Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Thomas Hardy

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Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 
 
In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtitled 'A Story of a Man of Character', Hardy's powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town.

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin’s debut novel follows the vivacious and rebellious sixteen-year-old Sybylla Melvyn – closely modelled on Franklin herself – as she fights to break free of restrictive bush life. Growing up on her parents’ outback farm, Sybylla is desperate to read, write, sing and achieve great things. Yet her aspirations for a ‘brilliant career’ are persistently thwarted, first by the arduous demands of rural family life, and later by the shackles of a proposed conventional marriage to the wealthy Harold Beecham. With only her brilliant, conflicted mind to guide her, Sybylla is forced to define a life on her own terms. 
 
My Brilliant Career is acclaimed for capturing the spirit of Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. The struggles of its fiery, precocious protagonist shine a light on the emergent women’s rights and suffrage movement during this period, and memorably evoke the intensity of youth.

My Brilliant Career

Charles Dickens

Now a major film directed by Armando Iannucci, starring Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw 
 
Dickens's great coming-of-age novel, now in a beautiful clothbound Penguin edition 
 
This is the novel Dickens regarded as his 'favourite child' and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experiences from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the 'umble Uriah Heep, along with Mr Micawber, a portrait of Dickens's own father which evokes a mixture of love, nostalgia and guilt. 
Dickens's great Bildungsroman (based, in part, on his own boyhood) is a work filled with life, both comic and tragic. 
 
 
Charles Dickens (1812-70) had his first, astounding success with his first novel The Pickwick Papers and never looked back. In an extraordinarily full life he wrote, campaigned and spoke on a huge range of issues, and was involved in many of the key aspects of Victorian life, by turns cajoling, moving and irritating. He completed fourteen full-length novels and volume after volume of journalism. Of all his many works, he called David Copperfield his 'favourite child'. 
Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester.

David Copperfield

George Orwell

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.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Annotated Edition

Penguin Modern Classics

Elizabeth Gaskell

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Gaskell's best known work is set in a small rural town, inhabited largely by women. This is a community that runs on cooperation and gossip, at the very heart of which are the daughters of the former rector: Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister Miss Matty. But domestic peace is constantly threatened in the form of financial disaster, imagined burglaries, tragic accidents, and the reapparance of long-lost relatives.

Cranford

Vladimir Nabokov

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 new ones; the search for a suitable boarding house; and the trials of taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has yet to master.

Pnin

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality, colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 
 
Jude Fawley's hopes of an education at Christminster University are dashed when he is trapped into marrying the wild, earthy Arabella, who later abandons him. Moving to Christminster to work as a stonemason, Jude falls in love with Sue Bridehead, a sensitive, free-thinking 'New Woman'. Refusing to marry merely for the sake of religious convention, Jude and Sue decide instead to live together, but they are shunned by society, and poverty soon threatens to ruin them. Jude the Obscure, with its fearless and challenging exploration of class and sexual relationships, caused a public furore when it was first published and marked the end of Hardy's career as a novelist.

Jude the Obscure

Shirley Jackson

Hunting for evidence of the occult, Dr Montague invites three participants to Hill House: Theodora, his lovely assistant; Luke, set to inherit the estate; and Eleanor, a fragile young woman with a troubled past. As The House takes hold, Jackson plumbs the depths of the human condition, asking the electric question: will any of them make it out? This definitive horror novel blurs the lines between reality and imagination, between dream and nightmare. Beautiful, atmospheric and utterly terrifying, Jackson&rsquo;s magnum opus examines the shadows that lurk not just in cobwebbed corners, but in the facets of our very minds.

The Haunting of Hill House

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. 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? Humbert Humbert's seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures.

Lolita

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 
 
When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy's novels.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Penguin Classics

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with Porfiry, a suspicious detective, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murderer, Dostoyevsky's dark masterpiece evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone's faith in humanity is tested.

Crime and Punishment

Sam Selvon

At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo? But the irrepressible newcomer cannot be cast down. He and all the other lonely new Londoners - from shiftless Cap to Tolroy, whose family has descended on him from Jamaica - must try to create a new life for themselves. As pessimistic 'old veteran' Moses watches their attempts, they gradually learn to survive and come to love the heady excitements of London.

The Lonely Londoners

Jules Verne

One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days.  Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout.  Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand - whether train or elephant - overcoming set-backs and always racing against the clock.

Around the World in Eighty Days

Set in Hardy's fictional realm of Wessex, these four charming novels have been brought together in a stunning clothbound set, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. From the moving and poetic story of Tess of the D'Urbervilles to the intensely dramatic tale of the Mayor of Casterbridge, this collection is a true celebration of one of England's best loved writers.

Thomas Hardy Boxed Set

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude

Jack Kerouac

On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

On the Road

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 
 
Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from any young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and 'bully of humanity' Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimized weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognize the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.

Hard Times

George Eliot

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George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as 'one of the few English novels written for adult people'.

Middlemarch

Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby and a host of other characters.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Herman Melville

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Captain Ahab is an eerily compelling madman who focuses his distilled hatred and suffering (and that of generations before him) into the pursuit of a creature as vast, dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. More than just a novel of adventure, this is a haunting social commentary populated with some of the most enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith and the nature of perception.

Moby-Dick

or, The Whale

Part of Penguin's beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. 
 
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil lanes of London, they are all drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror and soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.

A Tale of Two Cities

James Joyce

Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th of June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce's belief that literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'.

Ulysses

Jonathan Swift

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Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters - with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos - give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift's savage satire views mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves.

Gulliver's Travels

Robert Louis Stevenson

Published as a 'shilling shocker', Robert Louis Stevenson's dark psychological fantasy gave birth to the idea of the split personality. The story of respectable Dr Jekyll's strange association with 'damnable young man' Edward Hyde, the hunt through fog-bound London for a killer, and the final revelation of Hyde's true identity is a chilling exploration of humanity's basest capacity for evil. The other stories in this volume also testify to Stevenson's inventiveness within the gothic genre: 'Olalla', a tale of vampirism and tainted family blood, and 'The Body Snatcher', which shows the murky underside of medical practice.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

William Makepeace Thackeray

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In William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, 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 way through the tawdry glamour of Regency society, battles - military and domestic - are fought, fortunes made and lost. The one steadfast and honourable figure in this corrupt world is Dobbin with his devotion to Amelia, bringing pathos and depth to Thackeray's gloriously satirical epic of love and social adventure.

Vanity Fair

Virginia Woolf

On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel's lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works.

Mrs Dalloway

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Pip doesn't expect much from life...His sister makes it clear that her orphaned little brother is nothing but a burden on her. But suddenly things begin to change. Pip's narrow existence is blown apart when he finds an escaped criminal, is summoned to visit a mysterious old woman and meets the icy beauty Estella. Most astoundingly of all, an anonymous person gives him money to begin a new life in London. 
Are these events as random as they seem? Or does Pip's fate hang on a series of coincidences he could never have expected?

Great Expectations

James Baldwin

David, a young American in 1950s Paris, is waiting for his fiancée to return from vacation in Spain. But when he meets Giovanni, a handsome Italian barman, the two men are drawn into an intense affair. After three months David's fiancée returns and, denying his sexuality, he rejects Giovanni for a 'safe' future as a married man — a decision that will bring tragedy, longing and regret.

Giovanni's Room

Arthur Conan Doyle

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This collection includes many of the famous cases - and great strokes of brilliance - that made the legendary Sherlock Holmes one of fiction's most popular creations. With his devoted amanuensis, Dr Watson, Holmes emerges from his smoke filled rooms in Baker Street to grapple with the forces of treachery, intrigue and evil in such cases as 'The Speckled Band', in which a terrified woman begs their help in solving the mystery surrounding her sister's death, or 'A Scandal in Bohemia', which portrays a European king blackmailed by his mistress. In 'Silver Blaze' the pair investigate the disappearance of a racehorse and the violent murder of its trainer, while in 'The Final Problem' Holmes at last comes face to face with his nemesis, the diabolical Professor Moriarty - 'the Napoleon of crime'.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Wilkie Collins

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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 white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

The Woman in White

Charlotte Brontë

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With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There, she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, the hostility of headmistress Madame Beck, and her own complex feelings - first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë'sautobiographical novel, the last published during her lifetime, is a powerfully moving study of loneliness and isolation, and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances. 
 
Helen M. Cooper's new introduction places the novel in the context of Brontë's life and career and argues for the importance of the novel as an exploration of imperialism. 
 
'I am only just returned to a sense of real wonder about me, for I have been reading Villette' 
George Eliot 
 
'Her finest novel' 
Virginia Woolf

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