Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass

Nov 8, 2025 7:54 AM

Author:John Tenniel,Lewis Carroll,Katie Leung

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Katie Leung, star of the Harry Potter films. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Hugh Haughton.

Conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain Alice Liddell, the daughter of the dean of Carroll's college, the dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down. Following the white rabbit into his warren, Alice falls into a world where croquet is played with hedgehogs and flamingos, a baby turns into a pig, time runs amok at a the Mad Hatter's tea-party, a chaotic game of chess makes Alice a Queen and the Mock Turtle and Gryphon dance the Lobster Quadrille. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling wordplay, unforgettable characters, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for a lost childhood. Original and experimental, adapted into countless film and television versions as Alice in Wonderland, the Alice books give readers a window on both child and adult worlds.

Reviews

Darkness at Noon is the sort of novel that transcends ordinary limitations...written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling, and with such persuasive simplicity

—— New York Times, 1941

A piece of brilliant literature

—— George Orwell

A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of...all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualised drama of prison psychology

—— Times Literary Supplement

[Darkness At Noon] is written from terrible experience. From knowledge of the men whose struggles of mind and body he describes. Apart from its sociological importance, it is written with a subtlety and an economy which class it as great literature. I have read it twice without feeling that I have learned more than half of what it has to offer me- Koestler approaches the problem of ends and means, of love and truth and social organisation, through the thoughts of an old Bolshevik, Rubashov, as he awaits death in a GPU prison

—— New Statesman

Along with Animal Farm and 1984, this book formed part of the essential bookshelf of those intellectuals who repudiated their early illusions about the Soviet Union

—— Christopher Hitchens , The Week

Darkness at Noon [is] a guided tour of a totalitarian mind... it gave me a deep, life-long interest in politics

—— Rafael Behr , Guardian

One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it.

—— New Statesman

One of the most celebrated political novels of the 20th century

—— Guardian

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