Hector bidding farewell to his wife and baby son, Odysseus bound to the mast listening to the Sirens, Penelope at the loom, Achilles dragging Hector's body round the walls of Troy - scenes from Hom...
A beautifully moving tale of loss and reaching out to the ones we love, of one man’s journey to discover what really matters in modern life.Our narrator’s days are numbered....
Is who we are really only skin deep? In this searing, remonstrative book, Toni Morrison unravels race through the stories of those debased and dehumanised because of it. A young black girl longing ...
Let the magic of J.K. Rowling's classic series take you back to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Issued to mark the 20th anniversary of first publication of Harry Potter and the Chamber ...
Here is Edward FitzGerald’s original translation of the Rubáiyát, the collection of poems attributed to the Persian astronomer and mathematician, Omar Khayyám. FitzGerald...
Rene Descartes (1569-1650), the 'father' of modern philosophy, is without doubt one of the greatest thinkers in history: his genius lies at the core of our contemporary intellectual identity. Break...
Late in the eighteenth century authors began to write ‘Gothic’ stories as a way of putting literature back in touch with the irrational, the supernatural and the bizarre, which had been...
From its first publication in 1816 Rob Roy has been recognised as containing some of Scott's finest writing and most engaging, fully realised characters. The outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor was already a ...
An immediate best-seller on publication, Ben Hur remains a dazzling achievement by any standards. A thoroughly exhilarating tale of betrayal, revenge and salvation, it is the only novel that ranks ...
COUNT LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, ...
The product of more than a decade's continuous work (1598-1611), Chapman's translation of Homer's great poem of war is a magnificent testimony to the power of The Iliad. In muscular, onward-rolling...
Lawrence's reputation as a novelist has often meant that his achievements in poetry have failed to receive the recognition they deserve. This edition brings together, in a form he himself sanctione...
When Princess Irene and her nursemaid stay out too late one night and are chased home by goblins, a young miner boy called Curdie comes to their rescue. So begins a fantastic adventure in which Ire...
In this famous story of seduction, two highly intelligent but amoral French aristocrats plot the downfall of a respectable young married woman and a fifteen year old girl who has only just emerged ...
Translated by F Max-Muller, revised and with an Introduction by Suren Navlakha.Upanishads are mankind's oldest works of philosophy, predating the earliest Greek philosophy. They are the...
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was such an acclaimed poet in her own lifetime that she was suggested as a candidate for the Poet Laureateship when Wordsworth died in 1850. Yet today we have only a limi...
The Hachette Essentials series comprises a collection of titles that are regarded as modern classics. A carefully and lovingly curated selection of distinctive, ground-breaking fiction and non-fict...
Njal's Saga is the finest of the Icelandic sagas, and one of the world's greatest prose works. Written c.1280, about events a couple of centuries earlier, it is divided into three parts: the first ...
Hardy distrusted the application of nineteenth-century empiricism to history because he felt it marginalized important human elements. In The Trumpet-Major, the tale of a woman courted by three com...
Fathers and Sons is one of the greatest nineteenth century Russian novels, and has long been acclaimed as Turgenev's finest work. It is a political novel set in a domestic context, with a universal...