This selection of John Donne's most powerful prose shows that the man remembered predominantly for his poetry was also a...

Poet, education reformer, social theorist and passionate critic of Victorian England, Matthew Arnold condemned an industrial...

'This book is a record of what has moved me between Uxbridge and Dagenham. My hope is that it moves you, too.'

Nairn's London...

It had a smell of holidays. The previous evening, in Cannes harbour, with the setting sun, had also had the smell of holidays,...

One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not...

The Penguin English Library edition

Many readers would claim that The Adventure of the Copper Beeches or The Man with the...

As usual with the Sherlock Holmes stories it is very hard to say which are the best - but there are many stories here which would...

Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work...

Jane Austen's brilliant, hilarious - and often outrageous - early stories, sketches and pieces of nonsense.

Jane Austen's...

A novel of the friendships and woes of two couples, which tells the story of their lives in lyrical, evocative prose by one of...

Combining thrilling adventure with scientific facts and a wonder at the natural world, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is...

'There is only one book to a man' Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden. Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California,...

A man picked up for wandering in obvious distress among the cars and buses on the Grands Boulevards. Questioned in French, he...

She wasn't an ordinary supplicant. She didn't lower her eyes. There was nothing humble about her bearing. She spoke frankly,...

Maigret savoured the sensations of his youth again: the cold, stinging eyes, frozen fingertips, an aftertaste of coffee. Then,...

The Pearl is Steinbeck's flawless parable about wealth and the evil it can bring. When Kino, an Indian pearl-diver, finds 'the...

A charming, mind-bending and anarchic book of imagined civilizations

'Most cosmic civilizations long for things, in the depths...

He recalled his travelling companion's agitated sleep - was it really sleep? - his sighs, and his sobbing. Then the two dangling...

Arthur Koestler's extraordinary history of humanity's changing vision of the universe

In this masterly synthesis, Arthur...

Of all the extraordinary Victorian travelogues, The Malay Archipelago has a fair claim to be the greatest - both as a beautiful,...

A new translation of this gripping domestic tragedy, set in Simenon's very own neighbourhood.

One by one the lighted windows...

'A radiant late afternoon. The sunshine almost as thick as syrup in the quiet streets of the Left Bank . . .
there are days like...

'The island itself. Its throbbing heat as if in a belljar under the sun, the scorpion in his son's bed, the deafening sound of...

The Haunted Life is the coming-of-age story of Peter Martin, a college track star determined to idle away what he knows will be...

Nobel-prize winner Francois Mauriac's masterpiece is Therese Desqueyroux, the story of a complex woman trapped by provincial...

These five rich, witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her most well-known tales, 'Babette's...

'There they stood, bumbling into lines with a bit of difficulty: Mother Finland's chosen sacrifice to world history'

Unknown...

The city of Simenon's youth comes to life in this new translation of this disturbing novel set in Liege, book ten in the new...

'Let's be clear that it's not your professionalism which I question. If you understand nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing,...

It was indeed a photograph, a picture of a woman. But the face was completely hidden, scribbled all over in red ink. Someone had...