\"Still as the night was, the mysterious population of the distant moonlit woods was not yet lulled to rest\" The aim of a good ghost story is to make the blood freeze, pleasurably, and this M. R. James achieves to perfection in these wonderful stories....

\"I saw him taking a different shape before my eyes. His loose draperies all fell off him, and, as they were in the very act of falling, there issued ......

\"My guest was lying sprawled on his back. There was a long knife through his heart which skewered him to the floor\" Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London....

Jane Austen\"s masterworks in a single beautiful Penguin English Library volume Few novelists have observed their society with the wit and insight of Jane Austen. This volume brings together her seven great novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion and Lady Susan....

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh\"s stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh\"s novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War....

Clare Kendry has severed all ties to her past. Elegant, fair-skinned and ambitious, she is married to a white man who is unaware of her African-American heritage....

O. Henry was a master of the short story and one of the most popular American writers of the twentieth century. This selection of tales from across his writing career ranges from New York apartments to the cattle-lands of Texas, taking in con men, clerks, hustlers, shop assistants, tramps and tricksters....

A new Penguin English Library edition of Jane Austen\"s tantalizing final work - set to be a major Andrew Davies ITV adaptation this autumn 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...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin \"My hour is come ... the clock of eternity is about to strike, but its knell must be unheard by mortal ears!...

\"He began to wonder if he himself didn\"t suffer from the ingrained, morbid apathy he liked to draw in others\" Tod Hackett is a brilliant young artist - and a man in danger of losing his heart. Brought to an LA studio as a set-designer, he is soon caught up in a fantasy world where the cult of celebrity rules....

\"The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening\" To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness....

\"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.\" 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....

\"It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life\" Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach ... Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties....

\"The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude\" When \"The Awakening\" was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author\"s reputation....

\"All children, except one, grow up.\" It was Friday night. Mr and Mrs Darling were dining out. Nana had been tied up in the backyard. The poor dog was barking, for she could smell danger....