Penguin Modern Classics

'All animals are equal - but some are more equal than others' When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them,

James Joyce's Dubliners is an enthralling collection of modernist short stories which create a vivid picture of the day-to-day experience of Dublin life. This Penguin Classics edition includes notes and an introduction by Terence Brown. Joyce's first major work, written when he was only

'When I opened my eyes and sat up in bed Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.' Ex-detective Nick Charles attracts trouble like a magnet. He thinks his sleuthing days are over, but when Julia Wolf, a former acquaintance, is found dead, her body

Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel, follows the interwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck

"You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that." E.M. Forster is best known for his exquisite novels, but these two affecting short stories brilliantly combine the fantastical with the allegorical.

'No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's' Exploring the primordial nightmares that lurk within humanity's dreams of progress and technology, H. G. Wells was a science fiction

'One of the most important American novels of the twentieth century' The Times 'It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves' Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible 'simply

Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of

Equally tragic, joyful and comical, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a seamless blend of fantasy and reality, translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa in Penguin Modern Classics. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great masterpiece is the story

Written in Berlin in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading contains all the surprise, excitement and magical intensity of a work created in two brief weeks of sustained inspiration. It takes us into the fantastic prison-world of Cincinnatus, a man condemned to death and spending his last days in prison

'There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks; it is most confusing. The parapet of a trench which we don't occupy is built up with ammunition boxes and corpses .

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the

All the King's Men is considered the finest novel ever written on American politics. Set in the 1930s, this book traces the rise and fall of Willie Stark, who resembles the real-life Huey 'Kingfish' Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon

Arthur Miller's play A View from the Bridge is a tragic masterpiece of the inexorable unravelling of a man, set in a close-knit Italian-American community in 1950s New York. Eddie Carbone is a longshoreman and a straightforward man, with a strong sense of decency and of honour. For Eddie, it's a

Meet the fat, flatulent and eloquent Ignatius J. Reilly in John Kennedy Toole's light and pithy comic tale A Confederacy of Dunces, beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. 'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics,