Item category 1: Classics

This brutal glimpse of Russia under Stalin shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string or a single match in a time where survival is all.

The story of a typical day in a Stalinist labour camp as experienced by prisoner Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

This book captured the radical anti-establishment mood of 1960s America. Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her psychiatric ward with an iron fist and a penchant for electric shock therapy, so when the boisterous McMurphy arrives - intent on disruption and showing the other patients a good time - a t...

Pitching an extraordinary battle between cruel authority and a rebellious free spirit, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel that epitomises the spirit of the sixties. This Penguin Classics edition includes a preface, never-before published illustrations by the author, and an int...

In the sixteenth century, Zen monks in Japan developed the haiku, an unrhymed poetic form consisting of 17 syllables arranged in three lines. Now, in One Hundred Great Books in Haiku, David Bader has applied this ancient poetic form to the classics.

The story of seven generations of the Buendia family and of Macondo, the town they built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles. A microcosm of Colombian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book, an...