Klasika

Surely no man would take up my profession if it were not that danger attracts him.' In The Casebook, you can read the final twelve stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about his brilliant detective. They are perhaps the most unusual and the darkest that he penned. Treachery, mutilation and the terrible consequences of infidelity are just some of the themes explored in these stories, along with atmospheric touches of the gothic, involving a bloodsucking vampire, crypts at midnight and strange bones in a furnace. The collection His Last Bow features some of Sherlock Holmes' most dramatic cases, including the vicious revenge intrigue connected with 'The Red Circle' and the insidious murders in 'The Devil's Foot'. The title story recounts how Sherlock Holmes is brought out of retireme

The Complete Short Stories of Roald Dahl in the first of two unsettling and sinister volumes. "They are brutal, these stories, and yet you finish reading each one with a smile, or maybe even a hollow laugh, certainly a shiver of gratification, because the conclusion always seems so right". (Charlie Higson, from his introduction). Roald Dahl is one of the most popular writers of the modern age, effortlessly writing for children and adults alike. In this, the first of two volumes chronologically collecting all his published adult short stories, we see how Dahl began by using his experiences in the war to write fiction but quickly turned to his powerful and dark imagination to pen some of the most unsettling and disquieting tales ever written. In 27 stories, written between 1944 and 1953,

A historical romance, The Three Musketeers tells the story of the early adventures of the young Gascon gentleman, D'Artagnan and his three friends from the regiment of the King's Musketeers - Athos, Porthos and Aramis. Under the watchful eye of their patron M. de Treville, the four defend the honour of the regiment against the guards of Cardinal Richelieu, and the honour of the queen against the machinations of the Cardinal himself as the power struggles of seventeenth century France are vividly played out in the background. But their most dangerous encounter is with the Cardinal's spy, Milady, one of literature's most memorable female villains, and Dumas employs all his fast-paced narrative skills to bring this enthralling novel to a breathtakingly gripping and dramatic conclusion.</p

The story of Edmund Dantes, self-styled Count of Monte Cristo, is told with consummate skill. The victim of a miscarriage of justice, Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and empowered by a stroke of providence. In his campaign of vengeance, he becomes an anonymous agent of fate. The sensational narrative of intrigue, betrayal, escape, and triumphant revenge moves at a cracking pace. Dumas' novel presents a powerful conflict between good and evil embodied in an epic saga of rich diversity that is complicated by the hero's ultimate discomfort with the hubristic implication of his own actions. Our edition is based on the most popular and enduring translation first published by Chapman and Hall in 1846. The name of the translator was never revealed.

As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around the writhings of this one dysfunctional family Dostoevsky weaves a dense network of social, psychological and philosophical relationships. At the same time he shows - from the opening 'scandal' scene in the monastery to a personal appearance by an eccentric Devil - that his dramatic skills have lost nothing of their edge. The Karamazov Brothers, completed a few months before Dostoevsky's d

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Woman in White" by Wilkie Collins. 'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop ...There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth ...stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'. "The Woman in White" famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, "The Woman in White" is the first and most influential o

"The Sea is My Brother" is Jack Kerouac's very first novel, begun shortly after his tour as a merchant sailor in 1942. Lost during his lifetime, it is an intense portrait of friendship and brotherhood and a meditation on the desire to escape society, following the fortunes of two men as they impulsively decide to work their passage on the S.S. Westminster: drinking, arguing, playing cards, dodging torpedoes and contemplating the vast, terrible beauty of the sea. Published with fragments of early stories and letters, this visceral work gives a unique insight into the young Kerouac and the formation of his genius.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer of uncommon talent; in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" he created the genre of detective fiction while his genius for finding the strangeness lurking within us all has been an influence on everyone from Freud to Hollywood. This complete collection of all his short stories and novellas contains well-known tales 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart' alongside hidden gems that both unsettle and enthrall the reader.

We are here to find a target who will fulfil our requirements. Someone who is admired and whose ignominious destruction would cause dismay' A beautiful Soviet spy. A brand-new Spektor cipher machine. Smersh has set an irresistible trap that threatens the entire Secret Service. In Fleming's fifth "007" novel Bond finds himself enmeshed in a deadly game of cross and double cross.

War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.