Botchan is a modern young man from the Tokyo metropolis, sent to the ultra-traditional Matsuyama district as a Maths teacher...

Dark, desolate and fantastical, The Purple Cloud was a pioneer in the genre of apocalyptic novels, and the first great science...

Written between 1143 and 1153 by the daughter of Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, The Alexiad is one of the most popular and...

Throughout his life Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to...

A superb new translation by Judson Rosengrant of Tolstoy's semi-autobiographical trilogy

Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy,...

Set on a Bengali noble's estate in 1908, this is both a love story and a novel of political awakening. The central character,...

Mencius was one of the great philosophers of ancient China, second only in influence to Confucius, whose teachings he defended...

Headstrong and naive, the young Italian aristocrat Fabrizio del Dongo is determined to defy the wrath of his right-wing father...

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness and religious experience, and...

The Ladies' Delight is the glittering Paris department store run by Octave Mouret. He has used charm and drive to become director...

Infamous as the inspiration for the novel which slowly corrupts Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, Joris-Karl Huysmans' Against Nature (A...

Considered by Andre Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Emile Zola's Germinal is a brutal depiction...

The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical...

Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto in the thirteenth century, Vasari traces the development of Italian art across three centuries...

The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber, is one of the greatest novels of Chinese...

The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known by the title of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is the great novel of manners in...

The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), also known by the title of The Dream of the Red Chamber, is the great novel of manners in...

The Story of the Stone (с. 1760), also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber, is one of the greatest novels of Chinese...

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and...

A furiously witty response to Tobias Smollett's curmudgeonly 'Travels through France and Italy', Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental...

In the fourth of the 'Palliser' stories, Trollope follows Phineas Finn's return to the dangerous world of Westminster politics....

Channelling a razor-sharp satire through the everyday mishaps of the immortal comic character Mr Pooter, George and Weedon...

The Penguin Classics edition of Jonathan Swift's savagely satirical A Modest Proposal and Other Writings is edited with an...

Hardy described Desperate Remedies as a tale of 'mystery, entanglement, surprise and moral obliquity'.

Cytherea has taken a...

Shamela is a brilliant parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, in which a virtuous servant girl long resists her master's advances...

Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium and former Prime Minister of England, is widowed and wracked by grief. Struggling to...

Daniel Defoe's bawdy tale of a woman's struggle for independence and redemption, Moll Flanders is edited with an introduction and...

Mark Robarts is a clergyman with ambitions beyond his small country parish of Framley. In a naive attempt to mix in influential...

The ten stories collected in this volume demonstrate Tolstoy's artistic prowess displayed over five decades - experimenting with...

Lewis Carroll's anarchic, disturbing and boisterously funny Alice stories, conjured
up one afternoon to entertain a young girl,...