Classics

  90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'I walked in a daze of illusions toward my future.'Deeply felt and told with an intrepid spirit, Tales from the Heart are the...

 ‘A devastating work, but proof that a novelist of Naipaul’s stature can often define problems quicker and more effectively than a team of economists and other experts’ – The Times n...

Willy Chandra whom we first met in 'Half a Life' is a man who has allowed one identity after another to be thrust upon him. Now, in his early 40s,...

Originally featured in the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ column, these are Jamaica Kincaid’s first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York. ‘Fresh, risky, improvisational and hard-to-categorize writing’ - Chicago Tribune Talk...

A story of a marriage, Jamaica Kincaid’s most recent novel is one of her most emotionally and thematically daring works. ‘If revenge is a dish best served cold, See Now Then is...

‘Controlled and fearless perfection’ - The Washington Post Jamaica Kincaid’s brother Devon died of Aids on 19 January 1996 at the age of 33. This poetic and shockingly candid recounting of...

One of the most important literary voices of the twentieth century on one of her greatest loves – gardening. ‘[Kincaid] is able to do something that is almost never done...

From the author of The Lonely Londoners, a short story collection of life in mid-century Trinidad and London, told with Selvon's unique wit and poetic sensibility With equal humour, sorrow...

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize Salt is an extraordinary tour de force by one of the pre-eminent literary presences in the Caribbean, a novel which explores like none before it...

The Lonely Londoners, an unforgettable account of immigrant experience and one of the great twentieth-century London novels, now in in a stunning Clothbound Classics edition. At Waterloo Station, hopeful new...

Black Britain: Writing Back Theonly novelfrom the revolutionary intellectual C.L.R. James, andthe first novel by a Black West Indian to be published in the UK It is the 1920s in...

Translated by Richard Philcox A mesmerizing novel from one of the most important writers working today, winner of the alternative Nobel Prize Francis Sancher, a handsome outsider, loved by some...

A brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua — by the author of Annie John. If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, A House for Mr Biswasis V. S. Naipaul's best-loved novel; one of BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. Heart-rending and...

A Faulkner-esque Classic of Trinidadian literature — No Pain Like This Body is a lost masterpiece of contemporary fiction.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONIQUE ROFFEYIn the Caribbean, at the beginning of...

Timely reissue of the classic radical history of race and modernityIn this ground-breaking work, Paul Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American,...

Edwidge Danticat's first short story collection. Gorgeous 10th anniversary edition — complete with a new story! Arriving one year after the Haitian-American's first novel (Breath, Eyes, Memory) alerted critics to...

A Walk in the HimalayasIn this acclaimed travel memoir Jamaica Kincaid chronicles a spectacular and exotic three-week trek through the Himalayan land of Nepal, where she and her companions are...

A phenomenal modern classic, new to the Vintage Classics list, for readers both long-standing and new. Through dialogue and flashback we learn of the colonialism and racism, love and envy,...

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. Sam Selvon is now widely considered to...

Few modern voices have had as profound an impact as Frantz Fanon. A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial and Black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks...

At the Bottom of the Riveris Jamaica Kincaid’s first published work, a selection of inter-connected prose poems told from the perspective of a young Afro-Caribbean girl. Collecting pieces written for...

Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, with new introduction from Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo.At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to...

A classic coming-of-age story from Jamaica Kincaid, following a young woman as she enters adulthood against the backdrop of a strange and unfamiliar country.Lucy, a teenage girl from the West...

An adored only child, Annie has until recently lived a peaceful and content life. She is inseparable from her beautiful mother, a powerful and influential presence, who sits at the...

Xuela Claudette Richardson is recalling the last seventy years of her life, and so she must begin with her birth, and the accompanying death of her mother. Xuela’s vivid, visceral...

Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo RevolutionThe iconic study of the Haitian revolution by one of the founding fathers of Caribbean scholarship, now in Modern Classics for the first timeIn...

A beautifully atmospheric memoir and travelogue from poet Amryl Johnson depicting her journey from the UK to Trinidad in the 1980sSequins for a Ragged Hem narrates Johnson's return tour to...

Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from...