginations, carrying a palpable sense of the writer himself within the pages. Portraying the Dickensian world in all its facets, this deluxe hardbound edition comprises the popular novel Oliver Twist, which...

Thrown 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 unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three...

Gilbert Markham is fascinated by Helen Graham, the beautiful and enigmatic woman who has recently moved into Wildfell Hall. He is swift to befriend her, but when local gossip calls Helen’s character and behaviour into question, Gilbert begins to repent of his congeniality. It is only when Helen presents Gilbert with her diary and instructs him to read it that...

Discover Richard Wright's brutal and gripping masterpiece. Bigger Thomas has grown up in Chicago's slums, reckless, angry and adrift. A respectable job with the affluent Dalton family provides hope but sets him on course for a catastrophic collision between his world and theirs. Hunted by citizen and police alike, and baited by prejudiced officials, Bigger finds himself the cause célèbre...

Jane Austen's beloved novel of manners about the romance between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, now freshly repackaged for the Union Square & Co. Signature Editions line. A novel of manners about the romantic pas de deux between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, two perfectly suited lovers who, at first, find each other insufferable. Despite Elizabeth's negative feelings about Darcy,...

I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon... I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth - a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow. The...

A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Doctor Faustus tells the story of Adrian Leverkühn, a young man destined for success. He is a composer—creative and brilliant—but he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Intentionally contracting syphilis in order to deepen his creative potential through madness, Adrian makes his pact with...

What would Greek and Roman myth look like if women had written the stories? asks Tara Welch in her illuminating Introduction to this volume. Stanley Lombardo and Melina McClure's faithful translation of Ovid's famous letters, purportedly written by heroines of classical antiquity to their absent lovers, offers an inkling of one intriguing possibility. This compelling translation brings the voices of...

Hearty pirate adventure One-time doctor and fugitive from the Monmouth rebellion, Peter Blood escaped from slavery to become the terror of the Caribbean. Winning invaluable treasures, rescuing his crew from almost certain death, and saving an English settlement are all in a day's work for fiction's boldest adventurer. The Chronicles of Captain Blood is an enthralling tale of swashbuckling heroism...

Bruno's Dream centres around Bruno, who is dying, obsessed with spiders, and preoccupied with death and reconciliation. At the heart of an intricate spider's web of relationships and passions, Bruno's life intertwines with those around him. Bruno's estranged and grieving son, Miles, and Danby, Bruno's widowed son-in-law, find themselves drawn into the mix. Danby consoles himself with Adelaide, the maid,...

The Monk by Matthew Lewis has been described as a 'Graphic, almost pornographic tale of darkness and evil' by the Guardian and as 'One of the most shocking Gothic novels' by the Independent. Noble and devout, Ambrosio is the abbot of a Spanish monastery and spends his days in prayer and preaching. However, his monastery is harbouring a malevolent force...

Here is Maugham's famous heroine - the intelligent, spirited and passionate Mrs Craddock. Bertha Ley comes of age, inherits her father's money and promptly marries a handsome, calm and unimaginative man. Bertha is wildly in love with Edward and believes she can be happy playing the role of a dutiful wife in their country home. But, intelligent and sensual, she...

Montague Small, an obsessive writer of detective thrillers, mourns his lately dead wife, who may or may not have been unfaithful to him. His attempts at meditation are a failure. He detests his fictional detective. His interest in his neighbour's difficulties and his neighbour's wife appear to be his only consolations after all. The neighbour, Blaise Gavender, is an amateur...

Grand Canyon is a gripping, unflinching alternative history of the Second World War by the brilliant writer Vita Sackville-West. The Second World War has been won - by the Germans. Only America still stands, protected by a precarious promise of peace from the Reich. Lester and Helen, strangers staying at the Grand Canyon Hotel in Arizona, are united by their...

Margaret Kennedy caught just the taste of the time, mixing a stolid domestic Englishness with 'Continental' bohemians — Irish Times William and Emily Crowne seem to have it all — they live a life of privilege and glamour in London, the children of a successful poet, attractive, happy, largely blind to the world around them. But life takes an unexpected...

In a renovated Italian palace set above the blue of the sea, the Junoesque figure of Mrs Aldwinkle moves among her guests. These include a poet who earns his living editing The Rabbit Fancier's Gazette; a popular novelist who records every detail of her affair with another guest as future literary material; an ageing philosopher who pursues a wealthy yet...

Crippled and disconsolate, sixteen-year-old Catalina is the one person unable to join in the festivities of the Feast of the Assumption. Yet that is when she miraculously meets and talks with the Blessed Virgin as though she were her own mother. But in the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition, the Church is apt to take a serious view of...

‘In a class by himself—the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety’ William Golding Bertram was not a believer in luck or superstitions. An unambitious assistant accountant, his plans for his second marriage are typically quiet—St Luke's, Maida Hill, then two weeks in Bournemouth. But then he comes to the attention of Dreuther, the director of Bertram's company, who...

A classic adventure from the author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach During the Second World War, Peter Marshall's crew become one of the most successful bombing teams in their Oxfordshire airbase. However, when Peter falls in love with a young WAAF officer, his concentration begins to suffer and it looks as though his perfect run of...

A powerful read brought back to life; surprising, honest and witty at every turn. Jake's Thing centres on Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, in pursuit of his lost libido. He heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full...

A classic adventure from the author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach. When Johnny Pascoe attempts to rescue a sick girl from the Tasmanian outback, his plane crashes, leaving him dangerously injured. Ronnie Clarke, who was trained by Pascoe, endeavours to fly a doctor in to help, but this proves more difficult than he imagined. As he...

Stella Gibbons's gift is very special – Daily Express As heard on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime Amy, a neglected motherless child in 1920s London, meets Robert, a wealthy American boy. It's an encounter she will never forget. My American follows the lives and loves of Amy Lee and Robert Vorst – from a chance childhood meeting to the...

A tense potboiler set on an exotic Pacific island by one of the 20th century's bestselling authors. On his way home from a remote Pacific island, Dr Saunders travels with two strangers: the treacherous Captain Nichols, and Fred, a handsome Australian with a shadowy past. Driven to shelter from a storm on the island of Kanda, the trio meet good-natured...

Completed shortly before Burgess's death, this novel in verse is extravagantly original. Michael Byrne is an Irish Don Juan — a composer, a charmer, a bigamist, and a thug. He moves from country to country, from bed to bed, selling his talents and leaving a trail of children in his wake. His journey takes him from post-Great War London to...

V.S. Pritchett (1900 - 1997) was one of the most subtle, potent, and best-loved of modern British writers, an unparalleled storyteller and biographer. This engrossing and lively volume, edited by his son, is a tribute to a lifetime of writing. He looks back to his childhood and youth in extracts from his autobiographies A Cab At The Door and Midnight...

A haunting political allegory...a cracking beach read - The Times With an introduction by Michael Moorcock A model of efficiency and order, the aerodrome stands on the hill looking down on the village below. Roy, coming of age in the messy, violent and adulterous world of the villagers, is simultaneously attracted and repelled by this strange place and by the...

A Scottish classic, a world classic - Ian Rankin, Observer Robert is a difficult and disturbed young man. He comes from a troubled family background and turns to his Calvinist faith for solace but finds it hard to get along with other people, particularly his brother and his dissolute father. After he falls in with the mysterious and charming Gil-Martin,...

A classic adventure from the author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach. As seen on BBC Two's Between the Covers 'An incredible adventure story...a book that will live with you forever' Richard Osman (on BBC Two's Between the Covers). Discover a classic adventure from the author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach. Keith Stewart...

A classic adventure from the author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach. Nevil Shute wrote this prophetic novel just before the start of the Second World War. In it, he describes the devastation that results from an aerial bomb attack on Southampton that destroys the city's infrastructure and leaves the inhabitants at the mercy of cholera and...

A rousing story of pirate adventure, hair-raising duels and romance. With an introduction by Ben Kane Oliver Tressilian, a Cornish gentleman, is blessed with 'youth, wealth, and good digestion'. He is betrayed by his half-brother and becomes a renegade and Barbary corsair, winning the title of Sakr-el-Bahr - hawk of the sea. This is the thrilling, full-blooded adventure of how...

The Far Country is a dramatic romance set in the remote wilds of the Australian outback. A young English woman leaves her ageing parents to visit friends living in the Australian outback. She falls in love, both with the country and with Carl, a doctor and Czech refugee. Brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, their relationship...

The atmosphere of the cheap cafes...is subtly caught. Packed tight with wit and understanding, it lights the London Scene - Scotsman When Nell Sely moves from sleepy Dorset to Hampstead she leaves behind a childhood of dull teas and oppressive rules for the freedom of the big city. Naive and only nineteen, she becomes embroiled with the wayward John Gaunt...

Excitement and suspense 18,000 feet over the Atlantic! Read this classic uplifting, moving, and heartwarming story about life in the face of the Cold War. Theodore Honey is a shy, inconspicuous aircraft engineer whose eccentric interests in quantum mechanics and spiritualism are frowned upon in aviation circles. But when a passenger plane crashes in unexplained circumstances, Honey must convince his...

Time remarked, "No serious writer of this century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than did Graham Greene." In It's A Battlefield, Drover, a Communist bus driver, finds himself in prison, sentenced to death for killing a policeman during a riot at Hyde Park Corner. This gripping narrative explores the ensuing battle for a reprieve, involving a...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice explores a range of moral, political, historical and literary subjects in this impressive collection of essays, threaded with personal memoirs. In This Quiet Dust, the first book of non-fiction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lie Down in Darkness and Sophie’s Choice, William Styron addresses great moral issues with passion and precision. His...

Two exquisite novellas which confirm Sackville-West's gift as a novelist. Seducers in Ecuador is the story of Arthur Lomax, every bit the English gentleman in his white ducks and solar topee, enjoying the pleasures of an Egyptian cruise. But with the addition of a pair of blue spectacles to the outfit, Lomax's entire world changes – to alarming, deadly effect....

Stunningly written and cleverly done, Maugham masters the enthralling and shocking world of Machiavelli. Maugham found a parallel to the turmoil of our own times in the duplicity, intrigue and sensuality of the Italian Renaissance. Then and Now enters the world of Machiavelli, and covers three important months in the career of that crafty politician, worldly seducer and high priest...

A reclusive young man works in a San Francisco library for unpublishable books. Life's losers, an astonishing number of whom seem to be writers, can bring their manuscripts to the library, where they will be welcomed, registered, and shelved. They will not be read, but they will be cherished. In comes Vida, with her manuscript. Her book is about her...

Yet more thrilling adventures of the bold and bolshy Captain Blood. Ready of wit and skilled of blade, the elegant surgeon-buccaneer Captain Blood is ever a jump ahead of his foes. Time and again, he falls headlong into deep peril, and his own motley crew are happy to sail to hell and back at his command. Yet when everything is...

The first novel from one of the twentieth century's most admired and stylish writers. It's the balmy days of the 1920s and where could be more pleasant for a holiday than a hotel on the Italian Riviera? Filled with prosperous English visitors, The Hotel offers a closed world of wealth and comfort. It also provides the stage for the display...

She is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed – Anita Brookner Return I Dare Not presents Hugo Potts, a successful London playwright enjoying his moment of notoriety. Adored by critics and pursued by women, he's the darling of the literary scene. However, his public persona is exactly...

A first-class adventure story of love, mystery, and nail-biting suspense, for fans of classic wartime romance. Landfall follows Jerry Chambers, a fresh-faced young pilot who mistakenly sinks a British submarine. As a result, he is reprimanded and sent to a remote posting to test an experimental new bomb—a dangerous mission far away from the girl he loves. While Jerry risks...

The autobiography of the classic author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach. Nevil Shute was a power and a pioneer in the world of flying long before he began to write the stories that made him a bestselling novelist. This autobiography charts Shute's path from childhood to his career as a gifted aeronautical engineer working at the...

A classic adventure from the author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach. If somewhere is 'beyond the black stump' it means it is in the deepest darkest wilds of the Australian outback. This is the sun-baked setting for Nevil Shute's novel of a romance that is tested by the differences between two young people's home lives. Stanton...

Robin Davies is both a shrewd observer and an energetic actor in a drama that takes him from school to Oxford. With him, we live through all the pangs of a pre-war adolescence in South London, and on through his rites of passage to adulthood, involving rebellion, self-discovery, sex, seduction, and commitment. You Can't Do Both is classic Amis—brilliantly funny,...

A selection of spine-chilling tales by the Godfather of Goth. The midnight hour approaches. You lie in bed and try to sleep, but there is the howling of the wind outside, the creak of a floorboard, the scream of a cat, the ticking clock... Your heart beats, your skin crawls, and despite yourself you reach for this book and enter...

A novel about four different men learning how to live with their past lives, and face their futures. John Turner, a young man with a chequered past, has been told he has just one year to live. He decides to use his time in search of three very different men he met briefly during the war—an snobbish British pilot, a...

'Gibbons was an acute and witty observer, and her dissection of the British class system is spot-on' - Mail on Sunday Thrown out of her long-established office job, Miss Christine Smith takes up a new role as housekeeper for a group of middle-aged artists. Charmed by a previous mystical experience, her spirituality is nurtured further by the tenants, who seem...

A classic adventure from the author of A Town Like Alice and On the Beach. After Philip Stenning is involved in a near-fatal plane crash, he feels he owes a debt of gratitude to the man who rescued him. However, his mysterious saviour is an escaped convict, and his determination to help him leads Stenning into a tense and dramatic...

Of all the choristers at the Cathedral Basilica of St George, he is the angel—the one whose voice could only have been made in heaven. In every other respect, Hubert is utterly ordinary: a nice, rather timid ten-year-old boy. The year is 1976, but by bold Amisian sleight-of-hand, the England of The Alteration has become a disconcerting, quasi-medieval land in...

"I believe that that's the one thing most worth doing in this modern world," he said quietly. "To create jobs that men can work at, and be proud of" Ruined City Through a series of mishaps, Henry Warren, a recently divorced City financier, ends up in hospital in a Northern town ruined by the closure of its shipyard. Moved by...

'A perpetual feast to the reader. Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful' - Raymond Mortimer Set in pre-war Paris, Julie de Carneilhan tells of the complex relationship between the proud but impoverished Julie and her former husband, the Comte d'Espivant, who has remarried a wealthy widow. Julie de Carneilhan was the last full-length novel Colette was...

The fourth novel by Elizabeth Bowen, described by the Guardian as 'One of the last century's greatest woman writers'. Cecilia, capricious and unable to love, inches reluctantly towards a second marriage to the kind, passionless Julian Tower. Meanwhile, her sister-in-law, Emmeline, is surprised to find the calm tenor of her life disturbed by her attraction to the predatory Mark Linkwater....

A new translation of this gripping novel, originally intended as the last in the Maigret series, which sees the inspector brought out of his peaceful retirement. Maigret shrugged his shoulders, buried his hands in his pockets and went off without answering. He had just spent one of the most wretched days in his life. For hours, in his corner, he...

Penguin Classics relaunch The Diary of a Nobody began as a serial in Punch and the book which followed in 1892 has never been out of print. The Grossmith brothers not only created an immortal comic character but produced a clever satire of their society. Mr Pooter is an office clerk and upright family man in a dull 1880s suburb....

A beautiful new edition of Mary Shelley's Gothic horror classic, Frankenstein Includes a cultural history of Frankenstein’s monster by Jeanette Winterson Navigating the Arctic, the captain of a ship rescues a man wandering near death across the ice caps. How the man got there reveals itself in a story of ambition, murder, and revenge. As a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein...

First ever standalone edition of one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most important poetic dramas, that explores timely themes such as the nature of heroism and chivalry during war, and which features unpublished and never-before-seen texts and drafts. In 991 AD, vikings attacked an Anglo-Saxon defence-force led by their duke, Beorhtnoth, resulting in brutal fighting along the banks of the river Blackwater,...

The fictional portrait of Woolf's close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the hero Orlando is a young nobleman in Elizabethan England, a dreamy and romantic youth who wakes up one day to find himself transformed, astonishingly, into a woman. Over the span of three centuries, Orlando will fall in love many times and rub shoulders with the great artists and...

Grimm's Fairy Tales collects more than forty of the best-known fairy tales set down by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Among them are timeless stories such as "Little Red Riding Hood," "Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Rapunzel," "Rumpelstiltskin," and "Tom Thumb." In these wonderfully entertaining stories, frogs transform into handsome...

Pip is a poor orphan, a boy with no expectations, being raised by his unkind sister and her husband in a small home on the marshes of Kent. But when Pip meets the bizarre Miss Havisham and her beautiful ward, Estella, he starts to yearn for a life as a gentleman. However, Pip will discover that wealth and honesty do...

Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town. A short, sprightly man appeared in the doorway, looked left and right, and went back into the passage. A moment later, the improbable happened. The little man reappeared, bent over, clinging to a long mass that he now started dragging through the mud. It must have been...

When Harriet Beecher Stowe was introduced to Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the president reportedly said, "So this is the little woman who made this great war." Apocryphal or not, the words were apt. Uncle Tom's Cabin portrayal of the evils of institutionalized slavery galvanized the American public to new abolitionist heights and today remains a crucial literary artifact in a...

A spine-tingling collection of some of Japan's scariest yet still compelling classic ghost stories Enter the haunted world of Ancient Japan in this spine-tingling collection of ghostly tales told and retold across the centuries. From Goblin infested caves and haunted Tombs, to vengeful spirits and strange, sinister happenings, Ancient Japan was a country and culture that lived with between realms-...

It is no tragedy that seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland is not cut out to be the heroine of one of the Gothic novels she reads so avidly with her new friend Isabella Thorpe. What may lead to tragedy on her first visit to the glamorous resort town of Bath, however, are Catherines overactive imagination and her inability to read other people.Catherine...

This smart new paperback edition contains the fully-reset text of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex, and honour. It features a beautifully decorated text and includes as a bonus the complete version of Tolkien’s acclaimed lecture on Sir Gawain. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two...

A chilling exploration of humanity’s capacity for evil and the dark side of thoughtless curiosity Exploring timeless themes of the duality of human nature, the tension between good and evil, and the consequences of tampering with the natural order, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde remains one of the enduring classics of the gothic horror genre. This...

A timeless story of beauty, hedonism, and morality A new addition to the widely read Capstone Classics series, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Gothic Classic, by Oscar Wilde, explores the brutal consequences of hedonism, loose morals, and an obsessive focus on beauty and pleasure. Wilde’s novel follows a young man, Dorian Gray, who becomes infatuated with his own beauty...

By turns hilarious and heartwarming, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered Mark Twain's masterpiece. Desperate to escape his abusive father and the constraints of civilisation, young Huck Finn fakes his death and, with his slave friend Jim, embarks on a vagabond life rafting down the Mississippi. Together, Huck and Jim forge a bond that protects them from the prejudices...

Cherish Emily Brontë's beloved classic for generations with this heirloom edition.A timeless tale of haunting and passionate love and obsession, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is one of the most enduring classics in English literature. Originally published in 1847, the novel follows the tragic bond between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw-a relationship that defies social conventions and even death itself. A powerful...

Through tight dialogue and absurd settings Franz Kafka creates a maze-like prose to mimic the bureaucracy of early twentieth-century Germany, trapping his protagonist in an unlawful conviction that alters the path of his life. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or...

The greatest of all epics, soon to be a major motion picture directed by Christopher Nolan. Every book lover knows there are certain stories that transcend time, and Homer's The Odyssey stands tall among literature's greatest treasures. This isn't just another ancient epic gathering dust on your shelf—it's a masterfully crafted adventure that speaks to the wanderer in all of...