Mrs. Dalloway (Macmillan Collector's Library)

Bold and experimental, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a landmark in twentieth-century fiction and a book that gets better and better with every reading.

On a perfect June morning, Clarissa Dalloway – fashionable, worldly, wealthy and an accomplished hostess – sets off to buy flowers for the party she will host that evening. She is preoccupied with thoughts of the present and memories of the past, and from her interior monologue emerge the people who have touched her life.

On the same day, Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked survivor of the Great War, dies by suicide, and casual mention of his death at the party provokes in Clarissa thoughts of her own isolation and loneliness.