di Angela Carter

“One day, Annabel saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. The sight filled her with a terror which entirely consumed her … for she had no instinct for self-preservation if she was confronted by ambiguities.”

Annabel and Lee are married; Lee and Buzz are brothers. A quirky threesome, they have set up a household on the fringes on university life in the late sixties. Their hermetic existence is filled with drugs, sex, alchohol, intensity, and madness; their relationships with one another are haunting and complex.

Carter’s compelling tale carries echoes of Poe and Bronte into the very modern world of artists’ flats, psychiatrists’ offices, and generational conflicts. It is ultimately a tale of the search for loyalty and love in the midst of emotional starvation.

di Wilkie Collins

di Aphra Behn

A new single-volume edition of an early anti-slavery novel

When Prince Oroonoko’s passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko’s noble bearing soon wins the respect of his English captors, but his struggle for freedom brings about his destruction. Inspired by Aphra Behn’s visit to Surinam, Oroonoko reflects the author’s romantic views of native peoples as being in “the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin.” The novel also reveals Behn’s ambiguous attitude toward slavery: while she favored it as a means to strengthen England’s power, her powerful and moving work conveys its injustice and brutality.

This new single-volume edition of Oroonoko includes a carefully modernized text accompanied by an introduction, chronology, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

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.