Penguin classics

Set against a background of diocesan and parochial life, this is the story of Mr Peacock, a schoolmaster, threatened with blackmail by the brother-in-law of his wife.

Six stories, six variations on the theme of first love.

Flush was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's aristocratic pet cocker spaniel. In his biography, Virginia Woolf follows Flush's career from his birth in Berkshire and early years with the invalid, Miss Barrett, through to his kidnapping by London vagabonds and his dotage in Italy.

No gamble in history has been more momentous than the landfall of Columbus's ship the Santa Maria in the Americas in 1492 - an event that paved the way for the conquest of a 'New World'. The accounts collected here provide a vivid narrative of his voyages throughout the Caribbean and finally to the mainland of Central America, although he still believed he had reached Asia. Edited and translated by J M Cohen.

Rickie Elliot, a sensitive and intelligent young man with an intense imagination and a certain amount of literary talent, sets out from Cambridge full of hopes to become a writer. But when his stories are not successful he decides instead to marry the beautiful but shallow Agnes, agreeing to abandon his writing and become a schoolmaster at a second-rate public school. Giving up his hopes and values for those of the conventional world, he sinks into a world of petty conformity and bitter disappointments.

A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. When he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover a hierarchal society in which more than a third of all people are enslaved. Oppressed and uneducated, the masses cling desperately to one dream - that the sleeper will awake, and lead them all to freedom.