Fiction

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.

A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'. They regard this disallusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

The circus arrives without warning. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Against the grey sky the towering tents are striped black and white. A sign hanging upon iron gates reads: Opens at Nightfall Closes at Dawn As dusk shifts to twilight, tiny lights begin to flicker all over the tents, as though the whole circus is covered in fireflies. When the tents are aglow, sparkling against

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a stor

Jeanette is adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves.

Now a major BBC drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch

'Only Ian McEwan could write about loss with such telling honesty' Benedict Cumberbatch

On a routine trip to the supermarket with his daughter one Saturday morning, Stephen Lewis, a well-known writer of children's books, turns his back momentarily.

He is a true artist' New York Times Book ReviewBilly Pilgrim - hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier - has become unstuck in time.

This book is from the award-winning translators of "Crime and Punishment", Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. "The Brothers Karamazov" is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving Karamazov and his three sons - the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy young novice Alyosha. Throu

A troubled young man commits the perfect crime - the murder of a vile pawnbroker whom no one will miss. Raskolnikov is desperate for money, but convinces himself that his motive for the murder is to benefit mankind. So begins one of the greatest novels ever written, a journey into the criminal mind, a police thriller, and a philosophical meditation on morality and redemption.

The epic tale of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge, in its definitive translationThrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If.

When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy. This book introduces love's fascinating possibilities and extremities.

'I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language ... a very funny book' William S. Burroughs

Fifteen-year-old Alex doesn't just like ultra-violence - he also enjoys rape, drugs and Beethoven's ninth.

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.

Holly Golightly, glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while down. She's up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She's a shoplifter, a delight, a drifter, and a tease. She hasn't got a past. She doesn't want to belong to anything or anyone. Not to 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town. Not

Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except the clothes on their back - and a dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch in California's Salinas Valley, but their hopes are dashed as Lennie - struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and feelings of jealousy

A dazzling speculative novel of 'counterfactual history' from one of America's most highly-regarded science fiction authors, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle includes an introduction by Eric Brown in Penguin Modern Classics. Philip K. Dick's acclaimed cult novel gives us a horrifying glimpse of an alternative world - one where the Allies have lost the Second World War.

The best-known of Shirley Jackson's novels and a major inspiration for writers like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King as well as the hit Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House is a chilling story of the power of fear

The Penguin English Library Edition of Persuasion by Jane Austen'Her attachment and regrets had, for a long time, clouded every enjoyment of youth; and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect'Persuasion, Jane Austen's last novel, is a moving, masterly and elegiac love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "Oliver Twist" by Charles Dickens. 'A parish child - the orphan of a workhouse - the humble, half-starved drudge - to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none'. Dark, mysterious and mordantly funny, "Oliver Twist" features some of the most memorably drawn villains in all of fiction - the treacherous gangmaster F

The Penguin English Library Edition of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville