Item category 1: Classics

During World War II, Captain Charles Ryder returns to Brideshead, ancestral home of the Marchmain family. He recalls his friendship with the younger son Sebastian, his love affair with Sebastian's sister Julia, and the effect of Catholicism on each of their lives.

"John Keats died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1821, aged only 26. He is now seen as one of the greatest English poets and a genius of the Romantic age. This collection, which contains all his most memorable works and a selection of his letters, is a feast for the senses, displaying Keat's...

This title is presented with an introduction by J.M. Coetzee. A gang war is raging through the dark underworld of Brighton. Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene...

A gang war is raging through the dark, seedy underworld of Brighton. Pinkie, fighting for leadership, is only seventeen yet he has already proved his ruthlessness in the brutal killing of Hale, a journalist. Untouched by human feeling, Pinkie is isolated from the rest of the world, a figure of pu...

Querry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference: he no longer finds meaning in art of pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper who has gone through a stage of mutil...

Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the ...

Life is good for Buck in Santa Clara Valley, where he spends his days eating and sleeping in the golden sunshine. But one day a treacherous act of betrayal leads to his kidnap, and he is forced into a life of toil and danger. Dragged away to be a sledge dog in the harsh and freezing cold Yukon, B...

John Steinbeck's paean to the Monterey County of his youth, "Cannery Row" contains an introduction by Susan Shillinglaw in "Penguin Modern Classics". In the din and stink that is "Cannery Row" a colourful blend of misfits - gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists - survive side by side in a ju...