The Mercant of Venice, William Shakespeare

Upon finding a map in his parents' inn, young Jim Hawkins joins a crew on route to the Caribbean to find buried treasure. One of his crew, the charming, yet devious Long John Silver is determined to snag the booty for himself and Jim's swashbuckling voyage becomes a mutinous and murderous adventure  where his own bravery is put to the test and he...

Jane Austen's final completed novel is set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath. It has been described as the most romantic of all her novels.

Combining these with typically Dickensian elements of burlesque and farce, the novel is eminently suited to dramatic adaptation. So great was the impact as it left Dickens' pen that many pirated versions appeared in print before the original was even finished. 

The skies are leaden, the air is thick and sultry, and a sickening stench emanates from the murky labyrinth of canals. It would hardly be sensible to stay, especially not when rumours of a `sickness' spread through the city. 

The Shirley of the title is a woman of independent means; her friend Caroline is not. Both struggle with what a woman's role is and can be. Their male counterparts - Louis, the powerless tutor, and Robert, his cloth-manufacturing brother - also stand at odds to society's expectations. 

When four young lovers flee from Athens and become lost in an enchanted wood, they stumble into a fairy world where King Oberon, and Queen Titania, are feuding over ownership of a young Indian prince. 

'There was one place in the world that stood solid and did not melt into unreality: the place where his mother was. Everybody else could grow shadowy, almost non-existent to him, but she could not.'

Dazzling modern lyrical poems from Catullus - by turns smutty, abusive, romantic and deeply moving.

They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

'She was bored and fought against her boredom, which only bored her still more.'

'My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!'

In 1922, F Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple, intricately patterned".

But it is his symbolic art that projects these things in a vision that embraces black comedy, cosmic farce, and tragic ruin. In a unique creative experiment, Dickens divides the narrative between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers.

Under the Greenwood Tree is Hardy’s most bright, confident and optimistic novel. This delightful portrayal of a picturesque rural society, tinged with gentle humour and quiet irony, established Hardy as a writer.

George Orwell's best-known novels, Animal Farm, describing a revolution that goes horribly wrong, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, portraying a world where human freedom has been crushed, are two of the most famous, well-quoted and influential political satires ever written.

'I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.'