King Solomon’s Mines

Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world’s greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith
A Penguin Classics Hardcover

A group of passengers on a cruise ship challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd—a man who will risk everything to win. Stefan Zweig’s acclaimed novella Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of obsession and the price of the past.

Three late-Victorian gentlemen, George, Harris and the writer himself, as well as their fox terrier Montmorency, take a trip in a boat along the River Thames to Oxford. What ensues is a hilarious journey through the English waterways full of anecdotes, and farcical incidents with Montmorency wreaking havoc along the way.

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"I’m an outsider to the end of my days!"

Jude Fawley’s hopes of a university education are lost when he is trapped into marrying the earthy Arabella, who later abandons him. Moving to the town of Christminster where he finds work as a stonemason, Jude meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead, a sensitive, freethinking "New Woman." Refusing to marry merely for the sake of religious convention, Jude and Sue decide instead to live together, but they are shunned by society and poverty soon threatens to ruin them. Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last novel, caused a public furor when it was first published, with its fearless and challenging exploration of class and sexual relationships.

This edition uses the unbowdlerized text of the first volume edition of 1895, and also includes a list for further reading, appendices and a glossary. In his introduction, Dennis Taylor examines biblical allusions and the critique of religion in Jude the Obscure, and its critical reception that led Hardy to abandon novel writing.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.