Classic Literature
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
$23.00
A collection of the most famous cases faced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's peerless creation, now in a beautiful hardcover edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith
This 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 his smoke-filled room in Baker Street to grapple with the forces of treachery, intrigue and evil in such cases as 'The Speckled Band', in which a terrified woman begs their help in solving the mystery surrounding her sister's death, or 'A Scandal in Bohemia', which portrays a European king blackmailed by his mistress. In 'Silver Blaze' the pair investigate the disappearance of a racehorse and the violent murder of its trainer, while in 'The Final Problem' Holmes at last comes face to face with his nemesis, the diabolical Professor Moriarty - 'the Napoleon of crime'.
576 pages
Published by Penguin Random House, 2018
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
$24.00
Written by Lewis Carroll
488 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Canterbury Tales
$25.00
In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories, and low farce. A storytelling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight’s account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath’s Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook. Nevill Coghill’s masterly and vivid modern English verse translation is rendered with consummate skill to retain all the vigor and poetry of Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Middle English.
Written by Geoffrey Chaucer
528 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Confessions of Saint Augustine
$20.00
The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Saint Augustine spent his early years torn between conflicting faiths and worldviews. His Confessions, written when he was in his forties, recount how, slowly and painfully, he came to turn away from his youthful ideas and licentious lifestyle, to become instead an ardent devotee of Christianity and one of its most influential thinkers. A remarkably honest and revealing spiritual autobiography touching on issues relevant to people of all faiths, the Confessions also address fundamental issues of Christian doctrine, and many of the prayers and meditations it includes are still an integral part of the practice of Christianity today. In his insightful introduction, R. S. Pine-Coffin discusses Saint Augustine’s intentions in writing his Confessions and issues of translation. This edition also includes a list of dates of events recorded in the Confessions.
Written by Augustine of Hippo576 pages
Published by Penguin Classics
Hardcover
4.13 x 6.67 inches
David Copperfield
$30.00
This is the novel Dickens regarded as his “favourite child” and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experiences from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the ‘umble Uriah Heep, along with Mr. Micawber, a portrait of Dickens’s own father that evokes a mixture of love, nostalgia, and guilt.
Written by Charles Dickens
1024 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2016
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Don Quixote
$30.00
The canonical Spanish classic, now in a beautiful hardcover edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith
Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray--he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants--Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years.
With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. This Penguin Classics edition includes John Rutherford's masterly translation, which does full justice to the energy and wit of Cervantes's prose.
Translated by John Rutherford
1056 pages
Published by Penguin Random House, 2018
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Dracula
$23.00
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the 'Master' and his imminent arrival. In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.
Written by Bram Stoker512 pages
Published by Penguin Random House, 2011
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Emma
$24.00
Beautiful, clever, rich – and single – Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protégée Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen’s most flawless work.
Written by Jane Austen512 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Great Expectations
$25.00
Pip doesn’t expect much from life…His sister makes it clear that her orphaned little brother is nothing but a burden on her. But suddenly things begin to change. Pip’s narrow existence is blown apart when he finds an escaped criminal, is summoned to visit a mysterious old woman and meets the icy beauty Estella. Most astoundingly of all, an anonymous person gives him money to begin a new life in London. Are these events as random as they seem? Or does Pip’s fate hang on a series of coincidences he could never have expected?
Written by Charles Dickens544 pages
Published by Penguin Classics
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Hard Times
$23.00
Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from any young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and ‘bully of humanity’ Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimized weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognize the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.
Written by Charles Dickens368 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2011
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Inferno: The Divine Comedy I
$27.00
Describing Dante’s descent into Hell midway through his life with Virgil as a guide, Inferno depicts a cruel underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of seven deadly sins. As he descends through nine concentric circles of increasingly agonising torture, Dante encounters doomed souls including the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicide Cleopatra, and his own political enemies, damned for their deceit. Led by leering demons, the poet must ultimately journey with Virgil to the deepest level of all. For it is only by encountering Satan, in the heart of Hell, that he can truly understand the tragedy of sin.
By Dante Alighieri576 pages
Published by Penguin Random House
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Lady Chatterly's Lover
$20.00
400 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Les Miserables
$28.00
Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is one of the great works of western literature. Victor Hugo’s tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged Inspector Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.
Written by Victor Hugo1232 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2012
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Little Women
$26.00
Written by Louisa May Alcott
544 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Madame Bovary
$24.00
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and devastating consequences. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” One of the greatest novels of the 19th century, Flaubert’s torrid debut lives on in Geoffrey Wall’s brilliant translation. This edition features an introduction by Wall, and a preface on Emma Bovary’s femininity and modernity by novelist Michèle Roberts.
Written by Gustave Flaubert
384 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Mansfield Park
$25.00
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 Antigua, the Crawford's arrive in the neighborhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen's first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social position and moral integrity, one of her most profound.
Written by Jane Austen, edited by Kathryn Sutherland; illustrated by Coralie Bickford-Smith, introduction by Tony Tanner
560 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2012
Hardcover
5.3 x 1.4 x 8 inches
Moby Dick or, The Whale
$30.00
In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.
This edition contains the definitive text of Moby-Dick based on the Northwestern-Newberry edition. It also features an introduction by Andrew Delbanco and explanatory commentary by Tom Quirk.
Written by Herman Melville
720 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Northanger Abbey
$22.00
During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine’s love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father’s mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels of sensation and intrigue, Catherine imagines terrible crimes committed by General Tilney. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and and optimistic of Jane Austen’s works.
Written by Jane Austen320 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2012
Hardcover
5 x 5.75 inches
Oliver Twist
$25.00
The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens’s tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters – the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.
Written by Charles Dickens
608 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Paradise Lost
$25.00
In Paradise Lost, Milton produced a poem of epic scale, conjuring up a vast, awe-inspiring cosmos ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet, in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the center of this story, he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties—blind, bitterly disappointed by the Restoration, and briefly in danger of execution—Paradise Lost’s apparent ambivalence toward authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to “justify the ways of God to men,” or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.
Written by John Milton512 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2016
Cloth Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Persuasion
$24.00
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all,it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
Written by Jane Austen
288 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2012
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Count of Monte Cristo
$30.00
A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.
Written by Alexandre Dumas1312 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2013
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Iliad
$25.00
The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization—the cornerstone of Western culture and an epic poem without rival in world literature. The story centers on the critical events in the last year of the Trojan War, which lead to Achilles's killing of Hector and the fall of Troy. But Homer’s theme is not simply war or heroism. With compassion and humanity, he presents a universal and tragic view of the world: human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death set against a vast and largely unpitying divine background.
Written by Homer, Translated by E. V. Rieu
560 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Jungle Books
$23.00
The story of Mowgli, the abandoned “man-cub” who is brought up by wolves in the jungles of Central India, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. As he embarks on a series of thrilling escapades, Mowgli encounters such unforgettable creatures as the bear Baloo, the graceful black panther Bagheera and Shere Khan, the tiger with the blazing eyes. Other animal stories in The Jungle Books range from the dramatic battle between good and evil in “Rikki-tikki-tav” to the macabre comedy, “The Undertakers.” With The Jungle Books, Rudyard Kipling drew on ancient beast fables, Buddhist philosophy, and memories of his Anglo-Indian childhood to create a rich, symbolic portrait of man and nature, and an eternal classic of childhood. This edition contains both of Kipling’s Jungle Books, as well as “In the Rukh,” the story that introduced readers to Mowgli.
Written by Rudyard Kipling
488 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2015
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Odyssey
$25.00
The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats – shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon – Odysseus must use his wit and native cunning if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.
Written by Homer
416 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Picture of Dorian Gray
$24.00
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succès de scandale and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to fascinate and disturb.
Written by Oscar Wilde
304 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2009
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
The Sonnets & A Lover's Complaints
$23.00
When this volume of Shakespeare’s poems first appeared in 1609, he had already written most of the great plays that made him famous. The 154 sonnets – all but two of which are addressed to a beautiful young man or a treacherous ‘dark lady’ – contain some of the most exquisite and haunting poetry ever written, and deal with eternal subjects such as love and infidelity, memory and mortality, and the destruction wreaked by Time. Also included is A Lover’s Complaint, originally published with the sonnets, in which a young woman is overheard lamenting her betrayal by a heartless seducer.
Written by William Shakespeare
272 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Treasure Island
$23.00
The story grew out of a map that led to imaginary treasure, devised during a holiday in Scotland by Stevenson and his nephew. The tale is told by an adventurous boy, Jim Hawkins, who gets hold of a treasure map and sets off with an adult crew in search of the buried treasure. Among the crew, however, is the treacherous Long John Silver who is determined to keep the treasure for himself. Stevenson’s first full-length work of fiction brought him immediate fame and continues to captivate readers of all ages.
Written by Robert Louis Stevenson240 pages
Published by Penguin Classics
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Woman in White
$22.00
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright’s eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his ‘charming’ friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.
Written by Wilkie Collins, Illustrated by Coralie Bickford-Smith
720 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2010
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
Wuthering Heights
$24.00
In a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere … As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the strange, grim house Wuthering Heights. It is a place he will never forget. There he will come to learn the story of Cathy: how she was forced to choose between her well-meaning husband and the dangerous man she had loved since she was young. How her choice led to betrayal and terrible revenge – and continues to torment those in the present. How love can transgress authority, convention, even death.
Written by Emily Bronte
416 pages
Published by Penguin Classics, 2009
Hardcover
5 x 7.75 inches
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