Classics to Start With

A novel of sexual, racial, political, and artistic passions, set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France. Stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, this book depicts men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime.From one of the most important American novelists of the twentieth century.

'Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together—my future, my past, the whole of my life—and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!'Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.Endorsements'Haunting, compelling and brilliant' — The Times'Irresistible and seductive' — The Guardian'Enthralling... Forceful, cerebral and impeccably controlled' — The New York Times

Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power - the means by which he intends to rule Middle-earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring - the ring that rules them all - which has fallen into the hands of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins.In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as the Ring is entrusted to his care. He must leave his home and make a perilous journey across the realms of Middle-earth to the Crack of Doom, deep inside the territories of the Dark Lord. There he must destroy the Ring forever and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.Since it was first published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings has been a book people have treasured. Steeped in unrivalled magic and otherworldliness, its sweeping fantasy has touched the hearts of young and old alike.

'In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.' The world and his mistress are at Jay Gatsby's party. But Gatsby stands apart from the crowd, isolated by a secret longing. In between sips of champagne, his guests speculate about their mysterious host. Some say he's a bootlegger. Others swear he was a German spy during the war. They lean in and whisper 'He killed a man once.' Just where is Gatsby from and what is the obsession that drives him?

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: an unmanned ship is wrecked; strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck; and a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his 'Master'. In the ensuing battle of wits between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries, Bram Stoker created a masterpiece of the horror genre, probing into questions of identity, sanity and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.

The astonishing novel Brave New World, originally published in 1932, presents Aldous Huxley's vision of the future—of a world utterly transformed. Through the most efficient scientific and psychological engineering, people are genetically designed to be passive and therefore consistently useful to the ruling class. This powerful work of speculative fiction sheds a blazing critical light on the present and is considered to be Aldous Huxley's most enduring masterpiece.The non-fiction work Brave New World Revisited, published in 1958, is a fascinating work in which Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy envisioned in Brave New World, including the threats to humanity, such as over-population, propaganda, and chemical persuasion.

"May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you — haunt me, then"Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.

Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce's belief that literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'.Endorsements'Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century' — Anthony Burgess, Observer'The most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape' — T. S. Eliot'Intoxicating ... a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare' — Guardian

Pride and Prejudice is one of the most cherished love stories in English literature, delighting generations of readers with its high comedy, social observation and compelling romance, and spawning an entire industry of spin-off books, film adaptations and works of literary criticism. The pride of high-ranking Mr Darcy and the prejudice of middle-class Elizabeth Bennet conduct an absorbing dance through the rigid social hierarchies of early-nineteenth-century England, with the passion of the two unlikely lovers growing as their union seems ever more improbable.With a host of Bennet sisters playing out their own triumphs and disasters, and the unforgettable tragicomedy of their parents’ marriage demonstrating just how high the stakes can be, Jane Austen’s second novel has a lasting effect on everyone who reads it.

When Mrs Ramsay tells her guests at her summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does she know that this trip will only be completed ten years later by her husband, and that a gulf of war, grief and loss will have opened in the meantime. As each character tries to readjust their memories and emotions with the shifts of time and reality, this long-delayed excursion will also prove to be a journey of self-discovery and fulfilment for them.Rich in symbolism, daring in style, elegiac in tone and encapsulating Virginia Woolf’s ideas on life, art and human relationships, To the Lighthouse is a landmark of twentieth-century literature and one of the high points of early Modernism.

Winston Smith is a low-rung member of the Party, the ruling government of Oceania. He works in the Ministry of Truth, the Party's propaganda arm, where he is in charge of revising history. He is but a small brick in the pyramid that is the Party, at the head of which stands Big Brother, the infallible. Big Brother, the all-powerful. In a totalitarian society where individuality is suppressed and freedom of thought has its antithesis in the Thought Police, Winston finds respite in the company of Julia. Originality of thought awakens, love blooms, and hope is rekindled. But what they don't know is that Big Brother is always watching...

Oscar Wilde's madcap farce about mistaken identities, secret engagements, and lovers' entanglements still delights readers more than a century after its 1895 publication and premiere performance. The rapid-fire wit and eccentric characters of The Importance of Being Earnest have made it a mainstay of the high school curriculum for decades.Cecily Cardew and Gwendolen Fairfax are both in love with the same mythical suitor. Jack Worthing has wooed Gwendolen as Ernest while Algernon has also posed as Ernest to win the heart of Jack's ward, Cecily. When all four arrive at Jack's country home on the same weekend — the "rivals" to fight for Ernest's undivided attention and the "Ernests" to claim their beloveds — pandemonium breaks loose. Only a senile nursemaid and an old, discarded hand-bag can save the day!

David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant, but ultimately unworthy school-friend James Steerforth; his formidable aunt, Betsey Trotwood; the eternally humble, yet treacherous Uriah Heep; frivolous, enchanting Dora Spenlow; and the magnificently impecunious Wilkins Micawber, one of literature's great comic creations. In David Copperfield — the novel he described as his 'favourite child' — Dickens drew revealingly on his own experiences to create one of the most exuberant and enduringly popular works, filled with tragedy and comedy in equal measure.

Gipsy’s Acre was a truly beautiful upland site with views out to sea – and in Michael Rogers it stirred a child-like fantasy. There, amongst the dark fir trees, he planned to build a house, find a girl and live happily ever after. Yet, as he left the village, a shadow of menace hung over the land. For this was the place where accidents happened. Perhaps Michael should have heeded the locals’ warnings: ‘There’s no luck for them as meddles with Gipsy’s Acre.’ Michael Rogers is a man who is about to learn the true meaning of the old saying ‘In my end is my beginning.’The title Endless Night was taken from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence and describes Christie’s favourite theme in the novel: a ‘twisted’ character, who always chooses evil over good.Christie finished Endless Night in six weeks, as opposed to the three to four months that most of her other novels took. Despite being in her seventies while writing it, she told an interviewer that being Michael, the twenty-something narrator, 'wasn't difficult. After all, you hear people like him talking all the time.'The book is dedicated to Christie's relative 'Nora Prichard from whom I first heard the legend of Gipsy's Acre.' Gipsy's Acre was a field on the Welsh moors.

You have to love those travel documentaries with celebrities awkwardly trying to make their interactions with locals seem impromptu and organic. Perhaps it's best to let the writers express the escapism of travel. And why not leave travel writing to Wilkie Collins, the star of Victorian-era mystery and thriller novels? In "Rambles Beyond Railways", Collins exchanges his London ale for a Cornish pasty when he writes of his travels around Cornwall. While the Victorians were crazy about building railways, rail access didn't extend to the whole of Cornwall. Instead, Collins goes by foot across Cornwall with his friend, Henry Brandling, who provided illustrations for the original publication. True to his love of the sensational, Collins explores the enchanting Cornish locations whence stories of ghostly shipwrecks and semi-mythical kings originated.Get lost in Collins's Cornwall instead of Jeremy Clarkson's ill-fitting jeans.

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert's fixation is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.Endorsements'Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine' — Martin Amis, Observer'There's no funnier monster in literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert' — Independent

Inspired by a grisly discovery in the nineteenth century, The King's General was the first of du Maurier's novels to be written at Menabilly, the model for Manderley in Rebecca. Set in the seventeenth century, it tells the story of a country and a family riven by war, and features one of fiction's most original heroines.Honor Harris is only eighteen when she first meets Richard Grenvile — proud, reckless, and utterly captivating. Following a riding accident, Honor must reconcile herself to a life alone, while Richard rises through the ranks of the army, makes enemies, and marries.As the English Civil War is waged across the country, Honor remains true to him and finally discovers the secret of Menabilly.Decades later, an undaunted Sir Richard, now a general serving King Charles I, finds her. Finally they can share their passion in the ruins of her family's great estate on the storm-tossed Cornish coast — one last time before being torn apart, never to embrace again.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great masterpiece is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo, the town they have built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles. A microcosm of Colombian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book and only Aureliano Buendía can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy with comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b. 1928) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He is the author of several novels, including Leaf Storm (1955), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.Endorsements“With a single bound Gabriel Garcia Marquez leaps on the stage with Gunter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov ... dazzling” — The New York Times

Wide Sargasso Sea, a masterpiece of modern fiction, was Jean Rhys’s return to the literary centre stage. She had a startling early career and was known for her extraordinary prose and haunting women characters. With Wide Sargasso Sea, her last and bestselling novel, she ingeniously brings into light one of fiction’s most fascinating characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. This mesmerizing work introduces us to Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Mr. Rochester. Rhys portrays Cosway amidst a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

Raskolnikov is surrounded by the harsh injustices of the world, and his guilt is unbearable. As Raskolnikov enters a dangerous cat and mouse game with the examining magistrate, a psychological thriller unfolds that probes how far humanity might go when driven by disillusionment and whether any crime can be justified by a higher purpose.

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her ‘cousin’ Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, subtitled “A Pure Woman,” is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy’s novels.A heartbreaking portrayal of a woman faced by an impossible choice in the pursuit of happiness.

L.P. Hartley's moving exploration of a young boy's loss of innocence, The Go-Between.'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school-friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.Leslie Poles Hartley (1895–1972) was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford. For more than thirty years from 1923 he was an indefatigable fiction reviewer for periodicals including the Spectator and Saturday Review. His first book, Night Fears (1924), was a collection of short stories; but it was not until the publication of Eustace and Hilda (1947), which won the James Tait Black prize, that Hartley gained widespread recognition as an author. His other novels include The Go-Between (1953), which was adapted into an internationally successful film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, and The Hireling (1957), the film version of which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.Endorsements'Magical and disturbing.' — Independent.'On a first reading, it is a beautifully wrought description of a small boy's loss of innocence long ago. But, visited a second time, the knowledge of approaching, unavoidable tragedy makes it far more poignant and painful.' — Express.

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.EndorsementsNamed to “best novels” lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer.

Born at the stroke of midnight at the exact moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is a special child. However, this coincidence of birth has consequences he is not prepared for: telepathic powers connect him with 1,000 other 'midnight's children' all of whom are endowed with unusual gifts. Inextricably linked to his nation, Saleem's story is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.EndorsementsWinner of the Booker Prize and Best of the Booker PrizeBBC Between the Covers Big Jubilee Read pick'A wonderful, rich and humane novel... a classic' — Guardian

Holden Caulfield is a seventeen-year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Navigating his way through the challenges of growing up, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès 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 men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.

"It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. 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 encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

In this classic of the 1960s, Ken Kesey's hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over. A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport, soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse Ratched, backed by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against McMurphy provides the story's shocking climax.

Life is good for Buck in Santa Clara Valley, where he spends his days eating and sleeping in the golden sunshine. But one day a treacherous act of betrayal leads to his kidnapping, and he is forced into a life of toil and danger. Dragged away to be a sled dog in the harsh and freezing cold Yukon, Buck must fight for his survival. Can he rise above his enemies and become the master of his realm once again?

Emma Woodhouse believes herself to be an excellent matchmaker, though she herself does not plan on marrying. But as she meddles in the relationships of others, she causes confusion and misunderstandings throughout the village, and she just may be overlooking a true love of her own.

On a pilgrimage to Canterbury, a group of travellers agree to a storytelling competition. As they make their way on the road, they drink, laugh, flirt, argue and try to outdo each other with their tales. From the exuberant Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend to the Miller's worldly, ribald farce, these tales can be taken as a mirror of fourteenth-century London. Incorporating every style of medieval narrative — bawdy anecdote, allegorical fable and courtly romance — the tales encompass a blend of universal human themes, retold here for our times by bestselling author Peter Ackroyd.Endorsements'Ackroyd's retelling is compulsive, bold and rare ... as fresh as new paint' — Observer'The only version to read' — Time Out

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and has been voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country.A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable coming-of-age tale in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage iniquities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father — a crusading local lawyer — risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

Obsessed with the secret of creation, Swiss scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein cobbles together a body he’s determined to bring to life. And one fateful night, he does. When the creature opens his eyes, the doctor is repulsed: his vision of perfection is, in fact, a hideous monster. Dr. Frankenstein abandons his creation, but the monster won’t be ignored, setting in motion a chain of violence and terror that shadows Victor to his death.Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a gripping story about the ethics of creation and the consequences of trauma, is one of the most influential Gothic novels in British literature. It is as relevant today as it is haunting.

Among the vibrant cast of characters who scheme and scramble for life's prizes in this entertaining saga, no one is better equipped than Becky Sharp, Thackeray's supreme creation. Brilliant, alluring, and ruthless, she defies her poverty-stricken background to climb the social ladder, while her sentimental companion Amelia longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour of English society during the Napoleonic wars, military and domestic battles are fought and fortunes are made and lost. Amid the fast-paced comic action stands Dobbin, a true gentleman in a corrupt world, whose unrequited love for Amelia brings pathos and depth to Thackeray's epic satire.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American classics.EndorsementsThe Pulitzer Prize–winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.

Charles Ryder, a lonely student at Oxford, is captivated by the outrageous and decadent Sebastian Flyte. Invited to Brideshead, Sebastian's magnificent family home, Charles welcomes the attentions of its eccentric, artistic inhabitants, the Marchmains, becoming infatuated with them and the life of privilege they inhabit — in particular with Sebastian's remote sister, Julia. But as duty and desire, faith and happiness come into conflict and the Marchmains struggle to find their place in a changing world, Charles eventually comes to recognize his spiritual and social distance from them.

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity.

Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a "strong man" of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo's fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.

Edith Wharton's masterwork captures the opulence and deceit of a bygone era. It follows Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland in 1870s New York, when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, a lady unrestrained by convention and surrounded by scandal. Archer must choose between happiness and the social code that has governed his life as all three are dragged into a love triangle packed with sensuality, cunning, and betrayal. Irony and surprise, struggle and acceptance abound in the resulting story of failed love. This classic novel, which won the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever given to a woman, paints a timeless depiction of "society."

In recent years, neither the persistent effort to "clean up" the racial epithets in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nor its consistent use in the classroom has diminished, highlighting the novel’s wide-ranging influence and its continued importance in American society. An incomparable adventure story, it is a vignette of a turbulent yet hopeful epoch in American history, defining the experience of a nation in voices often satirical but always authentic.Of all the contenders for the title of The Great American Novel, none has a better claim than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Written against the backdrop of the nation's desire to "light out" and expand into the promised future of the West, the novel stands as a reminder of the difficulty of escaping inherited traditions. Huck and Jim's voyage portrays a turbulent yet hopeful epoch in American history, defining the experience of a nation in voices often satirical but always authentic. By turns praised, derided, banned, and celebrated, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain's enduring masterpiece, an incomparable adventure story, and a classic work of American humor.

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley's Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships.