Ashleys must-read classic fiction
Explore Ashley's must-read classic fiction books with this curated list of timeless literary masterpieces. Discover beloved novels and essential reads for every classic literature lover.
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The Epic of Gilgamesh
A great king, strong as the stars in Heaven. Enkidu, a wild and mighty hero, is created by the gods to challenge the arrogant King Gilgamesh. But instead of killing each other, the two become friends. Travelling together to the Cedar Forest, they fight and slay the evil monster Humbaba. But when Enkidu is killed, his death haunts and breaks the mighty Gilgamesh. Terrified of mortality, he resolves to find the secret of eternal life...
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The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night
In the late 1920s, the art publisher H. Piazza produced a twelve volume version of The 1001 Noghts that was one of the most beautiful ever made. It included splendid illustrations by Mohammed Racim and wonderful miniatures by painter Leon Carre. Today, Assouline is publishing an abridged version of this masterpiece, which includes the most famous and most enchanting of the tales - from the story of King Shahryar, to Sinbad the sailor, to Ali Baba and forty thieves, and Aladdin and the magic lamp - all told by the beautiful and sensual Shahrazed. This wonderful book is one of the classics that will stand next to the most handsome book in your library. For The 1001 Nights is a cultural testimony of the past, the source of myths and beliefs of the East. A collection of extraordinary stories from India and Persia passed down orally and told at night in public squares, this unique work is on a par with Homer's Odyssey. 400 illustrations and ornaments
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The Pilgrim's Progress
by John Bunyan
"Spirituality involves taking our personal experience seriously as raw material for redemption and holiness, examining the material of our daily lives with as much rigor as we do Scripture and doctrine. The Confessions is the landmark work in this exercise." --Eugene Peterson, from his book "Take and Read" Written in the waning days of the Roman era, Augustine's "Confessions" are the moving diary of a soul's journey. From his earliest memories of childhood, through his turbulent and licentious youth, to his resolute conversion at the age of 32, Augustine traces a pilgrimage of unbounded grace. Throughout, he passionately addresses the spiritual questions that have engaged thoughtful minds since time began. Every Christian library needs the classics--the timeless books that have spoken powerfully to generations of believers. Now "Hendrickson Christian Classics" allows readers to build an essential classics library in affordable modern editions. Each volume is freshly retypeset for reading comfort, while thoughtful new introductions place each in historical and spiritual context. Attractive, classically bound covers look great together on the shelf. Best of all, value pricing makes this series easy to own. Planned to span the spectrum of Christian wisdom through the ages, "Hendrickson Christian Classics" sets a new standard for quality and value.
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The Man who was Thursday
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Perhaps best-known for his "Father Brown" detective series, G. K. Chesterton was renowned for his wit, rhetorical brilliance, and talent for ingenious paradox. Those qualities fill this funny, fast-paced novel about a club of anarchists in turn-of-the-20th-century London. Ostensibly a story of mystery and espionage, it's also functions as a vehicle for social, religious, and philosophical commentary.
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Fanny Hill
by John Cleland
First published in London in 1749, the story of a country orphan's initiation into the urban world of prostitution offers a remarkably frank portrait of sexual awakening of a young girl and the society around her.
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The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
This clear print title is set in Tiresias 13pt font for easy reading
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Exam board: EdexcelLevel & Subject: AS and A Level English LiteratureFirst teaching: September 2015First examination: June 2017
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Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe
On a desolate tropical island, a shipwrecked British seaman tries to master his hostile environment and remain civilized.
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Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens
A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap’s expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights “Noddy” Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes “the Golden Dustman.” Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens’s most complex—and satisfying—novels.
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The History of Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
The protagonist, Tom Jones, is introduced to the reader as a ward of a liberal Somerset squire, appearing a generous but slightly wild and reckless boy. Misfortune, followed by many spirited adventures as he travels to London to seek his fortune, teach Tom wisdom to go with his good-heartedness.
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Howards End
by Edward Morgan Forster
A chance acquaintance brings together the prosperous bourgeois Wilcox family and the clever, cultured, and idealistic Schlegel sisters. As clear-eyed Margaret develops a friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, the impetuous Helen brings into their midst a young bank clerk named Leonard Bast, who lives at the edge of poverty and ruin. When Mrs. Wilcox dies, her family discovers that she wants to leave her country home, Howards End, to Margaret. Thus as Forster sets in motion a chain of events that will entangle three different families, he brilliantly portrays their aspirations to personal and social harmony.
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North and South
by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the vital but turbulent north. Elizabeth Gaskell's skilful narrative uses an unusual love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a newly industrial society.
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The Sorrows of Young Werther and Selected Writings
by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
This classic selection of writings by Goethe reflects the author's philosophy of love and death. This new, updated package includes a new Introduction. Reissue.
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The Vicar of Wakefield
by Oliver Goldsmith
'He loved all mankind; for fortune prevented him from knowing there were rascals.' Oliver Goldsmith's hugely successful novel of 1766 remained for generations one of the most highly regarded and beloved works of eighteenth-century fiction. It depicts the fall and rise of the Primrose family, presided over by the benevolent vicar, the narrator of a fairy-tale plot of impersonation and deception, the abduction of a beautiful heroine and the machinations of an aristocratic villain. By turns comic and sentimental, the novel's popularity owes much to its recognizable depiction of domestic life and loving family relationships. Regarded by some as a straightforward and well-intentioned novel of sentiment, and by others as a satire on the very literary conventions and morality it seems to embody, The Vicar of Wakefield contains, in the figure of the vicar himself, one of the most harmlessly simply and unsophisticated yet also ironically complex narrators ever to appear in English fiction.
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The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
A tormented, alcoholic priest is pursued by an idealistic lieutenant during an anti-clerical persecution in Mexico.
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King Solomon's Mines
by H. Rider Haggard
Touted by its 1885 publisher as “the most amazing story ever written,” King Solomon’s Mines was one of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century. H. Rider Haggard’s thrilling saga of elephant hunter Allan Quatermain and his search for fabled treasure is more than just an adventure story, though: As Alexandra Fuller explains in her Introduction, in its vivid portrayal of the alliances and battles of white colonials and African tribesmen, King Solomon’s Mines “brings us the world of extremes, of the absurdly tall tales and of the illogical loyalty between disparate people that still informs this part of the world.”
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Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
There's a tale that goes around even now regarding Thomas Hardy -- that is, that the reaction of readers to one of his novels was so intense -- and so disturbing! -- that he swore off novels and spent the rest of his life committing poetry. Well, the story is true, the way it happens and this is the book responsible: Jude the Obscure.
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy the freedom that her fortune has opened up and to determine her own fate, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. It is only when she finds herself irresistibly drawn to the cultivated but worthless Gilbert Osmond that she discovers that wealth is a two-edged sword and that there is a price to be paid for independence. With its subtle delineation of American characters in a European setting, Portrait of a Lady is one of the most accomplished and popular of Henry James's early novels.
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Three Men in a Boat
by Jerome K. Jerome
Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a ‘T’. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks – not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.’s small fox-terrier Montmorency. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian ‘clerking classes’, it hilariously captured the spirit of its age.
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Bliss and Other Stories
by Katherine Mansfield
This is a collection of work from Katherine Mansfield, a writer of short fiction. In the title story, we meet Bertha, a young married woman, who experiences a blissful sexual awakening, only to be cruelly disillusioned.
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Utopia
by Thomas More
Revised introduction; new chronology and further reading Translated with an Introduction by Paul Turner.
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In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
The first installment of the French author's multivolume autobiographical novel, originally published in 1913, in which he recalls his childhood and first infatuation.
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A Sicilian Romance
by Ann Ward Radcliffe
Ann Ward Radcliffe was a nineteenth English century author and pioneer of the Gothic novel. Her novels involve innocent young woman who find themselves in mysterious gloomy castles with men who are even more mysterious having very sinister pasts. The fallen aristocrats from the house of Mazzini on the shores of Sicily have a stormy history. A tourist is fascinated by their story when a monk tells him their story while visiting the ruins of the castle. Radcliffe is able to combine the poetic with psychological terror to make her books true Gothic novels.
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Clarissa, Or, The History of a Young Lady
by Samuel Richardson
Written entirely in letters, this novel conveys the nuances and tensions only present in personal epistolary form. This novel is considered a keystone of modern English novels. Includes a new Introduction. Revised reissue.
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Waverley
by Walter Scott
Romantic young English captain in Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745 strives for love, harmony, and peace.
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The Red and the Black
by Stendhal
Charts the rise and fall of an ambitious young social climber in a cruel, monarchical society Handsome, ambitious Julien Sorel is determined to rise above his humble provincial origins. Soon realizing that success can only be achieved by adopting the subtle code of hypocrisy by which society operates, he begins to achieve advancement through deceit and self-interest. His triumphant career takes him into the heart of glamorous Parisian society, along the way conquering the gentle, married Madame de Rênal, and the haughty Mathilde. But then Julien commits an unexpected, devastating crime—and brings about his own downfall. The Red and the Black is a lively, satirical portrayal of French society after Waterloo, riddled with corruption, greed and ennui, and Julien—the cold exploiter whose Machiavellian campaign is undercut by his own emotions—is one of the most intriguing characters in European literature. Roger Gard's fine translation remains faithful to the natural, conversational tone of the original, while his introduction elucidates the complexities of Julien's character. This edition also contains a chronology, further reading and an appendix on Stendhal's use of epigraphs. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins. Gulliver's final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire - in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans. This text, based on the first edition of 1726, reproduces all the original illustrations and includes an introduction by Robert Demaria, Jr, which discusses the ways Gulliver's Travels has been interpreted since its first publication. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was born in Dublin. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Tolstoy's great Russian epic. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Set against the sweeping panoply of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, War and Peace—presented here in the first new English translation in forty years—is often considered the greatest novel ever written. At its center are Pierre Bezukhov, searching for meaning in his life; cynical Prince Andrei, ennobled by wartime suffering; and Natasha Rostov, whose impulsiveness threatens to destroy her happiness. As Tolstoy follows the changing fortunes of his characters, he crafts a view of humanity that is both epic and intimate and that continues to define fiction at its most resplendent. This edition includes an introduction, note on the translation, cast of characters, maps, notes on the major battles depicted, and chapter summaries. Praise for Antony Brigg's translation of War and Peace: "The best translation so far of Tolstoy's masterpiece into English." -Robert A. Maguire, professor emeritus of Russian studies, Columbia University "In Tolstoy's work part of the translator's difficulty lies in conveying not only the simplicity but the subtlety of the book's scale and effect. . . . Briggs has rendered both with a particular exactness and a vigorous precision not to be found, I think, in any previous translation." -John Bayley, author of Elegy for Iris For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Barchester Towers
by Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers (1857) by Anthony Trollope is one of the charming series of loosely connected novels set in Barsetshire. This is the second book to appear in the series, but may be read as a standalone work, and enjoyed on its own merits. The residents and clergy of Barchester are faced with the continuation of the wardenship controversy, the tyranny of the controlling Mrs. Proudie (the new bishop's spouse), and the insinuating onslaught of hypocrite and social climber Mr. Obadiah Slope -- to amusing effect, and culminating in rather satisfying circumstances.
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Candide, Or Optimism
by Voltaire
Are evil and tragedy part of a larger cosmic plan? Should we accept our fate that everything happens for a good reason? Voltaire's Candide is a satire addressing these central questions.
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The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole
First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the second edition, `to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern'. He gives us a series of catastrophes, ghostly interventions, revelations of identity, and exciting contests. Crammed with invention, entertainment, terror, and pathos, the novel was an immediate success and Walpole's own favourite among his numerous works. His friend, the poet Thomas Gray, wrote that he and his family, having read Otranto, were now `afraid to go to bed o'nights'. The novel is here reprinted from a text of 1798, the last that Walpole himself prepared for the press.
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The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Social and romantic misfortunes of a socially prominent woman in New York.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
The handsome appearance of dissolute young Dorian Gray remains unchanged while the features in his portrait become distorted as his degeneration progresses.
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To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
An English family's complex lives are followed and picked up again after a 10 year hiatus in order to explore the effects of time.