Classic Fiction

Some of our favorite classic stories

Updated April 19, 2024
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Watership Down
Adams, Richard
Paper Book
Sandleford Warren is in danger. Hazel's younger brother Fiver is convinced that a great evil is about to befall the land, but no one will listen. And why would they when it is Spring and the grass is fat and succulent? So together Hazel and Fiver and a few other brave rabbits secretly leave behind...
Little women
Alcott, Louisa May
Paper Book
One of the best loved books of all time.Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy- these are hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Through their...
Northanger Abbey
Austen, Jane
Paper Book
Austen's witty exploration of the perils of mistaking fiction for reality During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who...
The women of Troy : a novel
Barker, Pat
Paper Book
Troy has fallen and the Greek victors are primed to return home, loaded with spoils. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind does not come. The gods are offended - the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied - and so the victors remain in uneasy limbo, camped in...
A manual for cleaning women : selected stories
Berlin, Lucia.
Paper Book
Fahrenheit 451
Bradbury, Ray
Paper Book
The hauntingly prophetic classic novel set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task force of firemen. Over 1 million copies sold in the UK. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all...
Wuthering Heights
Bronte, Emily
Paper Book
One of English literature's classic masterpieces--a gripping novel of love, propriety, and tragedy. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read Emily Brontë's only novel endures as a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence....
Kindred
Butler, Octavia E.
Paper Book
Octavia E. Butler's ground-breaking masterpiece, with an original foreword by Ayòbámi Adébáyò. 'A marvel of imagination, empathy and detail' NEW YORK TIMES 'The marker you should judge all other time-travelling narratives by' GUARDIAN ...
The spy who came in from the cold
Le Carrâe, John
Paper Book
An agent, desperate to end his career as a spy during the Cold War, is caught up in a breathlessly perilous assignment to come in from the cold and re-enter the West.
Don Quixote
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
Paper Book
Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote's fancy leads them wildly astray. At the same time the...
The woman in white
Collins, Wilkie
Paper Book
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his "charming" friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for...
The last of the Mohicans
Cooper, James Fenimore
Paper Book
Cooper's most enduringly popular novel combines heroism and romance with powerful criticism of the destruction of nature and tradition. Set against the French and Indian siege of Fort William Henry in 1757,The Last of the Mohicansrecounts the story of two sisters, Cora and...
The red badge of courage
Crane, Stephen
Paper Book
Henry Fleming is an ordinary farm boy turned soldier, with romantic notions about the glory of war. But, as the tedium of his regiment's encampment without action provides ample time for self-reflection, disquieting thoughts begin to prey upon his mind: doubts as to whether, in combat, he will stand...
Robinson Crusoe
Defoe, Daniel
Paper Book
With Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote what is regarded as the first English novel, and created one of the most popular and enduring myths in literature. Written in an age of exploration and enterprise, it has been variously interpreted as an embodiment of British imperialist values, as a portrayal of...
Great expectations
Dickens, Charles
Paper Book
'His novels will endure as long as the language itself' Peter Ackroyd Dickens's haunting late novel depicts the education and development of a young man, Pip, as his life is changed by a series of events - a terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the...
Crime and punishment
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Paper Book
'Dostoyevsky's finest masterpiece' John Bayley Dostoyevsky's great novel of damnation and redemption evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur. It tells the story of Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, who wanders...
A room with a view
Forster, E. M.
Paper Book
Forster's social comedy is a witty observation of the English middle classes as they holiday abroad in Florence. One of these tourists is Lucy Honeychurch, a young girl whose heart is awakened by her experiences in Italy.
Love in the time of cholera
García Márquez, Gabriel
Paper Book
Wives and daughters
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
Paper Book
"Eh, miss, but that be a rare young lady! She do have such pretty coaxing ways ..." Seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson worships her widowed father. But when he decides to remarry, Molly's life is thrown off course by the arrival of her vain, shallow and selfish stepmother. There is...
King Solomon's mines
Haggard, H. Rider
Paper Book
Allan Quatermain, wild game hunter and explorer, narrates his adventures with Danish adventurer Sir Henry Curtis and Royal Navy Officer Captain Good. Hired by Curtis, Quatermain leads the quest to find Curtis's lost brother - who vanished while searching for the fabled diamond mines of King Solomon...
Far from the madding crowd
Hardy, Thomas
Paper Book
The classic novel of passion and courtship in rural England In Thomas Hardy's first major literary success, independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three...
The scarlet letter
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Paper Book
A dramatic, moving depiction of social defiance and social deference A stark and allegorical tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letteris a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the...
Catch-22
Heller, Joseph.
Paper Book
Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage. Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious...
The sun also rises
Hemingway, Ernest
Paper Book
Discover Ernest Hemingway's most decadent novel 'He's so damned nice and he's so awful. He's my sort of thing' Paris in the twenties- Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett...
Ayesha at last
Jalaluddin, Uzma
Paper Book
A big-hearted, captivating, modern-day Muslim Pride and Prejudice, with hijabs instead of top hats and kurtas instead of corsets.
Demon Copperhead : a novel
Kingsolver, Barbara
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES READERS BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION ...
Captains courageous
Kipling, Rudyard
Paper Book
A Penguin Classic First published in 1897, Captain Courageoustells of the high-seas adventures of Harvey Cheyne, the son of an American millionaire, who, after falling from a luxury ocean liner, is rescued by the raucous crew of the fishing ship We're Here. Obstinate and...
The call of the wild
London, Jack
Audiobook
Buck lives a content life. Half St. Bernard, half shepherd, he is top dog on a California ranch. But the gold rush in the Klondike has produced an enormous demand for sled dogs, so when a gardener at the ranch needs to pay off a gambling debt, stealing and selling Buck is a quick way to do it....
Northanger Abbey
McDermid, Val
Paper Book
Moby-Dick, or, The whale
Melville, Herman
Paper Book
'The ultimate fish story' Bob Dylan When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he has no idea of the horrors awaiting him out on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship's strange captain, Ahab, is in the grip of an obsession to...
Circe : a novel
Miller, Madeline
Paper Book
The international Number One bestseller from the author of The Song of Achilles, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction Woman. Witch. Myth. Mortal. Outcast. Lover. Destroyer. Survivor. CIRCE. In the house of Helios, god of the sun and...
Sula
Morrison, Toni.
Paper Book
'Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter' New York Times As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their...
Lolita
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich
Paper Book
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, fastidious college professor. He also likes little girls. And none more so than Lolita, who he'll do anything to possess. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? ...Or is he all of these?
The things they carried
O'Brien, Tim
Paper Book
The million copy bestseller that redefined the way the world saw war. One of the ten books - novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography - that make up our Matchbook Classics' series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist....
The bell jar
Plath, Sylvia.
Paper Book
'A modern classic.' Guardian 'A near-perfect work of art.' Joyce Carol Oates Sylvia Plath is a major cultural icon who continues to inspire new generations of female readers. The Bell Jar is one of the defining novels of the 20th century....
All quiet on the western front
Remarque, Erich Maria
Paper Book
** NOW A HIT NETFLIX FILM, WINNER OF 7 BAFTAS AND 4 OSCARS, INCLUDING BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE** One by one the boys begin to fall... In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the...
The plot against America
Roth, Philip.
Paper Book
'He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive' Guardian 'Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the next...
Franny and Zooey
Salinger, J. D.
Paper Book
No Marketing Blurb
Home fire
Shamsie, Kamila
Paper Book
_______________ WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION WINNER OF THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN, EVENING STANDAND AND NEW YORK TIMES _______________...
Frankenstein : or, The modern Prometheus
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paper Book
Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear....
The prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Spark, Muriel.
Paper Book
When an unbridled schoolmistress with advanced ideas is in her prime the classroom can take on a new identity and no one can predict what will happen. Jean Brodie is a teacher whose unconventional ideas put her at odds with the other members of staff at the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh, as she...
Of mice and men
Steinbeck, John
Paper Book
Streetwise George and his big, childlike friend Lennie are drifters, searching for work in the fields and valleys of California. They have nothing except the clothes on their back, and a hope that one day they'll find a place of their own and live the American dream. But dreams come at a price....
Dracula
Stoker, Bram
Paper Book
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England- an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman...
Uncle Tom's cabin, or, Life among the lowly
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Paper Book
Vanity fair : a novel without a hero
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Paper Book
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however, longs only for caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their...
War and peace
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Paper Book
In Russia's struggle with Napoleon, Tolstoy saw a tragedy that involved all mankind. Greater than a historical chronicle, War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself, 'a complete picture', as a contemporary reviewer put it, 'of everything in which people find their happiness and greatness,their...
The Eustace diamonds
Trollope, Anthony
Paper Book
'She liked lies...To lie readily and cleverly, recklessly and yet successfully, was, according to the lessons which she had learned, a necessity in a woman'Lizzie Eustace is young, beautiful, and widowed. Her determination to hold on to the Eustace family's diamond necklace in the face of legal...
The adventures of Tom Sawyer
Twain, Mark
Paper Book
Mark Twain's hymn to the secure and fantastic world of boyhood and adventure From the famous episodes of the whitewashed fence and the ordeal in the cave to the trial of Injun Joe, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is redolent of life in the Mississippi River towns in which Twain...
20,000 leagues under the sea
Verne, Jules
Paper Book
Ethan Frome
Wharton, Edith
Paper Book
Ethan works his unproductive farm, and struggles to maintain an existence with his suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.
The picture of Dorian Gray
Wilde, Oscar
Paper Book
'A triumph of execution ... one of the best narratives of the "double life" of a Victorian gentleman' Peter Ackroyd Oscar Wilde's alluring novel of decadence and sin was a succès de scandale on publication. It follows Dorian Gray who, enthralled by his own exquisite portrait,...
Frankissstein : a love story
Winterson, Jeanette
Paper Book
***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019*** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMEDY WOMEN IN PRINT PRIZE 2020** **LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2020** A radical love story for right now, from 'one of the most gifted writers working today' (New York Times)<...

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