'I am making up "To the Lighthouse" - the sea is to be heard all throughit'Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolfproduced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. Itconcerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye beforeand after the First World War. As children play and adults paint, talk, muse andexplore, relationships shift and mutate. A captivating fusion of elegy,autobiography, socio-political critique and visionary thrust, it is the mostaccomplished of all Woolf's novels. On completing it, she thought she hadexorcised the ghosts of her imposing parents, but she had also brought form to abook every bit as vivid and intense as the work of Lily Briscoe, the indomitableartist at the centre of the novel.

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of Americaís greatest writers and cultural figures. Over the next year, his many works published as black-spine Penguin Classics for the first time and will feature eye-catching, newly commissioned art. The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one manís fierce reaction to injustice, and of one womanís stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.