Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a catastrophic confrontation between fantasy and reality, embodied in the characters of Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Arthur Miller. 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers'Fading southern belle Blanche DuBois is adrift in the modern world.

When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner ...

I was supposed to be having the time of my life. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer.

The Italian Girl is an intoxicating tale of passion and destiny, from Lucinda Riley, #1 bestselling author of the Seven Sisters series. Nothing sings as sweetly as love, or burns quite like betrayal . .

. Rosanna Menici is just a girl when she meets Roberto Rossini – the man who will change her life forever. In the years that follow, their destinies become bound together, both by their extraordinary talents as opera singers, and by their enduring, obsessive love.

Their passion will ult...

With an introduction by Xiaolu GuoA classic memoir set during the Chinese revolution of the 1940s and inspired by folklore, providing a unique insight into the life of an immigrant in America. When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talking-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen.

Throughout her childhood, Maxine Hong Kingston listened to her mother's mesmerizing tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is e...

Katya Balen's October, October is a very special new addition to the shelf and deserves classic status - Times Children's Book of the Week

A classic in the making for anyone who ever longed to be WILD.

October and her dad live in the woods. They know the trees and the rocks and the lake and stars like best friends. They live in the woods and they are wild. And that's the way it is.

Until the year October turns eleven. That's the year October rescues a baby owl. It's the year Dad falls out of ...

'you are to understand, Mr. Pip, that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound secret...' Young Pip lives with his sister and her husband the blacksmith, with few prospects for advancement until a mysterious benefaction takes him from the Kent marshes to London. Pip is haunted by figures from his past - the escaped convict Magwitch, the time-withered Miss Havisham and her proud and beautiful ward, Estella - and in time uncovers not just the origins of his great...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'It happen'd one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz'd with the Print of a Man's naked Foot on the Shore.' Shipwrecked in a storm at sea, Robinson Crusoe is washed up on a remote and desolate island. As he struggles to piece together a life for himself, Crusoe's physical, moral and spiritual values are tested to the limit.

For 24 years he remains in solitude and learns to tame and ma...

From the author of THE PERFECT STORM and WAR comes a book about why men miss war, why Londoners missed the Blitz, and what we can all learn from American Indian captives who refused to go home. Tribe is a look at post-traumatic stress disorder and the challenges veterans face returning to society. Using his background in anthropology, Sebastian Junger argues that the problem lies not with vets or with the trauma they've suffered, but with the society to which they are trying to return.

One of...

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anyb...

Inexorably poisoned against the woman he loves by his trusted friend Iago, Shakespeare's Othello is a timeless tragic figure. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by Kenneth Muir with an introduction by Tom McAlindon.'O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;It is the green-eyed monster which doth mockThe meat it feeds on.'A popular soldier and newly married man, Othello seems to be in an enviable position. And yet, when his supposed friend Iago sows doubts in his mind about his wife Desdemona's...