Series: Penguin classics

Romance follows Ada and Van from their first childhood meeting through eight years of rapture. The story exhibits some of the perversity of 'Lolita' but also much more playfulness.

This is the fictional autobiography of a rumbustious adventurer and poker-player who sets off from his native Chicago in the spirit of a latter-day Columbus to rediscover the world - and more especially, 20th century America.

Tom Sawyer and his friends play truant from school and set off for an island near their home town. Here they decide to play pirates but their game is interrupted when they witness a murder. Tom has to grow up very quickly and do the right thing.

"The Aeneid" of Virgil (70-19 BC) describes the legendary origin of the Roman nation. It tells of the Trojan prince Aeneas who escaped, with some followers, after Troy fell and sailed to Italy. Here they settled and laid the foundations of Roman power.

Des Esseintes is a neurasthenic aristocrat who has turned his back on the vulgarity of modern life and retreated to an isolated country villa, where he pursues his obsessions with exotic flowers, rare gems and complex perfumes. The original handbook of decadence, this novel enjoys a cult following.

The accounts given by Bede and Eddius give the reader an idea of 6th and 7th century life in Britain as Roman Episcopal orthodoxy clashed with the monasticism that was spreading over Ireland and Northern England.

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes of dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries and identity.

Concerned that her son Chad may have become involved with a woman of dubious reputation, the formidable Mrs Newsome sends her 'ambassador' Strether from Massachusetts to Paris to extricate him. Strether's mission, however, is undermined as he falls under the spell of the city.

These five witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her well-known tales, Babette's Feast, which was made into the classic film. The book also contains The Diver, Tempests, The Immortal Story and The Ring.

Twenty-one, passionate and headstrong, Ann Veronica Stanley is determined to live her own life. When her father forbids her from attending a fashionable ball, she decides to leave home and make a new life in London. There she finds she can be truly free - until she falls in love with Capes, a mar...

Set in the Potteries, the region in which Bennett spent much of his youth, this is the story of a miser's daughter who inherits a fortune. She stands out as a spirited, complex modern woman in a stifling and repressive society.

Anne, now Mrs Doctor Blythe, is still sometimes as impetuous as when she was the girl from Green Gables. But with six lively children and hard-worked Gilbert to look after, Anne has to be practical too. Especially when the children get into as many scrapes as she ever did.

A malicious expose of the literary jet-set, when Answered Prayers first appeared in excerpts in Esquire magazine it outraged Capote's society friends. An amoral, bisexual author discovers that bed-hopping is the way to get published.

E.M. Forster describes the driving force behind this book as the effort to see through novels, not round them. This edition includes an introduction by Frank Kermode, which discusses the ways in which Forster's perspective as a novelist inspired his lectures.

This volume gathers 7 of the very best of Henry James's short stories, all exploring the relationship between art and life.

In the 'The Turn of the Screw' a governess is sent to take charge of two orphans. Unsettled by a sense of evil, she thinks that something malevolent is stalking the children. 'The Aspern Papers' tells the tale of a literary historian determined to get his hands on the letters of a great poet.

In the 'The Turn of the Screw' a governess is sent to take charge of two orphans. Unsettled by a sense of evil, she thinks that something malevolent is stalking the children. 'The Aspern Papers' tells the tale of a literary historian determined to get his hands on the letters of a great poet.

The undergraduate narrator of this novel lives with his uncle in Dublin, drinks too much and invents stories peopled with hilarious and unlikely characters, one of whom creates a means by which women can give birth to full-grown people.

Written shortly before his assassination in 1965, this autobiography of Malcolm X traces his life from its violent beginnings in the Harlem Ghetto to his becoming one of the most important political figures of his time, and an icon in ours.