Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters – with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos – give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift’s savage satire views mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves.

Written in the early 18th century, Gulliver’s Travels was acclaimed clergyman and writer Jonathan Swift’s attempt to both satirize humanity while also parodying previously popular travel stories such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Gulliver’s Travels became popular in the same way as the epic travel stories that preceded it, and it has remained a widely read classic ever since.