Secondhand Classics

Daniel Defoe's bawdy tale of a woman's struggle for independence and redemption, Moll Flanders is edited with an introduction and notes by David Blewett in Penguin Classics.Born in Newgate prison...

A new one-volume edition of this classic sequence of sea novels set in the early nineteenth century, about a voyage from England to Australia.Rites of Passage (Winner of the Booker...

THE SUNDAY TIMES LITERARY NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014. THE ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014. For more than a decade, the book now considered the most important novel...

Originally published in 1953, this novel was immediately hailed as a rare sweep of color across the drab post-war years. Fermor's writing about this tropical island is as beautiful and...

The tales of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad. When Mole goes boating with the Water Rat instead of spring-cleaning, he discovers a new world. As well as the river and...

Tolstoy's lightly fictionalized account of his own early experience ranks with Turgenev's Sportsman's Notebook as a masterpiece of nineteenth-century Russian pastoral life. Peasants and soldiers, servants and aristocrats: the whole...

'I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D....

In the city of Johannesburg a father seeks his delinquent son. His search takes him through a labyrinth of murder, prostitution, racial hatred and, ultimately, reconciliation. In CRY, THE BELOVED...

Flannery O'Connor's second and final novel, a dark and absorbing southern Gothic conflict between the sacred and the profane.The Violent Bear It Away was described on its publication as 'one...

HEART OF DARKNESS*AN OUTPOST OF PROGRESS*KARAIN*YOUTH The finest of all Conrad's tales, 'Heart of Darkness' is set in an atmosphere of mystery and menace, and tells of Marlow's perilous journey...

Kipling's epic rendition of the imperial experience in India is also his greatest long work. Two men - Kim, a boy growing into early manhood and the lama, an old...

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''Brilliant ... very probably the funniest book ever written' Sunday TimesWhen sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides...

Rebecca Randall is one of seven fatherless children, but is full of fun and strange ideas. She leaves her family at Sunnybrook Farm and goes to live with her two...

This selection of twenty-one short stories by M.R. James--a first-class writer of supernatural fiction--represents his best work, including "Count Magnus," "The Rose Garden," "The Uncommon Prayer-book," "Rats," "The Malice of...

This richly annotated edition takes a fresh look at the first part of Shakespeare's second tetralogy of history plays, showing how it relates to the other plays in the sequence....

This is one of the finest adventures of science and exploration ever written. When Axel deciphers an old parchment that describes a secret passage through a volcano to the centre...

The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, tells the story of Anthony Patch, a 1920s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune, the relationship with his wife...

'A brilliantly and preposterously funny book' Guardian'A flawless comic novel ... I loved it then, as I do now. It has always made me laugh out loud' Helen Dunmore, The...

The Great Gatsby lives in a luxurious Long Island mansion, playing lavish host to hundreds of people, and yet no-one seems to know him or how he became so rich....

'If we wish to know the force of human genius we should read Shakespeare' William HazlittA soldier of great standing and a newly married man, Othello seems to be in...

A THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019'The best introduction to the plays I've read, perhaps the best book on Shakespeare, full stop' Alex Preston, Observer'It makes you impatient to...

Immortalized in these famous stories, G.K. Chesterton's endearing amateur sleuth has entertained countless generations of readers. For, as his admirers know, Father Brown's cherubic face and unworldly simplicity, his glasses...

This Norton Critical Edition of Hamlet features a newly edited text based on the Second Quarto (1604-05). It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations and appendices providing important passages from...

Drunk and bitter at the world, the young Michael Henchard sells his wife to a sailor at Weydon Priors fair. The next morning he vows to give up drink and...

Heart of Darkness is a short and vividly brutal account of colonial enterprise that has as much in common with the jaded Evelyn Waugh of Black Mischief as it does...

George Eliot's own favourite novel centres on Silas Marner, the linen weaver of Raveloe, a village on the brink of industrialization. He was once a respected member of a narrow...