Pan Macmillan: 2057 books

E. M. Delafield's largely autobiographical novel takes the form of a journal written by an upper-middle-class lady living in a Devonshire village. Written with humour, this charming novel is full of the peculiarities of daily life. The Provincial Lady of the title attempts to avoid disaster and prevent...

Gorgeous, strange and magical, A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best loved of Shakespeare's plays. A young woman flees Athens with her lover, only to be pursued by her would-be husband and her best friend. Unwittingly, all four find themselves in an enchanted forest where fairies and sprites...

The richness of Oscar Wilde's way with words and ideas is given full range in this sparkling collection of short stories written between 1887 and 1891. From the comic tales of The Canterville Ghost and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime to the marvelous fairy stories and fantasies of The Selfish Giant,...

Evocative of ‘the blue remembered hills’ of his youth, Alfred Edward Housman’s A Shropshire Lad is a collection of sixty-three poems of extraordinary beauty and feeling. Set in a semi-imaginary pastoral Shropshire, Housman’s verse considers the helplessness of man, the fragility of life and...

Undoubtedly the greatest love story ever written, Romeo and Juliet has spawned a host of imitators on stage and screen and been adapted countless times. A young man and woman meet by chance and instantly fall in love. But their families are bitter enemies, and in order to be together the two lovers...

With subjects as broad as militarism, the British Empire, childhood and death, the Selected Verse of Rudyard Kipling is a treasure trove of the Nobel Prize winner's most striking and moving poetry, dramatic monologues and ballads. This Macmillan Collector's Library edition includes an introduction...

Richard, Duke of Gloucester - the bitter, deformed brother of the King - is secretly plotting to seize the throne of England. Charming and duplicitous, powerfully eloquent and viciously cruel, he is prepared to go to any lengths to achieve his goal. In his skilful manipulation of events and people,...

Othello is an intense drama of love, deception, jealousy and destruction. Desdemona's love for her husband Othello, the Moor, transcends racial prejudice; but his trusted ensign, the envious Iago, conspires to devastate their lives. In its vivid rendering of the savagery lurking within civilization,...

In this thrilling and hugely influential tragedy, ageing King Lear makes a capricious decision to divide his realm between his three daughters according to the love they express for him. When the youngest daughter refuses to take part in this charade, she is banished, leaving the king dependent on...

First staged in 1599, Shakespeare's history of Henry V's remarkable victory over the French at Agincourt and the subsequent peace between the two nations is also a study of war and kingship. From his wild youth, Henry comes to embody all of the kingly virtues: courage, justice, integrity and honour....

Controversial and sexually charged, The Taming of the Shrew is possibly William Shakespeare's first play, and certainly among the most performed. Petruchio's courtship of the unwilling 'shrew' Katherina poses the question: is it an examination of brute male domination or a passionate love story with...

In Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare uses the most notorious murder in classical history to tell a tragic tale of friendship, ambition and betrayal. As the greatest figures of the Roman Republic are swept along on the tide of a terrifying conspiracy, a touchingly human story is revealed in some of...

Separated from her twin brother Sebastian after a shipwreck, Viola disguises herself as a boy to serve the Duke of Illyria. Wooing a countess on his behalf, she is stunned to find herself the object of his beloved's affections. With the arrival of Viola's brother, and a trick played upon Malvolio,...

Broadly comedic and brilliantly postmodern in its lampooning of a genre, the Jane Austen classic Northanger Abbey tells the story of Catherine Morland, a naive young woman whose perceptions of the world around her are greatly influenced by the romantic gothic novels to which she is addicted. When...