Epic and tragic in its scope, ‘King Lear’ explores a king’s demise into madness and insanity when he is betrayed by two of his manipulative and scheming daughters.

The book was first published in September 1885 amid considerable fanfare, with billboards and posters around London announcing “The Most Amazing Book Ever Written”. It became an immediate best seller. By the late 19th century, explorers were uncovering ancient civilisations and their remains around the world, such as Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and the empire of Assyria. Inner Africa remained largely unexplored and King Solomon’s Mines, one of the first novels of African adventure published in English, captured the public’s imagination.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is D. H. Lawrence’s controversial novel written in 1928, which tells the story of an aristocratic woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), who has an affair with the estate’s gamekeeper when her husband is paralyzed and rendered impotent.

First published in 1855 and extended by the author over the course of more than three decades, Leaves of Grass embodies Walt Whitman’s lifetime ambition to create a new voice that could capture the spirit and vibrancy of the young American nation, while celebrating at the same time “Nature without check with original energy”.

Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott, originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869 at the request of her publisher. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters,? it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.

Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.

Little Women is an outstanding achievement of nineteenth-century American literature, and the first children’s novel written in the United States to have become an enduring classic. 

Jane Austen’s brilliant, hilarious – and often outrageous – early stories, sketches and pieces of nonsense, in a beautiful Penguin Classics clothbound edition.