Penguin Clothbound Classics

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.

In 'The Turn of the Screw', one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, a governess becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care. But are the children really in danger - and if so, from whom? The novella is accompanied here by several more of the very best of Henry James' short stories, including 'The Jolly Corner' and 'The Third Person', all of which explore human psychology through ghostly visitations and the uncanny.

In The Outsider, his classic existentialist novel, Camus explores the alienation of an individual who refuses to conform to social norms. Meursault, his anti-hero, will not lie. When his mother dies, he refuses to show his emotions simply to satisfy the expectations of others. And when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach near Algiers, his lack of remorse compounds his guilt in the eyes of society and the law. Yet he is as much a victim as a criminal.

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.

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'.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's timeless tale, reissued in a beautiful clothbound edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power.

The narrator is a downed pilot in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the apparition of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. "In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don't dare disobey," the narrator recalls. "Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket." And so begins their dialogue, which stretches the narrator's imagination in all sorts of surprising, childlike directions.

Truman Capote makes whisky-soaked fruitcake in Alabama; Laurie Lee slides across a frozen pond in Gloucestershire; and Shirley Jackson is outwitted by a wily Santa Claus at the bank. Ghosts haunt the Christmases of Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Bowen, while Dostoyevsky, Daphne du Maurier and Italo Calvino take a cynical view of the season and Selma Lagerlof and Angela Carter celebrate its miracles. Ranging from Cork to Lagos to the Wild West, and from Paris to San Paolo to outer space, this is Christmas as imagined by some of the greatest short-story writers of all time.

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.

One of China's Four Great Classical Novels, Monkey King was written anonymously during the Ming dynasty and is most commonly attributed to Wu Cheng'en, the son of a silk-shop clerk from east China. It recounts a Tang-dynasty monk's quest for Buddhist scriptures, accompanied by an omni-talented kung-fu Monkey King called Sun Wukong; a rice-loving divine pig; and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster.

Comparable to The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment.

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, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another. Orwell's chilling 'fairy story' is a timeless and devastating satire of idealism betrayed by power and corruption.

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.

Virgil's Aeneid, inspired by Homer and the inspiration for Dante and Milton, is an immortal poem that sits at the heart of Western life and culture. Virgil took as his hero Aeneas, legendary survivor of the fall of Troy and father of the Roman race. In telling a story of dispossession and defeat, love and war, he portrayed human life in all its nobility and suffering, in its physicality and its mystery.

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.

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.

In this stunningly designed book of classic fairy tales, award-winning author Philip Pullman has chosen his fifty favourite stories from the Brothers Grimm and presents them in a 'clear as water' retelling, in his unique and brilliant voice. These new versions show the adventures at their most lucid and engaging yet. Pullman's Grimm Tales of wicked wives, brave children and villainous kings will have you reading, reading aloud and rereading them for many years to come.

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.

Written in the last months of Austen's life, Sanditon features a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and speculators in a newly established seaside resort, and shows the author contemplating a changing society with scepticism and amusement. It tells the story of Charlotte Heywood, who is transported by a chance accident from her rural hometown to Sanditon, where she is exposed to the intrigues and dalliances of a small town - and encounters the intriguingly handsome Sidney Parker.

This edition also includes the early epistolary novel Lady Susan and the delightful fragment The Watsons.