Ten literary classics you may not have read

Henry Eliot is an author and editor. He has written three books: The Penguin Classics Book (2018), Follow This Thread (2018) and Curiocity (2016). He is the Creative Editor of Penguin Classics.

One of ten lesser known literary classics you may not have read that he tagged at the Guardian:

MP Shiel, The Purple Cloud, 1901

Matthew Phipps Shiel was born on Montserrat of mixed parentage. He sailed for England in 1885, claiming to be King Felipe of Redonda, a small, uninhabited rocky islet in the Caribbean. (The current king of the micronation Redonda is the Spanish author Javier Marías.) Shiel studied medicine in London and wrote detective stories. In The Purple Cloud, Adam Jeffson is the first man to reach the north pole, but on his return journey he discovers he is also the last person left alive on Earth: an insidious, sweet-smelling cloud of poisonous gas has enveloped the world and destroyed all animal life. He wanders the empty streets of London and the rest of the deserted globe, slowly descending into madness, dressed in Turkish costume and burning cities to the ground, until he discovers that he may not be the sole survivor of the calamity.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue