Orlando

A gorgeous clothbound edition of Woolf's fantastical and enchanting novel, designed by the acclaimed Coralie-Bickford Smith. Orlando has always been an outsider... His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey - a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or... woman? A wry commentary on gender and history, Orlando is also, in Woolf's own words, a light-hearted 'writer's holiday' which delights in ambiguity and capriciousness. This clothbound Penguin edition is edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert. 'I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future' Tilda Swinton

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was a major modernist novelist and the centre of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves. She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including A Room of One's Own (1929), a passionate feminist essay. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.