A gothic fever dream of love, cruelty, class injury and revenge, Wuthering Heights remains one of the stranger canonical novels.

Heathcliff and Catherine are not “great lovers” in the sentimental sense so much as mutually destructive forces, bound by obsession, childhood damage, property, inheritance, humiliation and the brutal economies of family life.

It's always surprising to read given the lore around it, for it is viciously unsentimental. The moors are not decorative; they are pressure, exposure, isolation. Brontë gives us ghosts, bad houses, bad marriages, abusive kinship structures, emotional possession, and one of literature’s most enduring studies of love curdling into punishment. For readers of gothic fiction, Victorian literature, obsessive relationships, dark inheritance plots, and novels where everyone involved probably needed to go outside and make one normal decision.

Penguin Classics paperback. First published 1847; this Penguin Classics edition first published 1995, with introduction and notes by Pauline Nestor. Later printing, with visible cover rubbing, edge/corner wear, light creasing and general second-hand handling.