The Penguin English Library edition of North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell 'How am I to dress up in my finery, and go off and away to smart parties, after the sorrow I have seen today?' Elizabeth Gaskell's compassionate, richly dramatic novel features one of the most original and fully-rounded female characters in Victorian fiction, Margaret Hale. It shows how, forced to move from the country to an industrial northern town, she develops a passionate sense of social justice, and a turbulent relationship with mill-owner John Thornton. North and South depicts a young woman discovering herself, in a nuanced portrayal of what divides people, and what brings them together. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

'Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party.

In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps the most pervasively influential book of the twentieth century.

Shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2024

Enthralling and ferociously funny, James by Percival Everett is a profound meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love. It is also a bold reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as the enslaved Jim emerges to reclaim his voice and defy the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.

The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan.

Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most dangerous, and life-changing, odyssey of them all . . .

In 1943, there was an urgent need for Animal Farm. The Soviet Union had become Britain’s ally in the war against Nazi Germany, and criticism of Stalin’s brutal regime was either censored or discouraged. In any case, many intellectuals on the left still celebrated the Soviet Union, claiming that the terrors of its show trials, summary executions and secret police were either exaggerated or necessary. But, to Orwell, Stalin was always a “disgusting murderer” and he wanted to remind people of this fact in a powerful and memorable way. But how to do it? A political essay would never reach a wide enough audience; a traditional novel would take too long to write. Orwell hit on the inspired idea of combining the moralism of the traditional ‘beast fable’ with the satire of Gulliver’s Travels.

A group of farmyard animals, led by the pigs, overthrow their human masters. Their revolution is inspired by high ideals: the farm will be run in the interests of its animals with no more slaughtering, plenty of food for all and comfort in retirement. But when Napoleon the pig takes command, he quickly corrupts their principles, creating a new tyranny worse than the old.

Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the middle of the Second World War, but at first no publishers wanted to touch it. It was finally published in August 1945, once the war was over. This little book quickly became a seminal text in the emerging ‘cold war’ (a phrase that Orwell himself coined). It also became a site of that conflict itself, suffering various attempts to subvert or change its meaning. Today, Animal Farm remains a powerful fable about the nature of tyranny and corruption which applies for all ages.

Our edition also includes the following essays:

• Shooting an Elephant;
• Charles Dickens;
• Inside the Whale;
• The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda;
• Literature and Totalitarianism;
• Fascism and Democracy;
• Patriots and Revolutionaries;
• Catastrophic Gradualism;
• Some Thoughts on the Common Toad;
• Why I Write;
• Writers and Leviathan

Having firmly established the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was retained by The Strand Magazine to contribute a series of twelve short stories, which began with 'A Scandal in Bohemia' in 1891 and were published monthly for the next year. The stories, in which the master sleuth receives a stream of clients presenting him with baffling and bizarre mysteries in his consulting room at 221B Baker Street, were instantly popular and by the time of the publication of the final story, 'The Copper Beeches', they had become the mainstay of the magazine. They included such classic tales as 'The Five Orange Pips' and 'The Adventure of the Speckled Band', and were gathered together in a collection known as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, representing some of the finest detective stories ever written.

Brave New World predicts - with eerie clarity - a terrifying vision of the future. Read the dystopian classic. EVERYONE BELONGS TO EVERYONE ELSE Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieved peace and stability through the prohibition of monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills. Discover the brave new world of Aldous Huxley's classic novel, written in 1932, which prophesied a society which expects maximum pleasure and accepts complete surveillance - no matter what the cost. 'A masterpiece of speculation... As vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I first read it' Margaret Atwood, bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale 'A grave warning... Provoking, stimulating, shocking and dazzling' Observer **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

 Five men survive a South Seas shipwreck and wash up on a seemingly deserted beach, only to discover that five beautiful, winged women inhabit the island. Dazzled and soon in love, the men will do anything to possess these flying women . . . but what they plan, and how the magical women respond, is tellingly—and predictably—human.

First published in 1914, and praised by Ursula K. LeGuin as “a real rediscovery—romantic, satiric, funny, fanciful, and a good read,” Angel Island is an adventure story and a genre-defining tale about women’s rights. 

A non-fiction classic from Orwell. Part I documents his sociological investigations of the living conditions amongst the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England in the 1930s. Part II covers his middle-class upbringing, the development of his political conscience, and a discussion of British attitudes towards socialism.

As literary political fiction, 1984 is considered a classic novel of the social science fiction subgenre. Since its publication in 1949, many of its terms and concepts, such as Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, and Memory hole, have become contemporary vernacular. In addition, the novel popularised the adjective Orwellian, which refers to lies, surveillance, and manipulation of the past in the service of a totalitarian agenda. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked 1984 13th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. This edition includes footnotes, Appendix, and a new introduction.

Little Women is one of the best-loved children's stories of all time, based on the author's own youthful experiences. It describes the family of the four March sisters living in a small New England community. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and wishes to be a lady; Jo, at fifteen is ungainly and unconventional with an ambition to be an author; Beth is a delicate child of thirteen with a taste for music and Amy is a blonde beauty of twelve. The story of their domestic adventures, their attempts to increase the family income, their friendship with the neighbouring Laurence family, and their later love affairs remains as fresh and beguiling as ever.

Great Expectations was first published as a weekly serial in All the Year Round, December 1860 - August 1861. Its first appearance in volume form was as three-volume novel, without illustrations, in July 1861. A one-volume edition, the next year, preceded its inclusion in the collected editions of Dickens's lifetime. The three-volume 1861 edition is the basis of the present text: variant readings, including those in manuscript and extant proofs, are recorded in the textual apparatus, providing an unusually rich source of information on Dickens's methods of composition. The Introduction traces this process of composition and draws attention to the two unperformed dramatic adaptations: the reading version and the 1861 play version, made as a safeguard of copyright. Appendices include the original ending, the author's notes, and two textual examinations, one of the five so-called `editions' of 1861, the other a comparison of the one-volume 1862 edition with the 1864 Library edition.

The Thought Police, Doublethink, Newspeak, Big Brother - 1984 itself: these terms and concepts have moved from the world of fiction into our everyday lives. They are central to our thinking about freedom and its suppression; yet they were newly created by George Orwell in 1949 as he conjured his dystopian vision of a world where totalitarian power is absolute. In this novel, continuously popular since its first publication, readers can explore the dark and extraordinary world he brought so fully to life. The principal characters who lead us through that world are ordinary human beings like ourselves: Winston Smith and Julia, whose falling in love is also an act of rebellion against the Party. Opposing them are the massed powers of the state, which watches its citizens on all sides through technology now only too familiar to us. No-one is free from surveillance; the past is constantly altered, so that there is no truth except the most recent version; and Big Brother, both loved and feared, controls all. Even the simple act of keeping a diary - as Winston does - is punishable by death. In Winston's battle to keep his freedom of thought, he has a powerful adversary in O'Brien, who uses fear and pain to enter his very thought processes. Does 2+2 = 4? Or is it 5? We find out in Room 101. Nineteen Eighty-Four was Orwell's last novel; but the world he created is always with us, as successive generations of readers find within it a mirror for their own times and a warning for the future. Our edition also includes the following selection of Orwell's essays, column extracts and broadcasts: A Hanging; Spilling the Spanish Beans; Reviews of Jack London, The Iron Heel; H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Awakes; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ernest Bramah, The Secret of the League ; England Your England; Looking Back on the Spanish War; Arthur Koestler; The Prevention of Literature; Politics and the English Language; Why I Write; Politics Vs Literature; Sir Walter Raleigh; The Three Super-States of the Future; Persecution of Writers in USSR; Literature and Totalitarianism; Imaginary Interview: George Orwell and Jonathan Swift

This volume collects more than forty detective tales published in the same years that Sherlock Holmes earned his formidable reputation as the Great Detective. It includes stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others that broke ground for the detective story, as well as featuring lady sleuths in stories by Wilkie Collins, Richard Marsh, Anna Katherine Green, and others. Also included are Sherlockian Satires and Homages, in the form of respectful and comic riffs on Sherlock Holmes and his methods by Henry, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and others.

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction and Notes by Agnes Cardinal, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in the frantic amatory and financial intrigues which centre around a cast of brilliantly realised characters and which ultimately lead to tragedy, he emerges as a unique combination of the Christian ideal of perfection and Dostoevsky's own views, afflictions and manners. His serene selflessness is contrasted with the worldly qualities of every other character in the novel. Dostoevsky supplies a harsh indictment of the Russian ruling class of his day who have created a world which cannot accomodate the goodness of this idiot.

"This Side of Paradise" was published in 1920. The novel explores the lives and morality of post-World War I youth and the theme of love corrupted by greed. "The Beautiful and the Damned" is about a 1920s socialite and his relationship with his wife, his service in the army and his alcoholism. It explores the themes of love, money and decadence. "The Great Gatsby" was first published in 1925 and quickly became a classic novel. The Modern Library named it the second best English-language novel of the 20th Century. Set in 1922 America is enjoying the roaring twenties, however Prohibition has made alcohol an illegal substance and hence the bootleggers are making a killing. "Tender Is the Night" is the final complete novel that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, it was published in 1934. It explores complex relationships and mental health issues, it is quite dark at times.