WILLIAM COLLINS

(P/B) OTHER MINDS
What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind's fitful development from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to the first evolved nervous systems in ancient relatives ...
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(P/B) The Common Reader: First Series
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out' In the first volume of her critical essays, Virginia Woolf discusses the greatest authors of the literary canon - Jane Austen, George Eliot and Geoffrey Chaucer among others - with the everyday, 'common reader' in mind. With wit and insight, Woolf also revisits classic novels and examines scholarly subjects, fr...
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(P/B) The Common Reader: Second Series
The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. In her second volume of essays, Virginia Woolf delves deeper into the delights of reading. Here, she explores the novels of Thomas Hardy and Daniel Defoe, and recounts the fascinating lives of Christina Rossetti and Mary Wollstonecraft. In ' How Should One Read a Book?' she offers sage advice for the common reader, and sheds light on the lessons and pleasures li...
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(P/B) THE RAVEN
"...Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." This selection of Edgar Allan Poe's poetical works includes some of his best-known pieces, including the triumphant, gleeful 'The Bells', the tragic ode 'Annabel Lee' and his famous gothic tour de force, 'The Raven'. Some present powerful, nightmarish images of the macabre and bizarre, while others have at their heart a profound sense of love, beauty and loss. All are linguistic masterpieces that demonstrate Poe's gift for marrying rhyt...
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(P/B) Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Greedily she engorged without restraint, And knew not eating death;' Milton's Paradise Lost is a poem of epic proportions that tells of Satan's attempts to mislead Eve into disobeying God in the Garden of Eden, by eating from the tree of knowledge. His interpretation of the biblical story of Genesis is vivid and intense in its language, justifying the actions of God to men. In his sequel poem, Paradise Regained, Milton shows Satan trying to seduce Jesus in ...
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(P/B) A History of Water
From award-winning writer Edward Wilson-Lee, this is a thrilling true historical detective story set in sixteenth-century Portugal. A History of Water follows the interconnected lives of two men across the Renaissance globe. One of them - an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music - returns home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to die in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder. The other - a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across...
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(P/B) A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN AND THREE GUINEAS
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. . .' Based on a lecture given at Cambridge and first published in 1929, 'A Room of One's Own' interweaves Woolf's personal experience as a female writer with themes ranging from Austen and Bronte to Shakespeare's gifted (and imaginary) sister. 'Three Guineas', Woolf's most impassioned polemic, came almost a decade later and broke new grou...
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(P/B) How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator
An enormous bestseller in Greece, this is a bold, witty retelling of the story of Ancient Greece by a rising star in archaeology. Two strangers meet in a trapped elevator. One is an archaeologist, the other isn't. A simple question, 'What do you do?', becomes the springboard for a dialogue that weaves a fascinating tale. Archaeologist Theodore Papakostas takes us on a spectacularly iconoclastic and hugely engrossing journey through ancient Greece, from its beginnings in prehistory to its end. Marvelling at the exalted moments in history as...
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(H/B) The Grammar of Angels
The Grammar of Angels tells the story of Renaissance prodigy and polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the uncontested marvel of an age of true wonders. Pico dedicated his life to a quest to find the sublime; to reconcile all existing thought into a philosophy that would settle the most important questions about human existence. This philosophy would also provide tools by which man could transcend his mortal limitations and join the ranks of the angels. At the heart of Pico's ideas were questions that he traced through the depth and brea...
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(P/B) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?" So begins the tale of Alice, who follows a curious White Rabbit down a hole and falls into Wonderland, a fantastical place where nothing is quite as it seems: an...
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(P/B) Hamlet
'Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.' Considered one of Shakespeare's most rich and enduring plays, the depiction of its hero Hamlet as he vows to avenge the murder of his father by his brother Claudius is both powerful and complex. As Hamlet tries to find out the truth of the situation, his troubled relationship with his mother comes to the fore, as do the paradoxes in his personality. A play of carefully crafted conflict and tragedy, Shakespeare's intricate dialogue continues to fascinate audiences to this day. (From the pu...
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(P/B) Walden and Civil Disobedience
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a cor...
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(P/B) The Yellow Wallpaper & Herland
Hailed as one of the most distinctive and compelling literary voices of her era, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is praised today for her ground-breaking, feminist writing. Collected here, both The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland are extraordinary for scrutinising the patriarchal norms of turn-of-the-century America. In The Yellow Wallpaper a woman frantically paces the empty nursery at the top of a secluded mansion. Her husband John, a physician, is of no comfort and she can't bear to sit with the new baby as his crying makes her much too nervous. ...
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(P/B) LOVECRAFT: SELECTED STORIES
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. "I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more." This selection of works showcases the best-known, most chilling stories of H. P. Lovecraft, including Dagon, The Call of Cthulhu, The Thing on the Doorstep and Herbert West - Reanimator. They feature such deadly horrors as terrifying sea-creatures, menaces from outer space, evil-worshipping cults and unexpected murder by familiar hands. There is no place so fr...
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(P/B) The Waves
There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, 'Consume me'. Six friends traverse the uneven road of life together in Virginia Woolf's most unconventional classic. Bernard, Jinny, Louis, Neville, Rhoda and Susan first meet as children by the sea, and their lives are forever changed. A poetic novel written in a lyrical way only Woolf could master, these narrators face both triumph and tragedy that touches them all. Throughout their lives, they examine the relationship between past and present, and the meaning of l...
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(P/B) THE ART OF WAR
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Opportunities multiply as they are seized.' Written in the 6th century BC, Sun Tzu's The Art of War is a Chinese military treatise that is still revered today as the ultimate commentary on war and military strategy. Focussing on the principle that one can outsmart your foe mentally by thinking very carefully about strategy before resorting to physical battle, this philosophy continues to be applied to the corporate and business world. Sun Tzu's timeless app...
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. . . If it was only the other way!' Wilde's first and only published novel recounts the story of handsome Dorian Gray who upon having his portrait painted desires that it will age and grow ugly while he may remain eternally beautiful. The painting, which reflects each of Gray's sins and transgressions in its hideousness, haunts him until it finally becomes u...
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(P/B) WUTHERING HEIGHTS
HarperCollins is proud to present its range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?' Set on the bleak moors of Yorkshire, Lockwood is forced to seek shelter at Wuthering Heights, the home of his new landlord, Heathcliff. The intense and wildly passionate Heathcliff tells the story of his life, his all-consuming love for Catherine Earnshaw and the doomed outcome of that relationship, leading to his revenge. Poetic, complex and grand in its scope, Emily Bront?'s masterpiece is...
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(P/B) A Study in Scarlet
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.There''s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it.After a harrowing tour in Afghanistan, Dr Watson returns to London to convalesce at 221B Baker Street, home to the enigmatic Sherlock Holmes. Their lives are irrevocably thrown together by news that a man has been found dead in a grimy 'ill-omened' house, with the word 'rache' - German for revenge - written in blood on the wall. This grisly discov...
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(P/B) The Sign of the Four
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. 'I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world' In London, 1888, the razor-sharp detective skills of Sherlock Holmes are to be put to the test. Mary Morstan reports two seemingly unconnected and inexplicable events: the disappearance of her father, a British Indian Army Captain, and the arrival of pearls by post from...
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