Books in the The Penguin English Library series

With an essay by John Huntington.'Death!' I shouted. 'Death is coming! Death!'In this pioneering, shocking and nightmarish tale, na ve suburban Londoners investigate a strange cylinder from space, but are instantly incinerated by an all-destroying heat-ray. Soon, gigantic killing machines that chase and feed on human prey are threatening the whole of humanity. A pioneering work of alien invasion fiction, The War of the World's journalistic style contrasts disturbingly with its horrifying visions of the human race under siege.The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

The abridged downloadable audiobook edition of Oscar Wildes classic tale of corrupted innocence and debauchery, The Picture of Dorian Gray, read by John Moffatt. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succs de scandale and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to fascinate and disturb.

'He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson ... He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them'Sherlock Holmes, scourge of criminals everywhere, whether they be lurking in London's foggy backstreets or plotting behind the walls of an idyllic country mansion, and his faithful colleague Dr Watson, solve these breathtaking and perplexing mysteries. In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Five Orange Pips and Other Cases we encounter some of his most famous and devilishly difficult problems.The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh's stunning novel of duty and desire set amongst the decadent, faded glory of the English aristocracy in the run-up to the Second World War.The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognise his spiritual and social distance from them.'Lush and evocative ... Expresses at once the profundity of change and the indomitable endurance of the human spirit'The Times

The Penguin English Library editionAs usual with the Sherlock Holmes stories it is very hard to say which are the best - but there are many stories here which would get the vote - ranging from The Boscombe Valley Mystery to the wonderful Adventure of Silver Blaze, from the Adventure of the Norwood Builder to A Case of Identity, but above to the uniquely strange and macabre Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb.

The Penguin English Library editionMany readers would claim that The Adventure of the Copper Beeches or The Man with the Twisted Lip was their favourite Sherlock Holmes story - but then that would be doing an injustice to The Adventure of the Yellow Face and The Problem of Thor Bridge. It is just as well that in the end we do not have to choose - as if we did then there would be no doubt it should be The Adventure of Six Napoleons.

'Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!'The death, quite suddenly, of Sir Charles Baskerville in mysterious circumstances is the trigger for one of the most extraordinary cases ever to challenge the brilliant analytical mind of Sherlock Holmes. As rumours of a legendary hound said to haunt the Baskerville family circulate, Holmes and Watson are asked to ensure the protection of Sir Charles' only heir, Sir Henry - who has travelled all the way from America to reside at Baskerville Hall in Devon. And it is there, in an isolated mansion surrounded by mile after mile of wild moor, that Holmes and Watson come face to face with a terrifying evil that reaches out from centuries past . . .

In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub Street including Jasper Milvain, an ambitious journalist, and Alfred Yule, an embittered critic. Here Gissing brings to life the bitter battles (fought out in obscure garrets or in the Reading Room of the British Museum) between integrity and the dictates of the market place, the miseries of genteel poverty and the damage that failure and hardship do to human personality and relationships.

When timid and plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing and determined suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is nothing more than a fortune-hunter, decides to put a stop to their romance. Torn between her desire to win her father s love and approval and her passion for the first man who has ever declared his love for her, Catherine faces an agonising dilemma, and becomes all too aware of the restrictions that others seek to place on her freedom. James s masterly novel deftly interweaves the public and private faces of nineteenth-century New York society; it is also a deeply moving study of innocence destroyed.

When Reverend Josiah Crawley, the impoverished curate of Hogglestock, is accused of theft it causes a public scandal, sending shockwaves through the world of Barsetshire. The Crawleys desperately try to remain dignified while they are shunned by society, but the scandal threatens to tear them, and the community, apart.Drawing on his own childhood experience of genteel poverty, Trollope gives a painstakingly realistic depiction of the trials of a family striving to maintain its standards at all costs. With its sensitive portrayal of the proud and self-destructive figure of Crawley, this final volume is the darkest and most complex of all the Barsetshire novels.

Jude Fawley, the stonemason excluded not by his wits but by poverty from the world of Christminster privilege, finds fulfilment in his relationship with Sue Bridehead. Both have left earlier marriages. Ironically, when tragedy tests their union it is Sue, the modern emancipated woman, who proves unequal to the challenge. Hardy's fearless exploration of sexual and social relationships and his prophetic critique of marriage scandalised the late Victorian establishment and marked the end of his career as a novelist.

After the death of old Dr Grantly, a bitter struggle begins over who will succeed him as Bishop of Barchester. And when the decision is finally made to appoint the evangelical Dr Proudie, rather than the son of the old bishop, Archdeacon Grantly, resentment and suspicion threaten to cause deep divisions within the diocese. Trollope's masterly depiction of the plotting and back-stabbing that ensues lies at the heart of one of the most vivid and comic of his Barsetshire novels, peopled by such very different figures as the saintly Warden of Hiram's Hospital, Septimus Harding, the ineffectual but well-meaning new bishop and his terrifying wife, and the oily chaplain Mr Slope who has designs on Mr Harding's daughter.

As Daniel Deronda opens, Gwendolen Harleth is poised at the roulette-table, prepared to throw away her family fortune. She is observed by Daniel Deronda, a young man groomed in the finest tradition of the English upper-classes. And while Gwendolen loses everything and becomes trapped in an oppressive marriage, Deronda's fortunes take a different turn. After a dramatic encounter with the young Jewish woman Mirah, he becomes involved in a search for her lost family and finds himself drawn into ever-deeper sympathies with Jewish aspirations and identity. 'I meant everything in the book to be related to everything else', wrote George Eliot of her last and most ambitious novel, and in weaving her plot strands together she created a bold and richly textured picture of British society and the Jewish experience within it.

Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour saving machinery to his Yorkshire mill, arousing a ferment of unemployment and discontent among his workers. Robert considers marriage to the wealthy and independent Shirley Keeldar to solve his financial woes, yet his heart lies with his cousin Caroline, who, bored and desperate, lives as a dependent in her uncle's home with no prospect of a career. Shirley, meanwhile, is in love with Robert's brother, an impoverished tutor - a match opposed by her family. As industrial unrest builds to a potentially fatal pitch, can the four be reconciled? Set during the Napoleonic wars at a time of national economic struggles, Shirley (1849) is an unsentimental, yet passionate depiction of conflict between classes, sexes and generations.

Engaged to the ambitious and self-serving Adolphus Crosbie, Lily Dale is devastated when he jilts her for the aristocratic Lady Alexandrina. Although crushed by his faithlessness, Lily still believes she is bound to her unworthy former fianc for life and therefore condemned to remain single after his betrayal. And when a more deserving suitor pays his addresses, she is unable to see past her feelings for Crosbie. Written when Trollope was at the height of his popularity, The Small House at Allington (1864) contains his most admired heroine in Lily Dale - a young woman of independent spirit who nonetheless longs to be loved - and is a moving dramatization of the ways in which personal dilemmas are affected by social pressures.

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE was written towards the beginning of Hardy's career as a novelist and can be considered one of his most representative works. In this novel, Hardy's tragic vision is powerfully and narrowly focussed on Egdon Heath and the men and women who live on it. Set against the backdrop of the Heath and the impersonal and eternal forces it represents, the fates of Eustacia Vye, Diggory Venn, Clym Yeobright - the returning 'native' - and others are inexorably played out.

Ambrosio, the worthy superior of the Capuchins of Madrid, falls to the temptations of Matilda, a fiend-inspired wanton who, disguised as a boy, has entered his monastery as a novice. Ambrosio then falls in love with one of his penitents and finally kills her in order to escape detection. However, he is discovered, tortured by the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Although extravagant in its mixture of the supernatural, the terrible, and the indecent, the book contains scenes of great effect. The novel is a prime example of 18th century Gothic, written partly in response to Walpole and Radcliffe and enjoyed a considerable contemporary vogue.

Penguin Classics presents the audiobook adaptation of Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens classic tale of family and power. Read by Andrew Sachs. Dombey and Son is both a firm and a family and the ambiguous connection between public and private life lies at the heart of Dickens novel. Paul Dombey is a man who runs his domestic affairs as he runs his business: calculatingly, callously, coldly and commercially. Through his dysfunctional relationships with his son, his two wives, and his neglected daughter Florence, Dickens paints a vivid picture of the limitations of a society dominated by commercial values and the drive for profit and explores the possibility of moral and emotional redemption through familial love. Part of a series of abridged, vintage recordings taken from the Penguin Archives. Affordable, collectable, quality productions - perfect for on-the-go listening.