Middle Ages Classic

Rafe Khatchadorian has enough problems at home without throwing his first year of middle school into the mix. Luckily, he's got an ace plan for the best year ever, if he can pull it off. With his best friend Leonardo the Silent awarding him points, Rafe tries to break every rule in his school's...

From the lauded, bestselling author of the Cazalet Chronicles, in Odd Girl Out, Elizabeth Jane Howard reveals with devastating accuracy a marriage put in a most destructive situation. Anna and Edmund Cornhill have a happy marriage and a lovely home. They are content, complete, absorbed in their...

Born in the United States into a secularized Hindu family, Amit Majmudar puzzled over the many religious traditions on offer and found that the Bhagavad-Gita had much to teach him with its "song of multiplicities." Chief among them is that "its own assertions aren't as important as the...

J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings on the Second Age of Middle-earth, collected for the first time in one volume. J.R.R. Tolkien famously described the Second Age of Middle-earth as a ‘dark age, and not very much of its history is (or need be) told’. And for many years readers would need to be...

A tragic epic love story before Romeo and Juliet, by one of the greatest medieval Persian romance poets, in a modern-verse English translation by Dick Davis A Penguin Classic Based on historical characters of the seventh-century Iranian court and written 850 years ago, the narrative poem about...

Brought to you by Penguin. Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up. Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad...

Out of the mixture of Latin and Germanic paganism and the Christianity of the Early Middle Ages has sprung one of the world's supremely great pieces of literature. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, delivered a famous lecture to the British Academy in 1936 in which he maintained that Beowulf was a poem all of a piece, and not (as had been suggested) a jumble of fragments for pedantic scholars to paw over.