Vividly imagined and richly described, each of these tales is a journey beyond normality. Danger lurks everywhere, and pounces at the drop of a hat in Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘Mujina’, a Japanese folk tale in which a man’s lonely night-time walk turns into a nightmare. Charlotte Riddell describes the unbridled power of evil in ‘Sandy the Tinker’, as a man is forced to make a life-or-death choice. Twisted minds conduct experiments on themselves and others in Edith Nesbit and Robert Louis Stevenson’s fiction, while other bizarre, paranormal experiences have onlookers struggling to believe what their instincts tell them. In Ambrose Bierce’s ‘The Damned Thing’, a sceptical jury stand around the corpse of a man who died in suspicious circumstances. For the terrified witness, words fail to convey exactly what he saw . . .

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning pocket-sized classics. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is compiled and introduced by Dr Emily Alder.

A haunting presence lurks among the secluded castles and rolling mountains of Styria, home to a lonely young woman called Laura. Upon the arrival of the mysterious Carmilla, Laura is instantly intoxicated. Upending the solitude Laura knows so well, the two young women form an intense connection that transforms her world. But a terrible truth begins to dawn on Laura and her father as they grapple with inexplicable events they only witness in the presence of Carmilla, who grows stranger and leaves more questions unanswered with the passing of each fitful day.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning pocket-sized classics. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by Irish writer and academic Jarlath Killeen.

Vampiric apparitions dreamed up by Charles Baudelaire and John Keats bewitch and shapeshift before our eyes. Demonic lovers sink ships as sirens tell tales of drowned sailors. Christina Rossetti and John Donne depict ghosts doomed to haunt their loved ones for ever. As witch-burning flames crackle, Shakespeare’s weird sisters chant spells. Edgar Allan Poe’s raven makes an appearance, joined by Percy Shelley’s Witch of Atlas. Literature’s most terrifying characters are lurking on every page. Yet Emily Dickinson believes danger comes from inside our own mind . . .

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning pocket-sized classics. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.

‘Ordinary fellow’ Richard Hannay returns home one night and is horrified to find a dead body. He recognizes the murdered man as his American neighbour who, just a few days earlier, had warned him about a secretive organization planning an assassination which threatens to plunge the country into war. Fearful of becoming a suspect, but resolved to scupper the plot, Hannay escapes in disguise and goes on the run. Hunted from England to Scotland by police and villains alike, he is determined to outwit his enemies and secure his country’s safety.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning, cloth-bound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.

One sweltering summer’s day, Charles Dickens passes through Wall Street. James Weldon Johnson’s anonymous narrator stumbles into a hidden bar full of poker players. Mark Twain recalls a dinner held in seven different languages. And Anaïs Nin declares that she is in love . . . with the city itself.

New York has lived through immense challenges yet remains irrepressible, filled with constant energy, movement and excitement. All these different perspectives are captured by the prose and poetry of a wonderful range of writers, including Audre Lorde, Walt Whitman, Edna St Vincent Millay, Henry James, Langston Hughes and many more.

Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library series of gorgeous pocket-sized travel paperbacks, featuring Treasures of Cornwall, Yorkshire: A Literary Landscape, London: An Illustrated Literary Companion and Paris: A Literary Anthology. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Edited and introduced by J. Michelle Coghlan.

From a beloved dachshund to a trouble-seeking Great Dane, via all manner of dogs large and small, obedient and defiant, von Arnim brilliantly captures the bond between dogs and their owners. This witty and often poignant book is the closest the author came to writing a memoir. Despite her frequent exhortations that it wasn’t an autobiography, much is revealed about her fascinating life: her marriages, life in Germany, England and Switzerland, her children and her lovers.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics bound in real cloth with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.

Two strangers embark on a feverish, dreamlike encounter abroad in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Olive’. A man impulsively meets his first love in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Between Two Planes’. Willa Cather writes of sunset island explorations, and Virginia Woolf depicts the all-too-familiar drowsy garden nap. Yet summer idylls can be shattered: there’s a deadly fishing quarrel from Guy de Maupassant, a touch of malevolent fairy magic from Selma Lagerlöf and, of course, Sherlock Holmes finds himself under pressure to solve an unsettling murder on the Cornish coast.

From light humour to deep nostalgia, Italian resorts to rural Russia, each of these tales will transport you somewhere new. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, these pocket-sized editions are perfect for travel. This edition is compiled and introduced by anthologist Becky Brown.

The book follows the pattern of the gardening year and is divided into sections: spring, when green shoots start to appear; summer, when plants grow in earnest, followed by high summer with its sultry days and warm nights. Then comes autumn and winter, when the year ends with frost and bare branches.

Filled to the brim with classic poetry, this collection contains poems about birds, plants, trees, flowers, weeds, bugs and butterflies, weather and wildlife, from poets such as William Wordsworth, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library poetry series of stunning, quarter-clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is compiled by publisher and anthologist Gaby Morgan, with an introduction by Alice Vincent.

Dip into five uplifting sections of essays, bite-size quotes and short, meditative poems. The best parts of powerful speeches from Martin Luther King Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt are included here, as well as humorous words from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mark Twain.

Pick the brains of the ancients: Seneca and Epictetus show us what we can and can’t control, while fables from Aesop remind us that slow and steady wins the race. Find inspiring poems on hope and choosing your own path by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost.

To remind new graduates that they can and will flourish, The Road Ahead has plenty of curated quotations for dealing with change, cultivating resilience and finding happiness, from Tolstoy, George Eliot, Shakespeare, Kahlil Gibran and many more.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics with ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect presents or a treat for any book lover.