Mr Polly is an ordinary middle-aged man who is tired of his wife's nagging and his dreary job as the owner of a regional gentleman's outfitters. Faced with the threat of bankruptcy, he concludes that the only way to escape his frustra...

In this thought-provoking masterpiece, H. G. Wells predicts the invention of the atomic bomb, which inadvertently leads to mass destruction and forces the world to 'start over.

H. G. Wells sets forth an intriguing first-hand observation of Italy, France and Britain under severe duress during the 'War to End All Wars,' World War I. He insightfully examines the technological effects of modern warfare, particul...

Edith Wharton's most widely read work is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village. This brilliantly wrought, tragic novella explores the repressed emotions a...

This edition presents Wharton's two most controversial stories, which she considered inseperable, in one volume for the first time. Set in frigid New England, both deal with sexual awakening and appetite and their devastating consequ...

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves an ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies.

Edith Wharton's masterful portrait of desire and betrayal during the sumptuous Golden Age of Old New York, a time when society people 'dreaded scandal more than disease.

Wharton’s sly and delicious novel about the ambitious social ascent of Undine Spragg, now in a Penguin Vitae edition, with a foreword by Sofia Coppola A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Considered by many to be her master...

Ralph Waldo Emerson issued a call for a great poet to capture and immortalize the unique American experience. In 1855, an answer came with Leaves of Grass.  Today, this masterful collection remains not only a seminal event in Ame...

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 daz...

William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life. As the years...

Owen Wister's powerful story of the silent stranger who rides into the uncivilized West and defeats the forces of evil embodies one of the most enduring themes in American mythology.

Five of the earliest and freshest of the Jeeves and Bertie stories are collected in this volume. The titles are: "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest," "Leave It to Jeeves," "Jeeves and the Hardboiled Egg," &qu...

One of the greatest comedy writers of all time for classic humor, pure nostalgia, and lovers of farceSince Lord Emsworth first appeared, his shambling gait, incoherent English, and lack of stomach for a fight have persuaded friends an...

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse KBE (15 October 1881 - 14 February 1975) was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, ...

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse KBE (15 October 1881 - 14 February 1975) was an English author and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, ...

"The funniest writer ever to put words to paper."  —Hugh Laurie The latest Jeeves offering from Martin Jarvis contains five unabridged stories starring Jeeves and Wooster: Jeeves and the Kid Clementia, The Love that Puri...

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." First published in 1929, Virginia Woolf's pioneering work on women in literature is an accessible yet fiercely astute essay. It is a crystallizatio...

In The Voyage Out, one of Virginia Woolf's wittiest, most socially satirical novels, Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage.

Published in 1931, 'The Wavesis perhaps the most challenging and experimental of Virginia Woolf's novels. As they move from childhood to maturity, the personalities of six friends are revealed through interior monologues. Elliptical, ...

To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf's arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an O...

'Listen, Stranger!'Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint collection of poems has often been singled out as the founding text of English Romanticism. Within this initially unassuming, anonymous volume were many of the poems that came to de...

Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II, which begins with The Winds of War and continues in War and Remembrance, stands as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers. Like no other books about the w...

Set in the 1860s in northern France, Zola's masterpiece of naturalistic fiction portrays the hardships of a mining community in which backbreaking physical exertion is undertaken for starvation wages. Étienne Lantier, an unemployed m...

His Excellency Eugène Rougon is set in the world of high politics and low characters during the Second Empire. The main protagonist, Eugène Rougon, is an determined and ruthless politician surrounded by a coterie of ambitious and gr...

New York Times bestselling author Mark Kurlansky's deft translation brings new life to Emile Zola's rich characters and stunning depiction of Les Halles, the food markets of 1850s ParisThe Belly of Paris is the dramatic story of Flore...

Perhaps the most autobiographical of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels, The Masterpiece is a hard, bleak, and raw portrait of unrecognised artistic genius. Claude Lantier, brother to Nana and son of Gervaise, is a struggling pain...

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Samuel Beckett, the recipient of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the greatest writers of our century, first published these ten short stories in 1934; they originally formed part of an unfinished novel. They trace the c...

An orphaned girl, a grim moorland manor with hundreds of empty rooms, strange cries in the night, and a walled garden, with its door locked and the key buried. These are the ingredients of one of the most famous and well-loved of chil...