Collins Classics

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. The young Rachel Vinrance leaves England on her father's ship, the Euphrosyne, on a voyage to South America. Despite being accompanied by her father and her aunt and uncle, Helen and Ridley Ambrose, the

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'In fact, the fairies had turned him into a water-baby. A water-baby? You never heard of a water-baby. Perhaps not. That is the very reason why this story was written.' Poor Tom is an orphan, employed by

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Kate Croy is a beautiful but impoverished young woman forced to live with her successful but astringent Aunt, Maude Lower. Lower intends Kate to marry the aristocratic Lord Mark, but she is already in love

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Considered one of Shakespeare's most haunting tragic-comedies, The Winter's Tale is an in-depth analysis of the psychology of family and friendship, jealousy and love, art and nature, all illustrated in rich

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Grace Melbury, the only daughter of a timber-merchant, arrives home in Little Hintock after an expensive education and her father looks to find a husband for her. There are two rivals for her hand: Giles

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Thomas Hughes' novel about the mischievous but kind-hearted schoolboy Tom Brown inspired other school novels, including Frank Richards' Billy Bunter stories and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. The novel

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'One thing is certain, - that there is a mustering among the masses, the world over; and there is a dis irae coming on, sooner or later.' Viewed by many as fuelling the abolitionist movement of the 1850s

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts...' Self-serving social climber and anti-heroine Becky Sharp will do anything to raise her status

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Sleep went quite away. I used to rise in the night, look round for her, beseech her earnestly to return. A rattle of the window, a cry of the blast only replied - Sleep never came!' Based on Charlotte

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Likened to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, What Katy Did Next is a timeless classic for both children and adults to enjoy. The story of Katy Carr, the lanky, good-hearted tomboy who learns to be gentle

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.' Isabel Archer is a beautiful, intelligent and independent young woman. Brought from America to England by her wealthy Aunt who seeks to

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books; for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved, and the heart.' Set in 16th-Century England and

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Set in the fictional country of Ruritania, The Prisoner of Zenda tells the story of Rudolf Rassendyll, identical cousin to King Rudolf of Ruritania, who must stand in for the king at his coronation when a

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The Professor' is Charlotte Bronte's first novel, reflecting her own experience of life in Brussels and published after her untimely death. Viewed as a precursor to the narrative style and characterisation

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. '...when the Green Dragon tore shrieking out of the mouth of its dark lair, which was the tunnel, all three children stood on the railing and waved their pocket-handkerchiefs without stopping to think whether

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'He felt that in this crisis his laws of life were useless. Whatever he had learned of himself was here of no avail. He was an unknown quantity.' Following one soldier's journey from naive recruit to

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Don't you sometimes feel that this is the kind of life we were meant to live on this earth? Everything we need, everything, right here, right at our fingertips.' Said to be inspired by Daniel Defoe's

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Bianca is beautiful and demure, with a plethora of wood-be suitors, but marriage is forbidden until her older sister Katherina finds a suitable match. The hitch? Fiery Katherina has sworn to deny the hand or

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being miserable one-half his days and mad the other.' When Helen flees from her alcoholic husband in order to protect her son she defies societal

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I snapped the switch, but there was nobody there. Then I saw something in the far corner which made me drop my cigar and fall into a cold sweat.' When Richard Hannay is warned of an assassination plot that

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The place, with its grey sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theatre after the performance-all strewn with crumpled playbills.' Revered as one of the greatest

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'There is no harm in a man's cub.' Best known for the 'Mowgli' stories, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book expertly interweaves myth, morals, adventure and powerful story-telling. Set in Central India,

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The movements of his mind seemed to tend to the thought that some power was working against him.' When Henchard, an out-of-work hay-trusser gets drunk and sells his wife at a country fair, his life will

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven' Bassiano, a noble Venetian, hopes to woo the beautiful heiress Portia. However, he requires financial assistance from his

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The horrid mystery hanging over us in this house gets into my head like liquor, and makes me wild.' Centred around a glorious yellow diamond that carries with it a menacing history, The Moonstone tells the

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Alas that mortals Should blame the gods! From us, they say, All evils come. Yet they themselves It is who through defiant deeds Bring sorrow on them-far more sorrow Than fate would have them bear.'

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, John Bunyan's masterful religious allegory, narrates the journey of an everyman hero, Christian, as he attempts to navigate the trials and tribulations of this world, the City of

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!' Challenging the hypocrisy and social

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.' Huck Finn escapes from his

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. Written between 29 and 19 B.C., The Aeneid tells the legendary tale of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the heroic ancestor of the Romans. This epic poem tells the story of Aeneas' nomadic

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that - categories like that - won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he remains one of the most important voices of Bengali culture to this day. Tagore's poetry continues to

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The red and yellow tulips, heavy with flowers, seemed to lean upon the dusk. A grey cat, dragging its belly, crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed after.' Powerful and evocative, each

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.' Set in the

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not.' In his

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.' Written at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Persuasion is a tale of love,

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on.' Dramatic and powerful in its scope, Othello explores the perils of suspicion and jealousy and the

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. '...for her, life was as cold as an attic with a window looking to the north, and ennui, like a spider, was silently spinning its shadowy web in every cranny of her heart.' Married to Charles, a provincial

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ’I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.' Humble and lowly, a

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'We're their slaves as long as we can work; we pile up their fortunes with the sweat of our brows, and yet we are to live as separate as if we were in two worlds...' Based in the industrial unrest of 1840s