Everyman's Library CLASSICS

Samuel Beckett is the greatest Irish novelist of the later twentieth century, and this trilogy of novels is his masterpiece -which makes it perhaps the outstanding literary work of our time. Because Beckett has a reputation for being difficult, even obscure, readers of the trilogy are bound to be struck not only by the verbal brilliance and inventiveness of the three novels, but also by their extraordinary humour which ranges from wit to broad comedy and even farce in a recognizably Irish way. Each story records an episode of human endurance in the face of metaphysical adversity with compassion and wisdom and each is a compelling narrative in itself in the great tradition of European fiction from Flaubert to Joyce.

With his "counter-novel" Hopscotch and his unforgettable short stories, Julio Cortázar earned a place among the most innovative authors of the twentieth century. Hopscotch follows the adventures of an Argentinean writer living in Paris with his lover and a circle of bohemian friends, and consists of 155 short chapters that the author advises us to read out of order. Blow-Up brings together the most famous of Cortázar's short fiction--stories where invisible beasts stalk children in their homes, where a man reading a mystery finds out that he is the murderer's intended victim. In Cortázar's work, laws of nature, physics, and narrative all fall away, leaving us with an astonishing new view of the world.

This beautiful hardback collection features the world's most famous detective in his most classic adventures.

We begin with A Study in Scarlet, the novel that introduces the most famous characters in literature - Sherlock Holmes and Dr. watson. Then, in The Sign of Four we delve into the East India Company and a pact between four convicts. Finally, in The Hound of Baskerville, we follow Sherlock and Watson as they investigate murder with a legendary twist on the Dartmoor Moors.

Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story.

But the murderee - Nicola Six - is searching for something and someone else: her murderer. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means. She just doesn't know the man.

London Fields is a brilliant, funny and multi-layered novel. It is a book in which the narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life...all Samson has to do is write it as it happens.

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

"From this new and intimate perspective, she learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew; that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.”

The Arabian Nights - stories told by Queen Shahrazad over a thousand and one nights, to beguile the Sultan into deferring her execution - first began to appear in the West in the early 18th century, firing in the European imagination an appetite for the mysterious and exotic which has never left it. Collected over centuries from Persia and Arabia and India, and ranging from vivacious erotica, animal fables and adventure fantasies to pointed Sufi teaching tales, they provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory.
English translations soon proliferated. Early ones were taken from Antoine Galland’s French version, but later scholars went back to the Arabic text and it is on three classic 19th-century translators – Richard Burton, Edward W. Lane and John Payne - that this anthology principally draws. It celebrates their role in bringing these stories to the centre of world literature, for they were subsequently retranslated into many other languages, including Chinese.
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This collection showcases the richness and artistry of these English translations and to allow them to speak for the cultural context in which they were made. It is of academic importance in that it provides an alternative and more positive history of Orientalism, and reflects the history of Arabic Studies in Europe and North America and the ways in which they have fashioned the debate around Arabic literature and the translation of Arabic literary texts. It will also serve as a textbook for World Literature programmes and courses in the Anglophone world.
But above all its timeless tales, its stories within stories, continue to fascinate and enchant, and the variety of translations used can only add to the pleasure of the general reader. The new Everyman edition has been beautifully designed to give something of the flavour of the first editions and includes elegant illustrations by the popular early Victorian engraver and designer, William Harvey.

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers including plague, famine and imprisonment, and confront a variety of strange characters - the mysterious Nun of Monza, the fiery Father Cristoforo and the sinister 'Unnamed' - in their struggle to be reunited. A vigorous portrayal of enduring passion,

One of the founding texts of Western literature, the Metamorphoses is nevertheless anything but earnest or off-putting. Ovid’s sequence of fifteen witty and playful poems sketches the history of the world from its creation to the poet’s own time through a series of transformation myths in which gods and goddesses succumb to all-too-human passions, not least in the matter of love. Frequently translated, imitated and paraphrased.

When mild-mannered and unremarkable academic Roland Mitchell stumbles upon a letter written by Victorian poet Randolph Ash to a mysterious woman with whom he seems to be infatuated, he is determined to uncover the truth.

Winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, Possession defies categorization. Rich in symmetry and symbolism, brimming over with myth, poetry and fairy tale, Byatt's masterpiece is part literary detective story, part academic satire and part historical novel. At its heart, however, is a compelling romance that draws the reader into the mirrored worlds of two couples, past and present, and explores the nature of obsession, possession and love.

Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs all its members are happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harbouring an ill-defined longing to break free. A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where the old, imperfect life still continues, may be the cure for his distress...

In Journey to the Centre of the Earth, an obsessive German professor and his nephew travel towards the earth’s core in the steps of a medieval explorer beneath an Icelandic volcano where they discover a lost world. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is famous for its portrayal of the Byronic Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus, in which he explores the ocean while wreaking vengeance on mankind for their wickedness. In Around the World in Eighty Days, a starchy Englishman suspected of robbing the Bank of England accepts a bet that he cannot circumnavigate the globe in that time, and proceeds to do so, accompanied by his resourceful valet, Passepartout.

The three novels combine fantasy and rich local colour with true learning and cod science in a mixture which attracts readers of all ages.

Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament and the luxury life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abady becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gaming tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire itself

The liberal hero, Balint, is at odds with the politics of his time; he lyrically describes the idyllic pre-industrial world of Hungarian Transylvania, later to fall into the hands of first the Nazis and then the Communists, his love for Adrienne, married to an unpleasant and dangerous lunatic, and a Proustian society helplessly bent on its own destruction.This is a novel hard to put down, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that deserves to be much more widely known.First published in English in the early 1990s by a small publisher, and a huge word-of-mouth success, this is the first edition in hardback, and in two rather than three volumes.

When Catherine Sloper falls for Maurice Townsend, her father, a wealthy New York doctor, believes that Townsend is a fortune hunter after his daughter’s inheritance. He forbids the marriage but Catherine persists in her affection, encouraged by her foolish aunt Lavinia who has a weakness for Maurice herself. Dr Sloper takes Catherine abroad to distract her from the infatuation, but she proves to be as stubborn as her father. The book is a vivid study of the four central characters drawn in what are, for this author, unusually strong primary colours.
Six novels by Henry James and two volumes of his shorter fiction are already published in Everyman’s Library.

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the English countryside and into his past . . . A haunting tale of lost causes and lost love, The Remains of the Day, winner of the Booker Prize, contains Ishiguro's now celebrated evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House - within its walls can be heard ever more distinct echoes of the violent upheavals spreading across Europe.