Nine lesser-known classics from your favourite authors

Would you believe that the man who created James Bond came up with this story about a magic car? Ian Fleming loved cars and the faster the car, the better. It was this love that inspired him to write his only children’s book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He wrote it for his son Casper and it has been enjoyed by generations of children ever since.

From the woman who brought The One Hundred and One Dalmatians to your childhood, I Capture the Castle is another feat of Dodie Smith’s imaginative genius. An equally lovable family to the dalmatians, follow the eccentric Mortmains as they navigate through life from their ramshackle castle home.

Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are some of the most influential novels of the 20th century and have made their author, George Orwell, one of the most famous writers in the English language. His debut novel, Burmese Days, is just as unflinching – drawing on his own experience of living and working in Burma, Orwell scathingly exposes the dark side of imperialism.

Essential reading for fans of Jane Austen who have already devoured all six of her full-length novels, Sanditon, Lady Susan, & The History of England is a rare collection of her lesser-known works. 

Best known for her magical adventure stories, including the award-winning Journey to the River Sea, Eva Ibbotson also wrote romantic short stories. These enchanting stories transport readers from nineteenth-century Vienna to the wild moors of Northumberland.

L. Frank Baum is the author behind legendary story The Wizard of Oz, and in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus he does what he does best, create fairy tales. In Baum’s fable young Claus is struck by the harsh reality of the world when he sees human society for the first time . . . which is how he ends up inventing toys.

Spielberg shook our screens with War of the Worlds in 2005, but the genius behind the story, H.G. Wells, had been shaking the literary scene with his prolific sci-fi novels since 1895. His lesser known debut, The Time Machine, used genuine scientific theory to ignite our global curiosity about travelling through time and space.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is rightly considered one of the greatest ever American writers and The Great Gatsby is one of the most celebrated novels in the American canon. With this later novel, Tender is the Night, he deliberately set out to write a more ambitious and far-reaching novel, experimenting radically with his writing style and drawing on  early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his characters and plot.

Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days have remained in the public eye after being given the Hollywood treatment. However Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Verne’s adventure of sea monsters and submarines, has unjustly received a lot less screen attention. Check out our gorgeously illustrated Macmillan Collector’s Library edition.