Fiction & Literature > classics

"Jane Eyre", "Wuthering Heights", "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Villette". The Bronte sisters were extraordinarily creative women whose passionate, thought-provoking and moving novels have had an enormous influence over English writing. This collection draws together their most famous works and showcases both their unique individual talents and their collective genius.



//
 

In these three tales from the first major translation into English of The Arabian Nights in more than 100 years, the endless inventiveness of the vizier's daughter Shahrzade is revealed, as she spins stories of greed, lust, riches and wonder to delay her death at the hands of a brutal king.

The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968. "The Gathering" is a novel about love and disappointment, about thwarted lust and limitless desire, and how our fate is written in the body, not in the stars.

We don't have secrets, Sheba and I. From the first day that the beguiling Sheba Hart joins the staff of St George's, history teacher Barbara Covett is convinced that she has found a kindred spirit. Barbara's loyalty to her new friend is passionate and unstinting and when Sheba is discovered having an illicit affair with one of her young pupils, Barbara quickly elects herself as Sheba's chief defender. But all is not as at first it seems in this dark story and, as Sheba will soon discover, a friend can be just as treacherous as any lover.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of "Penguin Modern Classics" we are publishing an incredibly desirable and collectable postcard collection of 100 "Modern Classics" authors. Following the success of "Postcards from Penguin" this is a must-have box of beautifully produced postcards with memorable, often iconic photographs of writers such as Camus, Steinbeck, Orwell, Waugh, Nabokov. Each postcard is designed to evoke the iconic look of the "Modern Classics" series.

If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened. She saw me kissing her father. She saw her father kissing me. The fact that a child got mixed up in it all made us feel that it mattered, that there was no going back.

'I'm unfavorable to killin' a man as long as you can get around it; it ain't good sense, it ain't good morals. Ain't I right?' The original Great American Novel, an incomparable adventure story and a classic of anarchic humour, Twain's masterpiece sees Huckleberry Finn and Jim the slave escape their difficult lives by fleeing down the Mississippi on a raft. There, they find steamships, feuding families, an unlikely Duke and King and vital lessons about the world in which they live. With its unforgettable cast of characters, Hemingw... read more

Classic / British English (Available February 2008) Winston Smith lives in a society where the government controls people's lives every second of the day. Alone in his small, one-room apartment, Winston dreams of a better life. Is freedom from this life of suffering possible? There must be something that the Party cannot control something like love, perhaps?

Catherine Morland meets all the trappings of Gothic horror and imagines the worst. Disaster does eventually strike, as it does in the real world as distinct from the romantic one, but without spoiling the wonderful atmosphere of this story.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

In the summer of 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church in Oxford, Charles Dodgson - better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll - dressed the six-year-old Alice Liddell in ragamuffin's clothes, draped the folds of cloth low enough to expose her bare chest, asked her to look deep into his eyes - and then snapped the camera's shutter. 
In The Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester uses the famous photograph of Alice - notorious for the child's alluring pose - as the launching pad for an energetic and penetrating... read more

Guy Crouchback, a Catholic and a gentleman is commissioned into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during the war years 1939-45. High comedy - in the company of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook or the denizens of Bellamy's Club - is only part of the shambles of his war. When action comes in Crete and in Yugoslavia, he discovers not heroism, but humanity.

"Peake's books are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience". (C.S. Lewis). Enter the world of Gormenghast. The vast crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is Lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this Gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons, cloisters and corridors as well as the eccentric and wayward subject. Things are changing in the castle and Titus must contend with a kingdom about... read more

"Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison," declares the whip-tongued eleven-year-old narrator of "Damned," Chuck Palahniuk's subversive new work of fiction. The daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas, while her parents are off touting their new projects and adopting more orphans. She dies over the holiday of a mari-juana overdose--and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. Madison shares her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that is almost too... read more

Machen's weird tales of the creepy and fantastic finally come to Penguin Classics. With an introduction from S.T. Joshi, editor of "American Supernatural Tales", "The White People" and "Other Weird Stories" is the perfect introduction to the father of weird fiction. The title story "The White People" is an exercise in the bizarre leaving the reader disoriented and on edge. From the first page, Machen turns even fundamental truths upside-down, as his character Ambrose explains, "there have been those who have sounded the very depths... read more

Shooting an Elephant is Orwell's searing account of his experience as a police officer in imperial Burma: killing an escaped elephant in front of a crowd 'solely to avoid looking a fool'. The other masterly essays in this collection include classics such as 'My Country Right or Left', 'How the Poor Die' and 'Such Were the Joys', his memoir of the horrors of public school, as well as discussions of Shakespeare, sleeping rough, boys' weeklies and a spirited defence of English cooking. Opinionated, uncompromising, provocative and huge... read more

'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 Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to create a new being from the bodies of the dead - but whose botched creature causes nothing but murder and destruction. Written after a nightmare when its author was only eighteen, "Frankenstein" gave birth to the modern scienc... read more

'Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!' Described by Dickens as 'the best story I have written', "A Tale of Two Cities" interweaves thrilling historical drama with heartbreaking personal tragedy. It vividly depicts a revolutionary Paris running red with blood, and a London where the poor starve. In the midst of the chaos two men - an exiled French aristocrat and a dissolute English lawyer - are both redeemed and condemned by their love for the same woman, as the shadow of La ... read more

'Death!' I shouted. 'Death is coming! Death!' In this pioneering, shocking and nightmarish tale, naive suburban Londoners investigate a strange cylinder from space, but are instantly incinerated by an all-destroying heat-ray. Soon, gigantic killing machines that chase and feed on human prey are threatening the whole of humanity. A pioneering work of alien invasion fiction, "The War of the World's" journalistic style contrasts disturbingly with its horrifying visions of the human race under siege. This is the Penguin English Library... read more