A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis – an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life – including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door – becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral.
Calvino tells the mingled tales of The Castle of Crossed Destinies by means of tarot cards. Travellers meet in a castle – or, in a second section, a tavern – where their powers of speech are magically taken from them and a tarot card is placed at their disposal-Ingenious’ New Yorker
The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village, and yet cannot go home. As he encounters dualities of certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.’s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make it feel strangely complete.
“Truly deserving of the accolade Modern Classic, Donna Tartt’s cult bestseller The Secret History is a remarkable achievement – incredibly compelling, dramatic and playful.Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and for ever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.”
“Discover Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant writing in this postmodern literature classic. ‘The greatest, wildest author of his generation’ GuardianWe could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a problem because bombs are falling across Europe and crashing to the earth at the exact locations of his sexual conquests. But that doesn’t really begin to cover it. Reading this book is like falling down a rabbit hole into an outlandish, sinister, mysterious, absurd, compulsive netherworld. As The Financial Times said, ‘you must forget earlier notions about life and letters and even the Novel.’ Forty years since its publication, Gravity’s Rainbow has lost none of its power to enthral.”
Disdainful of America’s booming commercialism and industrialism, Henry David Thoreau left Concord, Massachusetts in 1845 to live in solitude in the woods near Walden Pond. Walden, the account of his stay, conveys at once a naturalist’s wonder at the commonplace and a Transcendentalist’s yearning for spiritual truth and self-reliance. But even as Thoreau disentangled himself from worldly matters, his musings were often disturbed by his social conscience. Civil Disobedience, also included in this volume, expresses his antislavery and antiwar sentiments and has influenced non-violent resistance movements worldwide. Both give a rewarding insight into a free-minded, principled and idiosyncratic man.
“Is Sophie Fevvers, toast of Europe’s capitals, part swan…or all fake?Courted by the Prince of Wales and painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, she is an aerialiste extraordinaire and star of Colonel Kearney’s circus. She is also part woman, part swan. Jack Walser, an American journalist, is on a quest to discover the truth behind her identity. Dazzled by his love for her, and desperate for the scoop of a lifetime, Walser has no choice but to join the circus on its magical tour through turn-of-the-nineteenth-century London, St Petersburg and Siberia.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SARAH WATERS**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**’A spellbinding achievement’ Literary Review”
“Discover Angela Carter’s classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales interwoven by a master of seductive, luminous storytelling.From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.’Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality’ Ian McEwan’A quirky, original, and baroque stylist’ Margaret AtwoodFeaturing an introduction from award-winning short story writer Helen Simpson”
“Isherwood’s short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover, Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Isherwood shows George’s determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul’s ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation.’A virtuoso piece of work…courageous…powerful’ Sunday Times’This mix of humour and stoicism in the face of pent-up grief is essential Isherwood’ Guardian”
“‘[The Gulag Archipelago] helped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated’ Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSONA vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn’s own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair.A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author’s wish and with his full co-operation. ‘Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece…The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today’ Anne Applebaum THE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OF THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO VOLUMES I, II & III”
“Discover Toni Morrison’s most iconic work in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exemplifies her powerful and important place in contemporary American literature.‘An American masterpiece’ AS ByattIt is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison’s enduring masterpiece.‘Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours…“Beloved,” is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all’ Margaret Atwood, New York Times ‘The literary titan we must never stop learning from’ MetroWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**”
“A beautiful fairytale filled with unexpected plot twists. Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, is lord and heir. Titus is expected to rule this gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons (and his eccentric and wayward subjects) according to strict age-old rituals, but things are changing in the castle. Titus must contend with treachery, manipulation and murder as well as his own longing for a life beyond the castle walls.”
“Fifty-five fictional cities, each described in beautiful detail – each with a woman’s name… In Invisible Cities Marco Polo conjures up cities of magical times for his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, but gradually it becomes clear that he is actually describing one city: Venice. As Gore Vidal wrote ‘Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvellous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.’This is a captivating meditation on culture, language, time, memory and the nature of human experience.’Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose… The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island’ Jeanette Winterson’Touches inexhaustibly on the essence of the human urge to create cities, be in cities, speak of cities’ Guardian’A subtle and beautiful meditation’ Sunday Times”
“Avery’s fortune, life, and loves are on the line in the game that everyone will be talking about. To inherit billions, all Avery has to do is survive a few more weeks in Hawthorne House. The paparazzi are dogging her every step. Financial pressures are building. Danger is a fact of life. And the only thing getting Avery through it all is the Hawthorne brothers. Her life is intertwined with theirs. She knows their secrets, and they know her. But as the clock ticks down to when Avery will become the richest teenager on the planet, trouble arrives in the form of a visitor who needs her help-and whose presence in Hawthorne House could change everything. It soon becomes clear that there is one last puzzle to solve, and Avery and the Hawthorne brothers are drawn into a dangerous game against an unknown and powerful player. Secrets upon secrets. Riddles upon riddles. In this game, there are hearts and lives at stake – and there is nothing more Hawthorne than winning.”
“Intrigue, riches, and romance abound in this thrilling sequel to the New York Times bestselling The Inheritance Games, perfect for fans of Karen McManus and Holly Jackson. The Inheritance Games ended with a bombshell, and now heiress Avery Grambs has to pick up the pieces and find the man who might hold the answers to all of her questions – including why Tobias Hawthorne left his entire fortune to Avery, a virtual stranger, rather than to his own daughters or grandsons. As the mystery grows and the plot thickens, Grayson and Jameson, the enigmatic and magnetic Hawthorne grandsons, continue to pull Avery in different directions. And there are threats lurking around every corner, as adversaries emerge who will stop at nothing to see Avery out of the picture – by any means necessary. With nonstop action, aspirational jet-setting, family intrigue, swoonworthy romance, and billions of dollars hanging in the balance, The Hawthorne Legacy will thrill Jennifer Lynn Barnes fans and new readers alike.”
“She came from nothing.Avery has a plan: keep her head down, work hard for a better future. Then an eccentric billionaire dies, leaving her almost his entire fortune. And no one, least of all Avery, knows why.They had everything.Now she must move into the mansion she’s inherited. It’s filled with secrets and codes, and the old man’s surviving relatives – a family hell-bent on discovering why Avery got ‘their’ money.Now there’s only one rule: winner takes all.Soon she is caught in a deadly game that everyone in this strange family is playing.But just how far will they go to keep their fortune?”
“Written in secret during the darkest days of Stalin’s reign, The Master and Margarita became an overnight literary phenomenon when it was finally published it, signalling artistic freedom for Russians everywhere. Bulgakov’s carnivalesque satire of Soviet life describes how the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one spring afternoon. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will do anything to save the imprisoned writer she loves.Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an Introduction by Richard Pevear”
Katherine Mansfield’s perceptive and resonant writing helped to define the modern short story, observing apparently trivial incidents to create quietly devastating revelations of inner lives. Graceful, delicate and burning with emotion, Mansfield’s stories were integral in shaping the Modernist movement and redefined a genre. This collection contains some of Mansfield’s most celebrated stories, including ‘Bliss’, ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’.
The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim’s brilliant, irrepressible novella, tells the tale of four very different women who, on answering an advertisement in The Times, find themselves far away from the drizzle of London and instead in the warmth of an Italian sun. There, alongside the lapping of the Mediterranean, the women’s spirits begin to shift, and quite unexpected changes take place.
“Like his Viennese contemporary Sigmund Freud, the doctor and writer Arthur Schnitzlerwas a bold pioneer in exploring the dark tangled roots of human consciousness. His novella Dream Story tells the tale of a young married man who, after a discussion with his wife about their fantasises, embarks on a eery reverie through Vienna’s underbelly.”
Regarded as one of world literature’s foremost novelists, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short stories are also some of the best ever written. ‘White Nights’ tells of love and loss on the streets of St. Petersburg, ‘A Nasty Business’ presents the hilarious tale of a general dropping in on the wedding of a subordinate, while ‘The Meek One’ is an existentialist tale of marriage and tragedy.
Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie have nothing in the world except the clothes on their back – and a dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch in California’s Salinas Valley, but their hopes are dashed as Lennie becomes a victim of his own strength. Tackling universal themes of friendship and shared vision, and giving a voice to America’s lonely and dispossessed, Of Mice and Men remains Steinbeck’s most popular work, achieving success as a novel, Broadway play and three acclaimed films.
“Greetings to you, the lucky finder of this Gold Ticket from Mr Willy Wonka! Tremendous things are in store for you!Charlie Bucket’s life is about to change forever, thanks to one miraculous moment!Willy Wonka, chocolate maker extraordinaire, has hidden five golden tickets in five ordinary bars of chocolate, and any child who finds one will get the chance to visit his incredible factory.And Charlie has found one . . . But so have . . .Augustus Gloop – a glutton for chocolateVeruca Salt – a spoiled and selfish bratViolet Beauregarde – a repulsive gum-chewerMike Teavee – a television fiendWith a chocolate river, delectable confectionery and mysterious Oompa Loompas, Mr Wonka’s factory is the most wondrous place Charlie has ever seen.”
“These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: you are not alone.Matilda is a brilliant child with a magical mind.But her parents have decided she’s just a nuisance who wastes too much time on reading and stories.And her headmistress Miss Trunchbull is a terrible bully, who thinks children are rotten and awful and should be locked up.Now it’s time for Matilda to find the power to change her story, and show them just how extraordinary children can be . . .”
Laurence Sterne’s great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate ‘hero’ Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby and a host of other characters.
“Tara Chen has had her heart broken ten times, by ten different men. Nevertheless, she is still determined to find her perfect match. The only problem? Tara is a romance novel obsessive, and her standards are sky high.Modern dating apps have killed the meet-cute, so Tara decides to revisit her exes – all ten of them – in the hope of finding her very own trope-worthy second-chance romance. And every heroine needs a sidekick, so she enlists her new flatmate, firefighter Trevor.Trevor Metcalfe is the first to rush into a burning building but the last to rush into a relationship. Love just isn’t his thing. But, the more time they spend together, the more Trevor appreciates Tara’s authentic, dramatic self.Can they break the habits of a lifetime and give their spark a chance?”
“When Silas Bird wakes in the dead of night, he watches powerlessly as three strangers take his father away. Silas is left shaken, scared and alone, except for the presence of his companion, Mittenwool . . . who happens to be a ghost. But then a mysterious pony shows up at his door, and Silas knows what he has to do. So begins a perilous journey to find his father – a journey that will connect him with his past, his future, and the unknowable world around him.PONY is destined to become a future classic.”
“Once I had four brothers. Three of them are dead. I am next. Felix Ashe is sure of only one thing. In thirty days, on his eighteenth birthday, he will die. He might be the only one convinced of this, but the gruesome deaths of his three brothers before him seem to point to only one thing: a curse, one doomed to stop anyone inheriting his family’s incredible fortune.Felix doesn’t care about money, or himself, particularly. It’s hard to have a stake in the future when you know you haven’t got one. But he does care about his little brother Nick, very much. And when an opportunity to break the curse appears to present itself, it’s impossible not to heed its dark call.Soon long-buried secrets will take Felix to the darkest underbelly of Jazz-Age New York, to the far-flung wilds of the Yorkshire moors and back again. And bound to everything is a deadly secret society who will either be Felix’s downfall . . . or his one chance at redemption.”
The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul – determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother’s suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence’s native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers (1913) is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.
Women in Love is widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence’s greatest novel. The novel continues where The Rainbow left off with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula’s with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, though he gives that up, and Gudrun’s with Gerald Crich, an industrialist, and later with a sculptor, Loerke.
Dorothy Parker was the most talked-about woman of the decadent 1920s, notorious as a hard-drinking bad girl with a talent for endlessly quotable one-liners. In the stories collected here, she brilliantly captures the spirit of the decadent Jazz Age in New York, exposing both the dazzle and the darkness. This selection includes among others ‘The Standard of Living’, ‘Mr Durant’ and her masterpiece, ‘Big Blonde’.
Karen Blixen, author of the acclaimed memoir Out of Africa, was also a master of the short story form: her tales offer luminous meditations on rebirth and redemption, on the mystery and unexpectedness of human behaviour. Alongside ‘Babette’s Feast’, this selection also includes ‘Sorrow-Acre’, often thought to be one of her finest stories.
Holly Golightly is a glittering socialite mover and shaker: generally upwards, sometimes sideways and, every now and then, down. She’s up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She’s a shoplifter, a delight, a drifter, a tease. In short, she’s an icon. Truman Capote’s most famous work, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the ultimate ode to dreamers.
Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband’s gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships.
“I’m the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn’t really, after all’Goodbye to Berlin is the novella that inspired Cabaret, evoking the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles.VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s – 100 years on. ”
“Puffin Clothbound Classics are stunningly beautiful hardback editions of the most famous stories in the world, now including a beautiful 70th anniversary edition of Charlotte’s Web, the poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.This is the story of a little girl named Fern who loved a little pig named Wilbur and of Wilbur’s dear friend, Charlotte A. Cavatica, a beautiful large grey spider. With the unlikely help of Templeton the rat, and a wonderfully clever plan of her own, Charlotte saves the life of Wilbur, who by this time has grown up to be quite a pig. A time-honoured classic favourite.”
“Roger Lancelyn Green’s classic retelling of the adventures of the Greek Heroes has been in print for over 60 years and now a stunning Puffin Clothbound edition is available for readers and collectors.Discover the mysterious and exciting legends of the gods and heroes in Ancient Greece, from the adventures of Perseus, the labours of Heracles, the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, to Odysseus and the Trojan wars.”
“The book that won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature’It’s silly not to hope. It’s a sin he thought’Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway’s magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man’s challenge to the elements.’The best story Hemingway has written. No page of this beautiful master-work could have been done better or differently’ Sunday Times’The writing is as taut, and at the same time as lithe and cunningly played out, as the line on which the old man plays the fish’ Guardian”
“Ernest’s Hemingway’s powerful autobiographical story of war.‘I don’t live at all when I’m not with you’In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experience came A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s unforgettable war novel.Recreating the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer, and the men and women he meets in Italy, this is a story of war told with simplicity and immediacy. It is also a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.’A novel of great power’ Times Literary Supplement’In these troubled times Hemingway’s clarity, spirituality and sense of hard reality in the midst of confusion is very helpful’ Sunday Telegraph”
“Hemingway’s great novel of the Spanish Civil War’The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it’High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco’s rebels…’A sparse, masculine, world-weary meditation on death, ideology and the savagery of war in general’ Sunday Telegraph’One of the greatest novels which our troubled age will produce’ Observer **One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**”
“Sweet, good girl Wren Beaumont is loved by everyone at Lancaster Prep.Everyone but campus bad boy Crew Lancaster.That is, until sparks start to fly during one psychology class when Wren realises there’s more to life than good grades – and Crew finally understands what it’s like to be in love . . .Steamy, romantic and totally addictive. This is a love story for everyone who believes that true love really does happen when you least expect it”
“From the internationally bestselling author of Netflix’s hottest new show, One of Us is Lying, comes a new, page-turning thriller . . .True crime can leave a false trail.Four years ago, Brynn left Saint Ambrose School following the shocking murder of her favourite teacher. The case was never solved, but she’s sure that the three kids who found Mr. Larkin’s body know more than they’re telling, especially her ex-best friend Tripp Talbot. He’s definitely hiding something.When Brynn gets an internship working on a popular true-crime show, she decides to investigate what really happened that day in the woods. But the further she dives into the past, the more secrets she finds.Four years ago someone got away with murder. Now it’s time to uncover the truth . . .’Given that her high-school-based murder mysteries read like bingeworthy Netflix dramas, it’s easy to see why queen of teen crime Karen McManus is a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic’ – Observer”
Few writers have expressed loneliness, the need for human understanding and the search for love with such power and poetic sensibility as the American writer Carson McCullers. The Ballad of the Sad Café is her masterpiece: an unruly, bittersweet novella concerning the most unlikely of love triangles.
One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. Metamorphosis, Kafka’s masterpiece of unease and black humour, is one of the twentieth century’s most influential works of fiction, and is accompanied here by two more classic stories.
Recently widowed, the unscrupulous and beautiful Lady Susan Vernon is determined to scheme her way through high society in the hope of a profitable new match – all while trying to marry off her unfortunate daughter. Told through a series of letters, Jane Austen’s magnificent first novella is as subversive as it is charming.
In this inspirational, allegorical guide, Al Mustafa the prophet delivers spiritual yet practical homilies on the work of living: beauty, truth, possessions, sorrow, joy, death and more. Translated into more than fifty of languages and among the best-selling books of all time, The Prophet remains a wise and revitalising handbook for the soul.
“By far the shortest of Pynchon’s great, dazzling novels – and one of the best.Suffused with rich satire, chaotic brilliance, verbal turbulence and wild humour, The Crying of Lot 49 opens as Oedipa Maas discovers that she has been made executrix of a former lover’s estate. The performance of her duties sets her on a strange trail of detection, in which bizarre characters crowd in to help or confuse her. But gradually, death, drugs, madness and marriage combine to leave Oepida in isolation on the threshold of revelation, awaiting The Crying of Lot 49.’Engineered like a rocket’ Ned Beauman, Independent’The best book to start with’ Guardian”
“Rune and Poppy met as children and quickly fell in love. As they grew older their love became stronger, before Rune returned to Norway. Convinced neither time nor distance can keep them apart they promised to be faithful. Two years later Rune is back, though not the boy Poppy remembers. Is there still a way back to each other after all this time? And will the secret Poppy is carrying bring them closer together or separate them for ever?Discover the story that will break your heart twice yet make you believe true love lasts for eternity . . .”
In ‘The Turn of the Screw’, one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, a governess becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care. But are the children really in danger – and if so, from whom? The novella is accompanied here by several more of the very best of Henry James’ short stories, including ‘The Jolly Corner’ and ‘The Third Person’, all of which explore human psychology through ghostly visitations and the uncanny.
“This is the story of King Midas…Or that’s what we were always told. The Golden King with his palace of riches and me, his golden touched girl.I’m kept locked away. For my safety, I’m told. No one can get in. Apart from him.But when political upheaval becomes strife in our kingdom, I am sent with the royal court to be with my King.And everything I know starts to change. My love for Midas is challenged, my trust is broken. Everything I knew about him was wrong.We are told it’s his tale but really, it’s mine.”
“I’ve left the grips of one king to fall into the hands of another.Rip’s name is whispered in taverns and street corners throughout the kingdoms.But as I get to know him, I realise he is not what he seems…He is Fae.Part of the powerful and magical people who abandoned this world hundreds of years ago.But here one stands before me. And when he turns his onyx eyes upon me, I fall captive.For an entirely different reason. As his army marches towards a battle with the king I once adored, I must decide.Midas or Rip.Loyalty or freedom.”
“Curvy fitness influencer Crystal Chen built her career shattering gym stereotypes. After a recent break-up, she has little time left for men, instead finding joy in the gym – her place of power and positivity.Enter firefighter Scott Ritchie, the smug new guy who routinely steals her favourite squat rack. Soon, sparks start flying . . .As the ultra-competitive foes battle for gym domination, the last thing they expect is to run into each other at their grandparents’ engagement party. And, in the lead-up to the wedding, Crystal discovers there’s a soft heart under Scott’s muscled exterior. Bonding over family, fitness and cheesy pick-up lines, she just might have found her person.But when a photo of them goes viral, savage internet trolls put their relationship to the test . . . Are they strong enough to get through it? ”
“Nora is a cut-throat literary agent at the top of her game. Her whole life is books. Charlie is an editor with a gift for creating bestsellers. And he’s Nora’s work nemesis.Nora has been through enough break-ups to know she’s the woman men date before they find their happy-ever-after. That’s why Nora’s sister has persuaded her to swap her desk in the city for a month’s holiday in Sunshine Falls, North Carolina. It’s a small town straight out of a romance novel, but instead of meeting sexy lumberjacks, handsome doctors or cute bartenders, Nora keeps bumping into…Charlie.She’s no heroine. He’s no hero. So can they take a page out of an entirely different book?”
“Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative – a meticulous and unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.”
“There’s never been a better time to set new habits. This book will change your life.In The Power of Habit, award-winning journalist Charles Duhigg takes us into the thrilling and surprising world of the scientific study of habits.He examines why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. He visits laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. And he uncovers how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr.The result is a compelling argument and an empowering discovery: the key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive or even building revolutionary companies is understanding how habits work. By harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.______________________________'[An] essential manual for business and living.’ Andrew Hill, Financial Times’Once you read this book, you’ll never look at yourself, your organisation, or your world quite the same way.’ Daniel H. Pink’This is a first-rate book – based on an impressive mass of research, written in a lively style and providing just the right balance of intellectual seriousness with practical advice on how to break our bad habits.’ The Economist”
On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.
“A stunning hardback gift edition of one of the world’s most beloved stories.Look at my planet. It is directly above us. But how far away it is!The timeless, enchanting story of the little prince who lives on a tiny planet with three volcanoes and a haughty flower, which he must protect from the baobabs, the bad seeds. The rulers of the other planets he visits all suffer from the cares and stupidities of the everyday world. Only the little prince, through his clear, loving eyes, knows that the simplest of things can be of the utmost importance.Translated by T. V. F. Cuffe, and with the original illustrations, the story is complete and unabridged.Also in Puffin Clothbound Classics:9780241411148 Black Beauty9780241411162 The Secret Garden9780241411193 A Christmas Carol9780241411209 The Wizard of Oz9780241411216 Treasure Island9780241411155 Dracula9780241425121 Frankenstein9780241425138 Wuthering Heights9780241425114 Tales from Shakespeare”
“These tales are the perfect introduction to Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Renowned writers and essayists of the 18th century, siblings Charles and Mary Lamb vividly bring to life the power of Hamlet and Othello, the fun of As You Like It and the drama of Pericles. Their accessible writing never loses the feel of Shakespeare’s beautiful language and humanity, and convey all of his wit and wisdom. These tales are classic literature in their own right.Puffin Clothbound Classics is a series of much-loved stories from classic literature for children and adults, brought together in beautiful hardback volumes.”
Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th of June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce’s belief that literature ‘is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man’.
“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean Sea during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power.The narrator is a pilot downed in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the miraculous appearance of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. “”In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don’t dare disobey,”” the narrator recalls. “”Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket.”” And so begins their dialogue, one confined only by the limits of the imagination, by the horizon of a child’s wonder…”
“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry first published The Little Prince in 1943, only a year before his plane vanished over the Mediterranean Sea during a reconnaissance mission. Nearly eighty years later, this fable of love and loneliness has lost none of its power.The narrator is a pilot downed in the Sahara Desert, frantically trying to repair his wrecked plane. His efforts are interrupted one day by the miraculous appearance of a little prince, who asks him to draw a sheep. “”In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don’t dare disobey,”” the narrator recalls. “”Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket.”” And so begins their dialogue, one confined only by the limits of the imagination, by the horizon of a child’s wonder…”
“Ivy, Mateo, and Cal used to be close – best friends back in middle school. So, when Cal pulls into campus late for class, and runs into Ivy and Mateo, they decide to ditch school. Just like old times.But they’re not the only ones skipping school that day. When the trio spot classmate Brian ‘Boney’ Mahoney acting suspiciously downtown they follow him into an empty building, and walk straight into a murder scene.Brian’s not the only one keeping secrets, and when their day of freedom turns deadly it’s only a matter of time before the truth comes out.”
“TWO FRIENDS. TEN SUMMER TRIPS.THEIR LAST CHANCE TO FALL IN LOVE.12 SUMMERS AGO: Poppy and Alex meet. They hate each other, and are pretty confident they’ll never speak again.11 SUMMERS AGO: They’re forced to share a ride home from college and by the end of it a friendship is formed. And a pact: every year, one vacation together.10 SUMMERS AGO: Alex discovers his fear of flying on the way to Vancouver. Poppy holds his hand the whole way.7 SUMMERS AGO: They get far too drunk and narrowly avoid getting matching tattoos in New Orleans.2 SUMMERS AGO: It all goes wrong.THIS SUMMER: Poppy asks Alex to join her on one last trip. A trip that will determine the rest of their lives.”
No account of the financial insanity of 1929 has been issued in a form at once so readable, so humorous, and so carefully authenticated as this classic book. J.K. Galbraith examines the ‘gold rush fantasy’ in American psychology and describes its dire consequences. The Florida land boom, the operations of Insull, Kreuger and Hatry, and the fabulous Shenandoah Corporation all come together in this penetrating study of concerted human greed and folly. From the cold figures of Wall Street the author wrenches a truly human drama.
“A lonely woman in Rio de Janeiro makes a connection that will change her life. Ulisses, a mysterious man, has penetrated her soul and turned her inside out. This is a devastating novel of the interior, of a woman yearning to love, of the ultimate unknowability of the other in a relationship, of the cosmic changes that enrich us and destroy us at the dawn of love.”
“You can live on a shilling a day in Paris if you know how. But it is a complicated business’As a struggling writer in his twenties, Orwell lived as a down-and-out among the poorest members of society. In this, his early memoir, Orwell recalls with vivid clarity his time working as a penniless dishwasher in Paris, pawning clothes to buy a day’s worth of bread and wine, sleeping in bug-infested bunks, trading survival skills and cigarette butts with fellow tramps, and trudging between London’s workhouse spikes for a few hours’ sleep and tea. With all of the sensitivity and compassion that Orwell is known and loved for, he exposed the hardships of poverty and gave readers an unprecedented look at life lived on the fringes of society. This vivid account is an enduring call to support the world’s most vulnerable people and exemplifies his belief that ‘The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.’”
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker, Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.George Orwell’s fable of revolutionary farm animals – the steadfast horses Boxer and Clover, the opportunistic pigs Snowball and Napoleon, and the deafening choir of sheep – who overthrow their elitist human master only to find themselves subject to a new authority, is one of the most famous warnings ever written. Rejected by such eminent publishing figures as Victor Gollancz, Jonathan Cape and T.S. Eliot due to its daringly open criticism of Stalin, Animal Farm was published to great acclaim by Martin Secker and Warburg on 17 August 1945. One reviewer wrote ‘In a hundred years’ time perhaps Animal Farm … may simply be a fairy story: today it is a fairy story with a good deal of point.’ Seventy-five years since its first publication, Orwell’s immortal satire remains an unparalleled masterpiece and more relevant than ever.The authoritative text with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.”
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’The year is 1984 and war and revolution have left the world unrecognisable. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, led by Big Brother. Mass surveillance is everything and The Thought Police are employed to ensure that no individual thinking is allowed. Winston Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, carefully rewriting history, but he dreams of freedom and of rebellion. It is here that he meets and falls in love with Julia. They start a secret, forbidden affair – but nothing can be kept secret, and they are forced to face consequences more terrifying than either of them could have ever imagined.A DYSTOPIAN MASTERPIECE, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR IS THE POWERFUL AND PROPHETIC NOVEL THAT DEFINED THE 20TH CENTURY.”
When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master, Mr Jones, and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another. Orwell’s chilling ‘fairy story’ is a timeless and devastating satire of idealism betrayed by power and corruption.
“This is the story of one man who went to Spain with an intellectual sympathy for socialist doctrine and came back…with a fervent, almost religious belief in its necessity’Both a memoir of Orwell’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War and a heartfelt tribute to those who died, Homage to Catalonia is an extraordinary first-hand record of him time on the frontline. Written with all of the depth, passion and deep human understanding that defines Orwell’s writing this is incredible work of non-fiction tells of the battles that were faced by ordinary working people as they fought for both their lives and their ideologies. Although Orwell was himself near-fatally wounded he finds both bleak and comic notes in his experience which is recorded with such clarity and depth that this short work has become one of his best known.Despite a mixture of laudatory and politically biased reviews, that first edition of 1,500 copies had still not sold out by the time Orwell died, twelve years after the book was published.”
“The Storys are the envy of their neighbours: owners of the largest property on their East Coast island, they are rich, beautiful, and close. Until it all falls apart. The four children are suddenly dropped by their mother with a single sentence: You know what you did. An explosive YA thriller from international bestselling author of One of Us is Lying.They never hear from her again. Years later, when 18-year-old cousins Aubrey, Milly and Jonah Story receive a mysterious invitation to spend the summer at their grandmother’s resort, they have no choice but to follow their curiosity and meet the woman who’s been such an enigma their entire lives. This entire family is built on secrets, right? It’s the Story legacy. This summer, the teenagers are determined to discover the truth at the heart of their family. But some secrets are better left alone.”
“THE COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED TEXT’Most generally there is something about everything that you can be glad about, if you keep hunting long enough to find it’When her father dies, Pollyanna is sent to live with her stern Aunt Polly. She is poor, orphaned and alone but Pollyanna just feels lucky to have an aunt at all. The truth is that her dear father, before he died, taught her a trick for life – the ‘Glad Game’ – the aim of which is to find the good in every bad situation. Before long, Pollyanna’s sunny outlook has brightened up the whole town. But when a horrible accident occurs can the Game save Pollyanna?Includes exclusive material: In The Backstory you can test your knowledge of the book and find out if you’re as optimistic as Pollyanna!”
“””Stand firm'”” said Peter, “”and wave like mad!””‘ They were not railway children to begin with. When their Father mysteriously leaves home Roberta (everyone calls her Bobbie), Phyllis and Peter must move to a small cottage in the countryside with Mother. It is a bitter blow to leave their London home, but soon they discover the hills and valleys, the canal and of course, the railway. But with the thrilling rush and rattle and roar of the trains comes danger too. Will the brave trio come to the rescue? And most importantly, can they solve the disappearance of their Father?BACKSTORY: Find out all about steam trains and learn what it was really like to be a child in Edwardian times.”
“””Ho! ho! I am the Toad, the motor-car snatcher, the prison-breaker, the Toad who always escapes!”” Tired of spring cleaning, Mole ventures above ground into the warm sunshine, and happens upon his friend Ratty. Together they picnic on the sparkling, burbling river, brave the sinister Wild Wood in wintertime to visit the bad-tempered Badger, and take to the open road in a caravan with dear, silly old Toad. But when Toad’s attention turns to motor cars, his reckless behaviour goes from bad to worse. Badger, Rat and Mole must save their friend from ruin, and Toad Hall from the clutches of the rascally Stoats and Weasels.BACKSTORY: Get outdoors and explore the natural world, and test your knowledge of The Wind in the Willows.”
“””You saved your mistress’s life, Beauty! yes, you saved her life”” Black Beauty is the prettiest young horse in the meadows, and spends many happy days under the apple trees with his friends Ginger and Merrylegs. But this easy life comes to an end when Beauty is sold and goes from farm to inn to cabhorse in London, enduring rough treatment from foolish and careless masters. Beauty remains faithful, hardworking and full of spirit despite his trials, and through him we learn that all horses and humans alike deserve to be treated with kindness.BACKSTORY: Find out about the unusual author and learn some horsey vocabulary.”
“Read the ultimate classic comforting coming of age fantasy story.’Don’t you know a sand-fairy when you see one?’I dare say you have often thought about what you would do if you were granted three wishes. The five children – Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane and their baby brother – had often talked about it but when they are faced with the grumpy sand-fairy they find it difficult to make up their minds. And that is just the beginning of their dilemmas. As they discover, there is nothing quite like a wish for getting you into terrible trouble.EXTRA ACTIVITIES INCLUDED: Learn about what it was like to be a child in 1902 and try some fun activities! This special edition includes fantastic extra educational resources.”
“‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom’Sonnets are for romantics, starry-eyed lovers and ardent hearts. And Shakespeare’s sonnets are the best ever written. But this is why they are also for cynics, for star-crossed lovers and for those who know the anguish of unrequited love. Some of them are written to a young man, some of them to a woman. And although the poems are full of mystery – why did Shakespeare write them, what was his sexuality? – each one speaks to us from across the centuries of love, hate and the intensity of being alive.Includes exclusive content: In the ‘Backstory’ you can find a short, handy, funny guide to everything you might want to know about Shakespeare and his sonnets.‘This is a crazy, all-consuming, feverish and sweaty love; love, in all its uncut, full-strength intensity; an adolescent love’ Don Paterson, Guardian”
“A favourite childhood classic. What little girl can turn a whole household upside down and breathe new life back into a strange, old manor? The wonderfully contrary, strong-willed, angry, misunderstood Mary Lennox. When Mary Lennox is sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody says she is the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It is true, too. Mary is pale, spoilt and quite contrary. But she is also horribly lonely. Then one day she hears about a garden in the grounds of the Manor that has been kept locked and hidden for years. And when a friendly robin helps Mary find the key, she discovers the most magical place anyone could imagine… EXTRA ACTIVITIES INCLUDED: Take our quiz, learn about the plucky author and find out about the real secret garden. This beautiful edition includes fantastic extra educational resources.”
One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout. Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand – whether train or elephant – overcoming set-backs and always racing against the clock.
“Victor Frankenstein has made a terrible mistake. In his desperate pursuit to create life, he has created a monster. A monster which, abandoned by his master and shunned by everyone it meets, follows Dr Frankenstein to the very ends of the earth with horror and murder in its recycled heart. Shelley takes the reader on a journey through St Petersburg, to the beautiful Swiss Alps, to the desolate waste of the Arctic Circle, in a story that has sent a chill down the spines of generations.”
Heathcliff, an orphan, is raised by Mr Earnshaw as one of his own children. Hindley despises him but wild Cathy becomes his constant companion, and he falls deeply in love with her. But when she will not marry him, Heathcliff’s terrible vengeance ruins them all. Yet still his and Cathy’s love will not die.
“**THE NUMBER 1 BESTSELLER AND WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE**In this electrifying sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood answers the question that has tantalised readers for decades: What happened to Offred?’The Testaments is Atwood at her best . . . To read this book is to feel the world turning’ Anne EnrightThe Republic of Gilead is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, two girls with radically different experiences of the regime come face to face with the legendary, ruthless Aunt Lydia. But how far will each go for what she believes?Now with additional material: book club discussion points and an interview with Margaret Atwood about the real-life events that inspired The Testaments and The Handmaid’s Tale._________________________________PRAISE FOR THE TESTAMENTS:’Everything The Handmaid’s Tale fans wanted and more. Prepare to hold your breath throughout, and to cry real tears at the end’ Stylist’Atwood challenges us constantly and poses the question that lies like a pearl inside the shell of this frighteningly readable novel, “”Before you sit in judgement, how would you behave in Gilead?”’ Sunday Telegraph’She manages to write about the darkest and most terrifying parts of human psychology in a way that is still deeply funny and full of dark strange hope’ Naomi Alderman, author of The Power”
“He doesn’t believe in happy endings. She’s lost her faith that they exist. But could they find one together?January is a hopeless romantic who narrates her life like she’s the lead in a blockbuster movie. Gus is a serious literary type who thinks true love is a fairy-tale.But January and Gus have more in common than you’d think:They’re both broke. They’ve got crippling writer’s block. And they need to write bestsellers before summer ends.The result? A bet to swap genres and see who gets published first.The risk? In telling each other’s stories, their worlds might be changed entirely…”
“___________________________________’Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel – a black man falsely charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man’s struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much.To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story, an anti-racist novel, a historical drama of the Great Depression and a sublime example of the Southern writing tradition.”
Nausea is both the story of the troubled life of a young writer, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times – existentialism. The book chronicles his struggle with the realization that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning; a world in which he must find his own purpose and then take total responsibility for his choices. A seminal work of contemporary literary philosophy, Nausea evokes and examines the dizzying angst that can come from simply trying to live.
“Book Two of the Bayview Trilogy. The sequel to the international bestseller One of Us is Lying.Welcome back to Bayview High . . .It is a year after the action of One of Us Is Lying, and someone has started playing a game of Truth or Dare.But this is no ordinary Truth or Dare. This game is lethal. Choosing the truth may reveal your darkest secrets, accepting the dare could be dangerous, even deadly.The teenagers of Bayview must work together once again to find the culprit, before it’s too late . . .And now, discover the thrilling end to the One Of Us Lying trilogy with One Of Us Is Back.”
When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school friend at Brandham Hall, he begins to act as a messenger between Ted, the farmer, and Marian, the beautiful young woman up at the hall. He becomes drawn deeper and deeper into their dangerous game of deceit and desire, until his role brings him to a shocking and premature revelation. The haunting story of a young boy’s awakening into the secrets of the adult world, The Go-Between is also an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.
“She found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold … She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world’ Like the clay from which she sculpts figurines as a girl, Virginia is constantly shifting and changing. From her dreamlike childhood on Quiet Farm with her adored brother Daniel, through an adulthood where the past continues to pull her back and shape her, she moves through life, grasping for the truth of existence. Illuminating Virginia’s progress through intense flashes of image, sensation and perception, The Chandelier, Lispector’s landmark second novel, is a disorienting and exhilarating portrait of one woman’s inner life.”
Silas Marner lives a friendless and isolated existence near the country village of Raveloe, hoarding his gold. One night his fortune is stolen and Silas loses everything he holds dear. But then the golden-haired child Eppie appears in his home, and Silas begins to reform bonds of faith and human connectedness that he once renounced forever.
The serene and maternal Mrs Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr Ramsay, together with their children and assorted guests, are holidaying on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse Virginia Woolf constructs a remarkable and moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life, and the conflict between male and female principles. One of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century, To the Lighthouse is often cited as Virginia Woolf’s most popular novel.
In the course of his famous travels, Gulliver is captured by miniature people who wage war on each other because of religious disagreement over how to crack eggs, is sexually assaulted by giants, visits a floating island, and decides that the society of horses is better than that of his fellow man. Swift’s tough, filthy and incisive satire has much to say about the state of the world today and is presented here in its unexpurgated entirety.
“WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LIONEL SHRIVERNewland Archer and May Welland are the perfect couple. He is a wealthy young lawyer and she is a lovely and sweet-natured girl. All seems set for success until the arrival of May’s unconventional cousin Ellen Olenska, who returns from Europe without her husband and proceeds to shake up polite New York society. To Newland, she is a breath of fresh air and a free spirit, but the bond that develops between them throws his values into confusion and threatens his relationship with May.The Vintage Classics edition of The Age of Innocence is published to tie-in with the publication of the Vintage paperback of Hermione Lee’s celebrated biography of Edith Wharton”
“INCLUDES ‘THE CHIMES’ AND ‘THE HAUNTED MAN’Ebenezer Scrooge is unimpressed by Christmas. He has no time for festivities or goodwill toward his fellow men and is only interested in money. Then, on the night of Christmas Eve, his life is changed by a series of ghostly visitations that show him some bitter truths about his choices.A Christmas Carol is Dickens’ most influential book and a funny, clever and hugely enjoyable story.”
“Since Europeans first reached Brazil in 1500 it has been an unfailing source of extraordinary fascination. More than any other part of the ‘New World’ it displayed both the greatest beauty and grandeur and witnessed scenes of the most terrible European ferocity.Brazil: A Biography, written by two of Brazil’s leading historians and a bestseller in Brazil itself, is a remarkable attempt to convey the overwhelming diversity and challenges of this huge country from its origins to the 21st century – larger than the contiguous USA and still in some regions not fully mapped. The book’s major themes are the near-continuous battles to create both political institutions and social frameworks that would allow stable growth, legal norms and protection for all its citizens. Brazil’s failure to achieve these except in the very short term has been tragic, but even now it remains one of the world’s great experiments – creative, harsh, unique and as compelling a story for its inhabitants as for outsiders.”
“Enter the surreal and enchanting world of Haruki MurakamiToru Okada’s cat has disappeared. His wife is growing more distant every day. Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving. As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada’s vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out. He embarks on a bizarre journey, guided by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell.’Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original’ The Times VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS series – five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.”
“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.Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end this brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier’s daughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, riches and wonder – tales of mystical lands peopled with princes and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba’s outwitting a band of forty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequence of stories will last 1,001 nights . . .”
Black Beauty is a handsome, sweet-tempered colt with a strong spirit. As a young colt he is free to gallop in the fresh green meadows with his beloved mother, Duchess, and their kind master. But when his owners are forced to sell him, Black Beauty goes from a life of comfort and kindness to one of hard labour and cruelty. Bravely he works as hard as he can, suffering at the hands of men who treat animals badly. But Black Beauty has an unbreakable spirit and will, and is determined to survive . . .
Following the demise of bloodthirsty buccaneer Captain Flint, young Jim Hawkins finds himself with the key to a fortune. For he has discovered a map that will lead him to the fabled Treasure Island. But a host of villains, wild beasts and deadly savages stand between him and the stash of gold. Not to mention the most infamous pirate ever to sail the high seas . . .
After losing her parents, young Mary Lennox is sent from India to live in her uncle’s gloomy mansion on the wild English moors. She is lonely and has no one to play with, but one day she learns of a secret garden somewhere in the grounds that no one is allowed to enter. Then Mary uncovers an old key in a flowerbed – and a gust of magic leads her to the hidden door. Slowly she turns the key and enters a world she could never have imagined.
“Follow the yellow brick road!Dorothy thinks she is lost forever when a terrifying tornado crashes through Kansas and whisks her and her dog, Toto, far away to the magical land of Oz. To get home Dorothy must follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City and find the wonderfully mysterious Wizard of Oz. Together with her companions the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion whom she meets on the way, Dorothy embarks on a strange and enchanting adventure.”
Jonathan Harker is travelling to Castle Dracula to see the Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. He is begged by locals not to go there, because on the eve of St George’s Day, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will come full sway. But business must be done, so Jonathan makes his way to the Castle – and then his nightmare begins. His beloved wife Meena and other lost souls have fallen under the Count’s horrifying spell. Dracula must be destroyed…
Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean, miserable, bitter old man with no friends. One cold Christmas Eve, three ghosts take him on a scary journey to show him the error of his nasty ways. By visiting his past, present and future, Scrooge learns to love Christmas and the people all around him.
“**THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER**In twenty-one bite-sized lessons, Yuval Noah Harari explores what it means to be human in an age of bewilderment.’21 Lessons is, simply put, a crucial book’ Adam KayHow can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children?Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a thrilling journey through today’s most urgent issues. The golden thread running through his exhilarating new book is the challenge of maintaining our collective and individual focus in the face of constant and disorienting change.Are we still capable of understanding the world we have created?’Fascinating… compelling… [Harari] has teed up a crucial global conversation about how to take on the problems of the 21st century’ Bill Gates, New York Times’Truly mind-expanding… Ultra-topical’ Guardian”
“Written in flight from Lispector’s ‘shipwreck of introspection’ it is a book unlike any other in the Lispector canon, a novel about simply seeing the external world. Its heroine Lucrécia is utterly mute and unreflective. She may have no inner life. The plot itself is utterly unlike any other Lispector narrative: small-town girl marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after. But there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasies, catty remarks, minor characters’ visions and music from unknown sources. There is Lucrécia, the heroine free of the burden of thought, who ‘leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly’. And yet her ‘mere’ looking leads, as Lispector’s biographer Benjamin Moser notes, ‘paradoxically but inevitably, to Clarice’s own metaphysical concerns. As it turns out, not being profound is simply another way of being profound’.Translated by Johnny Lorenz”
“Graham Greene has wit and grace and character and story and a transcendent universal compassion that places him for all time in the top ranks of world literature’ John le Carré The Third Man, Graham Greene’s most iconic tale, takes place in post-war Vienna, a ‘smashed dreary city’ occupied by the four Allied powers. Rollo Martins, a second-rate novelist, arrives penniless to visit his friend and hero, Harry Lime. But Harry has died in suspicious circumstances, and the police are closing in on his associates… The Fallen Idol is the chilling story of a small boy caught up in the games that adults play. Left in the care of the butler and his wife whilst his parents go on a fortnight’s holiday, Philip realises too late the danger of lies and deceit. But the truth is even deadlier.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IAN THOMSON”
“WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY MONICA ALIThe love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. After a chance meeting rekindles his love and jealousy two years later, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.”
“A tragedy of classical proportions…a magnificent novel’ The TimesDiscover the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers.’Swede’ Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, lucrative business, sporting prowess and good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope. Until one sunny day in 1968, when Swede’s daughter, Merry, commits an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism and the Levov family is plunged into mayhem. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels that still resonates today._________________PRAISE FOR AMERICAN PASTORAL:‘Angry, grieving, witty, acute’ Sunday Times’A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years’ Financial Times’A momentous novel’ Observer’Utterly tragic and compelling’ Tatler”
“The American psyche is channelled into the gripping story of one man. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth at his very best. It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America – a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.’An extraordinary book – bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand’ Sunday Telegraph”
“‘In this holy community she would play the witch.’ Imber Court is a quiet haven for lost souls, a utopia for those who can neither live in the world, nor out of it. But beneath the gentle daily routines of this community run currents of supressed desire, religious yearning and a legend of disastrous love. Charming, indolent Dora arrives in their midst, and half-unwittingly conjures these submerged things to the surface.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SARAH PERRYVINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.”
“I saw a monster rising from the waves.’ Charles Arrowby has determined to spend the rest of his days in hermit-like contemplation. He buys a mysteriously damp house on the coast, far from the heady world of the theatre where he made his name, and there he swims in the sea, eats revolting meals and writes his memoirs. But then he meets his childhood sweetheart Hartley, and memories of her lovely, younger self crowd in – along with more recent lovers and friends – to disrupt his self-imposed exile. So instead of ‘learning to be good’, Charles proceeds to demonstrate how very bad he can be. **Winner of the Man Booker Prize 1978.**WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAISY JOHNSONVINTAGE CLASSICS MURDOCH: Funny, subversive, fearless and fiercely intelligent, Iris Murdoch was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. To celebrate her centenary Vintage Classics presents special editions of her greatest and most timeless novels.”
After Franz Kafka’s death, in perhaps the most important of all acts of literary disobedience, his executor refused to agree to Kafka’s wish that his great mass of unpublished fiction be destroyed. This fiction included not only The Castle and The Trial but also the amazingly varied, chilling and ingenious short works collected in The Burrow and Other Stories. These tales, some little more than a page, others much more substantial, are among the greatest works of Central European literature. They vary from the tiny and horrifying ‘Little Fable’ to the elaborate waking nightmares of ‘Building the Great Wall of China’ and the title story ‘The Burrow’, in which an unidentified creature describes its creation of an endlessly elaborate burrow to protect itself from unidentified enemies, but with every trap or tunnel only creating further terrors and uncertainty.
“The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deepThe revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those ‘outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women’. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose – essays, speeches, letters, interviews – explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity, and includes her landmark piece ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’.’The truth of her writing is as necessary today as it’s ever been’ Guardian”
“I have been womanfor a long timebeware my smileI am treacherous with old magicFilled with rage and tenderness, Audre Lorde’s most acclaimed poetry collection speaks of mothers and children, female strength and vulnerability, renewal and revenge, goddesses and warriors, ancient magic and contemporary America. These are fearless assertions of identity, told with incantatory power.”
Jean Rhys’s late, literary masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.
“Read the greatest rediscovered classic of recent years’A beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life’ Ian McEwanWilliam Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father’s farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death, his colleagues remember him rarely.Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value – of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history – and in doing so reclaims the significance of an individual life.’A brilliant, beautiful, inexorably sad, wise and elegant novel’ Nick Hornby’A terrific novel of echoing sadness’ Julian Barnes”
Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation. Separately and together, they query the relationship of past to present, and the meaning of life itself.
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. The novel’s use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.
On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel’s lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works.
“Orlando has always been an outsider…His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England amd imperial Turkey to the modern world.Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey – a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or… woman?”
“Herzog is alone, now that his wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend. Solitary, in a crumbling house which he shares with rats, he is buffeted by a whirlwind of mental activity. People are rumouring that his mind had collapsed. But is it true? Locked for days in the custody of his rambling memories, Herzog scrawls frantic letters which he never mails. His mind buzzes with conundrums and polemics, writing in a spectacular intellectual labyrinth. Is he crazy, or is he a genius?In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption.”
“Augie March is a penniless and parentless Chicago boy growing up during the Great Depression. A ‘born recruit’, he drifts through life latching onto a wild succession of occupations, including butler, thief, dog-washer, sailor and salesman, then proudly rejects each one as too limiting. Not until he tangles with the glamorous Thea, a huntress with a trained eagle, can he attempt to break free. A modern-day Everyman in search of identity and fulfilment, Augie is the star performer in Bellow’s exuberant, richly observed human variety show.”
This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka’s works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka’s eyewitness account of an air display in 1909. Together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka’s literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.
“Discover Vonnegurt’s funny absurdist novel about the human condition. ‘Outrageous, witty, thought-provoking, unputdownable, scintillating, invigorating, ennobling, enlightening and masterly’ SpectatorIn a frolic of cartoon and comic outbursts against rule and reason, a miraculous weaving of science fiction, memoir, parable, fairy tale and farce, Kurt Vonnegut attacks the whole spectrum of American society, releasing some of his best-loved literary creations on the scene.‘Vonnegut explains everything from an apple to the pyramids…weird, fast and inventive’ Daily Telegraph”
“Read Kurt Vonnegut’s powerful masterpiece, which is as timely now as when it was first published.‘An extraordinary success. A book to read and reread. He is a true artist’ New York Times Book ReviewBilly Pilgrim – hapless barber’s assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier – has become unstuck in time. Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War. But when, exactly? How did he get here? And how does he get out?Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself. This is a book about war. Listen to what he has to say: it is of the utmost urgency.‘The great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.’ George Saunders”
“””June, 1942: I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.””In Amsterdam, in the summer of 1942, the Nazis forced teenager Anne Frank and her family into hiding. For over two years, they, another family and a German dentist lived in a ‘secret annexe’, fearing discovery. All that time, Anne kept a diary. An intimate record of tension and struggle, adolescence and confinement, anger and heartbreak, this is the definitive edition of the diary of Anne Frank.”
A Room of One’s Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte to the silent fate of Shakespeare’s gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. Published almost a decade later Three Guineas breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and women’s attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolf’s fiery spirit and sophisticated wit and confirm her status as a highly inspirational essayist.
“Read this specially designed new edition of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of what makes us human. Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe? In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. An ambitious synthesis of history, biology, ecology and linguistics, Guns, Germs and Steel remains a groundbreaking and humane work of popular science.PATTERNS OF LIFE: SPECIAL EDITIONS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENCE BOOKS”
“The follow up YA thriller from the author of the international bestseller One of Us is Lying.A perfect town is hiding secrets. Secrets that somebody would kill to keep hidden.Ellery’s never been to Echo Ridge, but she’s heard all about it.It’s where her aunt went missing at age sixteen, never to return. Where a Homecoming Queen’s murder five years ago made national news.And now she has to live there with her estranged grandmother, after her mother lands in rehab.Malcolm grew up in the shadow of the Homecoming Queen’s death.His older brother was the prime suspect and left Echo Ridge in disgrace.But now he’s back- just as mysterious threats appear around town, hinting that a killer will strike again.Then another girl disappears.As Ellery and Malcolm race to unravel what happened, they realise every secret has layers in Echo Ridge.’Tightly plotted and brilliantly written, with sharp, believable characters, this whodunit is utterly irresistible’ – HEAT”
“The Greek myths are amongst the best stories ever told, passed down through millennia and inspiring writers and artists as varied as Shakespeare, Michelangelo, James Joyce and Walt Disney.They are embedded deeply in the traditions, tales and cultural DNA of the West. You’ll fall in love with Zeus, marvel at the birth of Athena, wince at Cronus and Gaia’s revenge on Ouranos, weep with King Midas and hunt with the beautiful and ferocious Artemis.Spellbinding, informative and moving, Stephen Fry’s Mythos perfectly captures these stories for the modern age – in all their rich and deeply human relevance.”
“October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C. 20,000 to 200,000 protesters are marching to end the war in Vietnam, while helicopters hover overhead and federal marshals and soldiers with fixed bayonets await them on the Pentagon steps. Among the marchers is Norman Mailer. From his own singular participation in the day’s events and his even more extraordinary perceptions comes a classic work that shatters the mould of traditional reportage. Intellectuals and hippies, clergymen and cops, poets and army MPs crowd the pages of a book in which facts are fused with techniques of fiction to create the nerve-end reality of experiential truth. The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties’ tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.”
“The world’s threats are universal like the sun but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow. Back in Lisbon after sixteen years practising medicine in Brazil, Ricardo Reis wanders the rain-sodden streets. He longs for the unattainably aristocratic Marcenda, but it is Lydia, the hotel chamber maid who makes and shares his bed. His old friend, the poet Fernando Pessoa, returns to see him, still wearing the suit he was buried in six weeks earlier. It is 1936, the clouds of Fascism are gathering ominously above them, so they talk; a wonderful, rambling discourse on art, truth, poetry, philosophy, destiny and love.”
“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.This collection includes many of the famous cases – and great strokes of brilliance – that made the legendary Sherlock Holmes one of fiction’s most popular creations. With his devoted amanuensis, Dr Watson, Holmes emerges from his smoke filled rooms in Baker Street to grapple with the forces of treachery, intrigue and evil in such cases as ‘The Speckled Band’, in which a terrified woman begs their help in solving the mystery surrounding her sister’s death, or ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, which portrays a European king blackmailed by his mistress. In ‘Silver Blaze’ the pair investigate the disappearance of a racehorse and the violent murder of its trainer, while in ‘The Final Problem’ Holmes at last comes face to face with his nemesis, the diabolical Professor Moriarty – ‘the Napoleon of crime’.”
“Audrey Niffenegger, bestselling author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, invites you to creep through haunted houses and commune with the undead in this anthology of all things ghostly.Haunted houses, spectral chills, and of course, the odd cat. . . In this volume, Audrey Niffenegger has brought together her selection of the very creepiest, weirdest and wittiest ghost stories around.Scare yourself silly with old favourites by Edgar Allan Poe and M. R. James. Entertain the unnerving with tales from Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link and Audrey Niffenegger herself. And as bedtime nears, allay your fears with funny new writing from Amy Giacalone and the classic wit of Saki.When the nights draw in and the fire burns low, enjoy the eeriness, the dread and the comedy of all things ghostly.”
“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. Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with Porfiry, a suspicious detective, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murderer, Dostoyevsky’s dark masterpiece evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone’s faith in humanity is tested.”
“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. Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote’s fancy leads them wildly astray, tilting at windmills, fighting with friars, and distorting the rural Spanish landscape into a fantasy of impenetrable fortresses and wicked sorcerers. At the same time the relationship between the two men grows in fascinating subtlety. Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a wonderful burlesque of the popular literature its disordered protagonist is obsessed with.”
Catherine Morland is a young girl with a very active imagination. Her naivety and love of sensational novels lead her to approach the fashionable social scene in Bath and her stay at nearby Northanger Abbey with preconceptions that have embarrassing and entertaining consequences.
Facts alone are wanted in life’: the children at Mr Gradgrind’s school are sternly ordered to stifle their imaginations and pay attention only to cold, hard reality. They live in a smoky, troubled industrial town so entertainment is hard to come by and resentments run deep. The effects of Gradgrind’s teaching on his own children, Tom and Louisa, are particularly profound and leave them ill-equipped to deal with the unpredictable desires of the human heart. Luckily for them they have a friend in Sissy Jupe, the child of a circus clown, who retains her warm-hearted, compassionate nature despite the pressures around her.
Kim is an orphan who earns his living begging on the streets of Lahore. One day he befriends an aged Tibetan Lama who, although content to live simply in India, is a rich and powerful abbot in his own country. When the Lama recruits Kim as a disciple and then funds his education at an English public school an adventure begins that will take the unlikely pair to the Himalayas on a thrilling journey of espionage and enlightenment.
A young governess is sent to a great country house to care for two orphaned children. To begin with Flora and Miles seem to be model pupils but gradually the governess starts to suspect that something is very wrong with them. As she sets out to uncover the corrupt secrets of the house she becomes more and more convinced that something evil is watching her.
“Tess is an innocent young girl until the day she goes to visit her rich ‘relatives’, the D’Urbervilles. Her encounter with her manipulative cousin, Alec, leads her onto a path that is beset with suffering and betrayal. When she falls in love with another man, Angel Clare, Tess sees a potential escape from her past, but only if she can tell him her shameful secret…’Gloriously physical, full of passion and irony, humour and tenderness’ Anne Michaels”
“WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY DR DIETER FUCHS AND JOSEPH O’CONNORAgainst the backdrop of nineteenth century Dublin, a boy becomes a man: his mind testing its powers, obsessions taking hold and loosening again, the bonds of family, tradition, nation and religion transforming from supports into shackles; until the young man devotes himself to the celebration of beauty, and reaches for independence and the life of an artist.”
“Brilliantly imaginative fiction or the shape of things to come? H.G. Wells’s masterpiece still retains its power to provoke and enthral.In the Time Traveller’s miraculous new machine, we will be carried from a Victorian dinner table to 802,701 AD, when the Earth is divided between the gentle, ineffective Eloi, and the ape-like Morlocks; forward again by a million years or so to glimpse a dying world of blood-red beaches and menacing shapes; and on again to the last days of our planet, a remote twilight where nothing moves but darkness and a cold wind.”
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied. Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.Then, late one night, in the middle of the English countryside, they landed.”
“SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY RUTH RENDELLM. R. James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a dolls house, a lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window – ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the original master of suspense.”
“With a beautiful cover and chapter-heading illustrations throughout from queen of colouring Johanna Basford.The Jungle Book tells the story of the irrepressible Mowgli, who is rescued as a baby from the jaws of the evil tiger, Shere Khan. Raised by wolves and guided by Baloo the bear, Mowgli and his animal friends embark on a series of hair-raising adventures through the jungles of India.”
In early eighteenth-century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost his left hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fe where women are burned at the stake, the two are bound body and soul by love of an unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the Crown and the Church clash, they purse his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.
“Life affirming, triumphant and tragic . . . masterfully told. . . but also a wonderful page-turner’ Guardian’Brilliant and hugely ambitious’ New York Times’Extraordinary’ Telegraph___HERE IS A SMALL FACT – YOU ARE GOING TO DIE 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall. SOME IMPORTANT INFORMATION – THIS NOVEL IS NARRATED BY DEATH___What readers are saying about The Book Thief: ***** ‘I loved every page of this book. So many great quotes, observations on humanity and images…I just didn’t want it to end.***** ‘I loved this book. It is not only one of the best I’ve read this year, it is one of the best I’ve ever read.’ ***** ‘This is the sort of book the restores your faith in humanity and leaves you feeling uplifted, even when it makes you shed a tear.”
In this thrilling adventure tale, three men embark on an epic journey under the sea with the mysterious Captain Nemo aboard his submarine, the Nautilus. Over the course of their fantastical voyage, they encounter the lost city of Atlantis, the South Pole and the corals of the Red Sea, and must battle countless adversaries, both human and monstrous. This new version by acclaimed translator David Coward brings Verne’s novel vividly to life for a new generation of readers.
“Sense and Sensibility | Pride and Prejudice | Mansfield Park | Emma | Northanger Abbey | Persuasion | Love and FreindshipFew novelists have conveyed the subtleties and nuances of their own social milieu with the wit and insight of Jane Austen. Through her vivacious and spirited heroines and their circle, she paints vivid portraits of English middle-class life as the eighteenth century came to a close. Each of the novels is a love story and a story about marriage – marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. But they are not mere romances; ironic, comic and wise, they are masterly studies of the society Jane Austen observed. The seven books in this box set contain some of the most brilliant, dazzling prose in the English language.”
Arendt’s classic work explores totalitarianism through an extended analysis of the Nazi and Soviet regimes. In a series of dazzling insights, she explores the role of propaganda, the use of terror and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination. A surprise bestseller in the wake of the US presidential election, Arendt’s book offers chilling lessons about the threat of totalitarianism that we ignore at our peril.
“Saramago’s Jesus is the son not of God but of Joseph. Mary Magdalene is his lover not his convert. In the wilderness he tussles not with the Devil – a kindly and necessary evil – but with God, a fallible, power-hungry autocrat. And he must die not for the sins of the fathers but for the sins of the Father. By investigating these simple inversions Saramago has woven a dark parable; a secular gospel of astonishing richness and depth.‘An original, wild and beautiful book’ Times Literary Supplement”
THE PEARL is Steinbeck’s flawless parable about wealth and the evil it can bring. When Kino, an Indian pearl-diver, finds ‘the Pearl of the world’ he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana in church and their little boy, Coyotito, will be able to attend school. Obsessed by his dreams, Kino is blind to the greed, fear and even violence the pearl arouses in him and his neighbours. Written with haunting simplicty and lyrical simplicity, THE PEARL sets the values of the civilized world against those of the primitive and finds them tragically inadequate.
Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer prize-winning epic remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of dust bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel West in search of the promised land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and broken dreams, yet out of their suffering Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human, yet majestic in its scale and moral vision; an eloquent tribute to the endurance and dignity of the human spirit.
Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel, follows the interwined destinies of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of indentity; the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love’s absence.
Drifters in search of work, George and his simple-minded friend Lennie, have nothing in the world except each other – and a dream. A dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch, but their hopes are doomed as Lennie – struggling against extreme cruelty, misunderstanding and jealousy – becomes a victim of his own strength. Tackling universal themes, friendship and a shared vision, and giving a voice to America’s lonely and dispossesed, OF MICE AND MEN remains Steinbeck’s most popular work.
“A Japanese teenager is overcome with longing for his male classmate. Each night he imagines his body punctured with arrows, like the body of St Sebastian in Guido Reni’s painting; the objects of our hero’s desire are tortured, killed and maimed, over and over again each night in his private fantasies. He must hide his lust from a homophobic and stiflingly conventional Japan. Self-loathing and desperate, he begins acting out a love affair with the sister of a school friend, while grappling with his hidden desires under the shadow of a Japan under threat from World War Two.”
“While the average reader cannot pretend truly to understand the reality of those who suffered in concentration camps, Kertesz draws us one step closer’ ObserverGyuri, a fourteen-year-old Hungarian Jew, gets the day off school to witness his father signing over the family timber business – his final act before being sent to a labour camp. Two months later, Gyuri finds himself assigned to a ‘permanent workplace’. This is the start of his journey to Auschwitz.On his arrival Gyuri finds that he is unable to identify with other Jews, and is rejected by them. An outsider among his own people, his estrangement makes him a preternaturally acute observer, dogmatically insisting on making sense of the barbarity – and beauty – he witnesses.”
“Demian is a coming-of-age story that follows a young boy’s maturation as he grapples with good and evil, lightness and darkness, and forges alternatives to the ever-present corruption and suffering that he sees all around him. Crucial to this development are his relationships with a series of older mentors, of who the titular Demian is the most charismatic, otherworldly and ultimately influential. Many have noted the influence of Jungian psychology upon this novel and it is fascinating to see Herman Hesse’s interests in the self, existence and free will play out through through the lens of early twentieth-century Europe; Christian imagery and themes are ever-present, as is the shadow of the First World War.”
“WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RUTH RENDELLThe Baskerville family curse tells of how a terrifying, supernatural hound roams the moors around Baskerville Hall and preys on members of the family in revenge for a ghastly crime committed by one of their ancestors. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead in the grounds, with a large animal footprint near his lifeless body, the locals are convinced that the hound is back. It is up to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to uncover the truth and keep the new heir to the hall safe from danger.”
It is the French Riviera in the 1920s. Nicole and Dick Diver are a wealthy, elegant, magnetic couple. A coterie of admirers are drawn to them, none more so than the blooming young starlet Rosemary Hoyt. When Rosemary falls for Dick, the Diver’s calculated perfection begins to crack. As dark truths emerge, Fitzgerald shows both the disintegration of a marriage and the failure of idealism. Tender is the Night is as sad as it is beautiful.
“EDITED BY HANS WALTER GABLER WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY SCARLETT BARON AND JOHN BANVILLEIn this powerfully influential series of short stories, James Joyce captures uneasy souls, shabby lives and innocent minds in the dark streets and homes of his native city. In doing so, he conjures uncertainties and desires, illumines moments of joy and sorrow otherwise lost in private memory, and pierces the many mysteries at the heart of things.”
Eight years ago Anne Elliot bowed to pressure from her family and made the decision not to marry the man she loved, Captain Wentworth. Now circumstances have conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited. However, when they meet again Wentworth behaves as if they are strangers and seems more interested in her friend Louisa. In this, her final novel, Jane Austen tells the story of a love that endures the tests of time and society with humour, insight and tenderness.
Lucie Manette has been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris’s most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes’ fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay and the dissolute lawyer Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution.
When Ishmael sets sail on the whaling ship Pequod one cold Christmas Day, he has no idea of the horrors awaiting him out on the vast and merciless ocean. The ship’s strange captain, Ahab, is in the grip of an obsession to hunt down the famous white whale, Moby Dick, and will stop at nothing on his quest to annihilate his nemesis.
“It is said that Charles Dickens invented Christmas, and within these pages you’ll certainly find all the elements of a quintessential traditional Christmas brought to vivid life: snowy rooftops, gleaming shop windows, steaming bowls of punch, plum puddings like speckled cannon balls, sage and onion stuffing, miracles, magic, charity and goodwill. This Vintage Classics edition gathers together not only Dickens’ Christmas Books (‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘The Chimes’, ‘The Battle of Life’,’The Cricket on the Hearth’ and ‘The Haunted Man’) but also stories that Dickens wrote for the special seasonal editions of his periodicals All the Year Round and Household Words, and a festive tale from The Pickwick Papers.”
“The midnight hour approaches. You lie in bed and try to sleep, but there is the howling of the wind outside, the creak of a floorboard, the scream of a cat, the ticking clock…Your heart beats, your skin crawls, and despite yourself you reach for this book and enter a world like a nightmare, haunted by dark fears, guilty secrets and the bloody consequences of rage, revenge and obsession. You cannot tear yourself away, these tales will appall and yet enthrall you, for no mere mortal can resist the master of Gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe.”
The Darling children are tucked up in bed when Peter Pan bursts in to their nursery. Peter and his mischievous fairy Tinker Bell entice Wendy and her brothers to fly away with them to a magical world called Neverland. There you can swim with mermaids and play all day with the Lost Boys. But you must watch out for pirates, especially Captain Hook. And how do you find Neverland? Second to the right and straight on till morning of course…
When a tornado crashes through Kansas City, Dorothy and her dog Toto are whisked far away, over the rainbow, to a strange land called Oz. How will they ever get home? And what is at the end of the yellow brick road? Plucky Dorothy and Toto embark on a magical adventure to search for the Wizard of Oz and along the way encounter new friends: the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion.
Huck Finn spits, swears, smokes a pipe and never goes to school. With his too-big clothes and battered straw hat, Huck is in need of ‘civilising’, and the Widow Douglas is determined to take him in hand. And wouldn’t you know, Huck’s no-good Pap is also after him and he locks Huck up in his cabin in the woods. But Huck won’t stand too much of this, and after a daring escape, he takes off down the Mississppi on a raft with an runaway slave called Jim. But plenty of dangers wait for them along the river – will they survive and win their freedom?
Christmas won’t be the same this year for Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as their father is away fighting in the Civil War, and the family has fallen on hard times. But though they may be poor, life for the four March sisters is rich with colour, as they play games, put on wild theatricals, make new friends, argue, grapple with their vices, learn from their mistakes, nurse each other through sickness and disappointments, and get into all sorts of trouble.
“The international bestselling YA thriller by acclaimed author, Karen M. McManus – NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES.Book One of the Bayview Trilogy.Five students go to detention. Only four leave alive. Yale hopeful Bronwyn has never publicly broken a rule.Sports star Cooper only knows what he’s doing in the baseball diamond.Bad boy Nate is one misstep away from a life of crime.Prom queen Addy is holding together the cracks in her perfect life.And outsider Simon, creator of the notorious gossip app at Bayview High, won’t ever talk about any of them again.He dies 24 hours before he could post their deepest secrets online. Investigators conclude it’s no accident. All of them are suspects.Everyone has secrets, right?What really matters is how far you’ll go to protect them.”
In this thrilling adventure tale by the ‘Father of Science Fiction’, three men embark on an epic journey under the sea with the mysterious Captain Nemo aboard his submarine the Nautilus. Over the course of their fantastical voyage, they encounter the lost city of Atlantis, the South Pole and the corals of the Red Sea, and do battle with countless underwater adversaries. Verne’s triumphant work of the imagination shows both the limitless possibilities of science and the dark depths of the human mind through the brilliant but vengeful Nemo.
“**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER**Sapiens showed us where we came from. In uncertain times, Homo Deus shows us where we’re going.’Homo Deus will shock you. It will entertain you. It will make you think in ways you had not thought before’ Daniel Kahneman, bestselling author of Thinking, Fast and SlowYuval Noah Harari envisions a near future in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century and beyond – from overcoming death to creating artificial life.It asks the fundamental questions: how can we protect this fragile world from our own destructive power? And what does our future hold?”
“No food, no water, no government, no obligation, no order.Discover a chillingly powerful and prescient dystopian vision from one of Europe’s greatest writers. A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks. It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.This is not anarchy, this is blindness.‘Saramago repeatedly undertakes to unite the pressing demands of the present with an unfolding vision of the future. This is his most apocalyptic, and most optimistic, version of that project yet’ Independent”
Daisy Miller is one of Henry James’s great heroines – a young, independent American travelling in Europe, whose flouting of social conventions has the potential to lead to disaster. Her story is here accompanied by six more set among English castles, Swiss hotels and French ports, and all riffing on a classic Jamesian theme: the clash between the old world and new, Europe and America.
“Orlando has always been an outsider…His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey – a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or… woman?”
Jean Rhys’s late masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.
“Ralph Ellison’s blistering and impassioned first novel tells the extraordinary story of a man invisible ‘simply because people refuse to see me’. Published in 1952 when American society was in the cusp of immense change, the powerfully depicted adventures of Ellison’s invisible man – from his expulsion from a Southern college to a terrifying Harlem race riot – go far beyond the story of one individual. As John Callahan says, ‘In an extraordinary imaginative leap, he hit upon a single word for the different yet shared condition of African Americans, Americans, and, for that matter, the human individual in the twentieth century and beyond.’This edition includes Ralph Ellison’s introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, a fascinating account of the novel’s seven-year gestation.”
Jay Gatsby is a self-made man famed for his decadent champagne-drenched parties. Despite being surrounded by Long Island’s bright and beautiful, he longs only for Daisy Buchanan. In shimmering prose, Fitzgerald shows Gatsby pursue his dream to its tragic conclusion.
“WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TIM BUTCHER The silence of the jungle is broken only by the ominous sound of drumming. Life on the river is brutal, and unknown threats lurk in the darkness. Marlow’s mission to captain a steamer upriver into the dense interior leads him into conflict with the others who haunt the forest. But his decision to hunt down the mysterious Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader who is the subject of sinister rumours, leads him into more than just physical peril.INCLUDES THE STORY ‘YOUTH'”
“WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM AND CAROL ANN DUFFYIn this vivid portrait of one day in a woman’s life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.”
“WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IRVINE WELSHDorian is a good-natured young man until he discovers the power of his own exceptional beauty. As he gradually sinks deep into a frivolous, glamorous world of selfish luxury, he apparently remains physically unchanged by the stresses of his corrupt lifestyle and untouched by age. But up in his attic, hidden behind a curtain, his portrait tells a different story…”
Impish, daring young Tom Sawyer is the bane of the old, the hero of the young. For wherever there is mischief or adventure, Tom is at the heart of it. During one hot summer, Tom witnesses a murder, runs away to be a pirate, attends his own funeral, rescues an innocent man from the gallows, searches for treasure in a haunted house, foils a devilish plot and discovers a box of gold. But can he escape his nemesis, the villainous Injun Joe?
“What you create can destroy you. One freezing morning, a lone man wandering across the Acrtic ice caps is rescued from starvation by a ship’s captain. Victor Frankenstein’s story is one of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist he pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final frontier and create life. But his creation is a monster stitched together from grave-robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and his life can only lead to tragedy.Written when she was only nineteen, Shelley’s gothic tale is one of the greatest horror stories ever published.”
Dr Jekyll has been experimenting with his identity. He has developed a drug which separates the two sides of his nature and allows him occasionally to abandon himself to his most corrupt inclinations as the monstrous Mr Hyde. But gradually he begins to find that the journey back to goodness becomes more and more difficult, and the risk that Mr Hyde will break free entirely from Dr Jekyll’s control puts all of London in grave peril.
“WITH A FOREWORD BY DAVID PEACE Discover Sherlock Holmes’s most memorable and intriguing cases, including adventures with mysterious masked strangers, ingenious heists, murderous plots and hidden jewels. From Holmes’s lodgings at 221B Baker Street, the famous detective and his faithful sidekick Dr Watson unravel the shadiest crimes taking place on the streets of London and across the English countryside.”
Robinson Crusoe runs away from home to join the navy. After a string of adventures at sea, he is shipwrecked in a devastating storm, and finds himself alone on a remote desert island. He remains there many years, building a life for himself in solitude, until the day he discovers another man’s footprint in the sand…
“Alice is one of the most beloved characters of English writing. A bright and inquisitive child, one boring summer afternoon she follows a white rabbit down a rabbit-hole. At the bottom she finds herself in a bizarre world full of strange creatures, and attends a very odd tea party and croquet match. This immensely witty and unique story mixes satire and puzzles, comedy and anxiety, to provide an astute depiction of the experience of childhood. Illustrated by John TennielIncludes Through the Looking Glass”
“WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW MOTION When young Jim Hawkins discovers a treasure map in a pirate’s chest, he is drawn into a world of danger and adventure. He joins a crew setting sail to the Caribbean to seek out the booty and over the course of the voyage confronts mutiny, murder and the charismatic and devious Long John Silver.”
Wuthering Heights is the tale of two families both joined and riven by love and hate. Cathy is a beautiful and wilful young woman torn between the soft-hearted Edgar, and Heathcliff, the passionate and resentful man who has loved her since childhood. The power of their bond creates a maelstrom of cruelty and violence which will leave one of them dead and cast a shadow over the lives of their children. Emily Brontë’s novel is a stunningly original and shocking exploration of obsessive passion.
Elizabeth Bennet is young, clever and attractive, but her mother is a nightmare and she and her four sisters are in dire need of financial security and escape in the shape of husbands. The arrival of nice Mr Bingley and arrogant Mr Darcy in the neighbourhood turns all their lives upside down in this witty drama of friendship, rivalry, enmity and love.
Who would have thought a comedy of manners written more than a hundred years ago would still be so apt and so funny? Oscar Wilde was a genius of play-writing, and his deftness, wit and sharp eye for social satire keep audiences in thrall to this day. Alongside Earnest, discover a biblical tragedy retold, Lady Windermere and her infamous fan and Wilde’s take on an ideal husband, in his selection of Wilde’s most important plays.
“This beautiful book of this classic powerful romance is a wonderful keepsake and real treasure. Elinor is as prudent as her sister Marianne is impetuous. Each must learn from the other after they are forced by their father’s death to leave their home and enter into the contests of polite society. The charms of unsuitable men and the schemes of rival ladies mean that their paths to success are beset with disappointment, but together they attempt to find a way to happiness.”
Collected inside this book are diary entries, letters and newspaper clippings that piece together the depraved story of the ultimate predator. A young lawyer on an assignment finds himself imprisoned in a Transylvanian castle by his mysterious host. Back at home his fiancée and friends are menaced by a malevolent force which seems intent on imposing suffering and destruction. Can the devil really have arrived on England’s shores? And what is it that he hungers for so desperately?
“WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HENNING MANKELLOliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape.In Oliver Twist, Dickens graphically conjures up the capital’s underworld, full of prostitutes, thieves, and lost and homeless children, and gives a voice to the disadvantaged and abused.ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK”
Pip’s life as an ordinary country boy is destined to be unexceptional until a chain of mysterious events lead him away from his humble origins and up the social ladder. His efforts to become a London gentleman bring him into contact not just with the upper classes but also with dangerous criminals. Pip’s desire to improve himself is matched only by his longing for the icy-hearted Estella, but secrets from the past impede his progress and he has many hard lessons to learn.
Emma is young, rich and independent. She has decided not to get married and instead spends her time organising her acquaintances’ love affairs. Her plans for the matrimonial success of her new friend Harriet, however, lead her into complications that ultimately test her own detachment from the world of romance.
As an orphan, Jane’s childhood is not an easy one but her independence and strength of character keep her going through the miseries inflicted by cruel relatives and a brutal school. However, her biggest challenge is yet to come. Taking a job as a governess in a house full of secrets, for a passionate man she grows more and more attracted to, ultimately forces Jane to call on all her resources in order to hold on to her beliefs.
“For over a hundred years the Pacific island of Pala has been the scene of a unique experiment in civilisation. Its inhabitants live in a society where western science has been brought together with Eastern philosophy to create a paradise on earth. When cynical journalist, Will Farnaby, arrives to research potential oil reserves on Pala, he quickly falls in love with the way of life on the island. Soon the need to complete his mission becomes an intolerable burden and he must make a difficult choice.In counterpoint to Brave New World and Ape and Essence, in Island Huxley gives us his vision of utopia.WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAW”
Set in the harsh Puritan community of 17th century Boston, this is a tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth. The mother of the child, Hester Prynne, is publicly disgraced and ostracized but emerges as the first true heroine of American fiction.
Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle’s country estate, in a ‘dream-bright’ America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are continually parted and reunited, come to learn the strange truth about their singular relationship and, decades later, put their extraordinary experiences into words.
Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behaviour becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her has been misplaced. Anne Brontë’s powerful novel is an exploration of a woman’s struggle for creative freedom and domestic independence, and disturbed many readers on first publication, including her own sister Charlotte.
At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon’s army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace (1868-9), Tolstoy entwines grand themes – conflict and love, birth and death, free will and fate – with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.
“I felt the powerful strength of my family overrunning me like a heavy rush of water’For André, a young man growing up on a farm in Brazil, life consists of ‘the earth, the wheat, the bread, our table and our family’. He loves the land, fears his austere, pious father who preaches from the head of the table as if it is a pulpit, and loathes himself, as he starts to harbour shameful feelings for his sister Ana. Lyrical and sensual, told with biblical intensity, this classic Brazilian coming-of-age novel follows André’s psychological and sexual awakening, as he must choose between body and soul, duty and freedom.”
“Yes, bastard, you’re the one I love’A pair of lovers – a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm in the Brazilian outback – spend the night together. The next day they proceed to destroy each other. Amid vitriolic insults, cruelty and warring egos, their sexual adventure turns into a savage power game. This intense, erotic cult novel by one of Brazil’s most infamous modernist writers explores alienation, the desire to dominate and the wish to be dominated.A New Translation by Stefan Tobler”
Conspiracies and intrigue are rife in the court of Henry VIII as a Duke is executed for treason, having been tricked by the Cardinal. And when the King falls in love with Anne Bullen and decides to divorce his wife, he causes an irrevocable rift with the Catholic Church. After the King’s secret marriage to Anne courtiers fall in and out of favour and deaths abound, with far-reaching consequences.
Victor Hugo’s tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, and by the relentless investigations of the dogged policeman Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.
In the spring of 1948 Arthur Miller retreated to a log cabin in Connecticut with the first two lines of a new play already fixed in his mind. He emerged six weeks later with the final script of Death of a Salesman – a painful examination of American life and consumerism. Opening on Broadway the following year, Miller’s extraordinary masterpiece changed the course of modern theatre. In creating Willy Loman, his destructively insecure anti-hero, Miller himself defined his aim as being ‘to set forth what happens when a man does not have a grip on the forces of life.’
Arthur Miller’s classic parable of mass hysteria draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch-hunt of 1692 – ‘one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history’ – and the McCarthyism which gripped America in the 1950s. The story of how the small community of Salem is stirred into madness by superstition, paranoia and malice, culminating in a violent climax, is a savage attack on the evils of mindless persecution and the terrifying power of false accusations.
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, fastidious college professor. He also likes little girls. And none more so than Lolita, who he’ll do anything to possess. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? …Or is he all of these?
Promised a golden future as ruler of Scotland by three sinister witches, Macbeth murders the king to ensure his ambitions come true. But he soon learns the meaning of terror – killing once, he must kill again and again, and the dead return to haunt him. A story of war, witchcraft and bloodshed, Macbeth also depicts the relationship between husbands and wives, and the risks they are prepared to take to achieve their desires.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. When young prince Hamlet is confronted by his father’s ghost on the battlements of Castle Elsinore, he is burdened with a terrible task: slay King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, who the ghost alleges murdered him. Wrestling with his conscience, Hamlet feigns wild madness while plotting a brutal revenge, alienating his mother Queen Gertrude and spurning his lover Ophelia. But his apparent insanity wreaks havoc on guilty and innocent alike.
The publication of Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories, eighty-five in all, is a major literary event. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Lispector’s stories take us through their lives – and ours. From one of the greatest modern writers, these 85 stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow Clarice Lispector throughout her life.
A popular soldier and newly married man, Othello seems to be in an enviable position. And yet, when his supposed friend sows doubts in his mind about his wife’s fidelity, he is gradually consumed by suspicion. In this powerful tragedy, innocence is corrupted and trust is eroded as every relationship is drawn into a tangled web of jealousies.
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
One of the most scandalous and influential books of the 20th century, Tropic of Cancer redefined the novel. Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Promptly banned in the US and the UK because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries. When it was first published in the US in 1961, it led to more than 60 obscenity trials until a historic ruling by the Supreme Court defined it as a work of literature. Long hailed as a truly liberating book, daring and uncompromising, Tropic of Cancer is a cornerstone of modern literature that asks us to reconsider everything we know about art, freedom, and morality.
A story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers as much as Henry Miller’s first novel, Tropic of Cancer. A mixture of fiction and autobiography, it is the story of Henry V. Miller who works for the Cosmodemonic telegraph company in New York in the 1920s and tries to write the most important work of literature that was ever published. Tropic of Capricorn paints a dazzling picture of the life of the writer and of New York City between the wars: the skyscrapers and the sewers, the lust and the dejection, the smells and the sounds of a city that is perpetually in motion. As daring, frank and erotic as his first novel, Tropic of Capricorn is a cult modern classic.
A young woman flees Athens with her lover, only to be pursued by her would-be husband and by her best friend. Unwittingly, all four find themselves in an enchanted forest where fairies and sprites soon take an interest in human affairs, dispensing magical love potions and casting mischievous spells. In this dazzling comedy, confusion ends in harmony, as love is transformed, misplaced, and – ultimately – restored.
With its astounding hardcover reviews Richard Zenith’s new complete translation of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET has now taken on a similar iconic status to ULYSSES, THE TRIAL or IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME as one of the greatest but also strangest modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes linked fragments, it is a mesmerising, haunting ‘novel’ without parallel in any other culture.
“**THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLER**’Interesting and provocative… It gives you a sense of how briefly we’ve been on this Earth’ Barack ObamaWhat makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens?Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human.Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us.In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going. ________________PRAISE FOR SAPIENS:’Jaw-dropping from the first word to the last… It may be the best book I’ve ever read’ Chris Evans’Sweeps the cobwebs out of your brain… Radiates power and clarity’ Sunday Times’It altered how I view our species and our world’ Guardian’Startling… It changes the way you look at the world’ Simon Mayo’I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species’ Bill Gates**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**”
A noble but impoverished Venetian asks a friend, Antonio, for a loan to impress an heiress. His friend agrees, but is forced to borrow the sum from a cynical Jewish moneylender, Shylock, and signs a chilling contract to honour the debt with a pound of his own flesh. A complex and controversial comedy, The Merchant of Venice explores prejudice and the true nature of justice.
Beautiful, clever, rich – and single – Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protégée Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen’s most flawless work.
A cultural landmark and the most shocking novel in the English language, Naked Lunch is an exhilarating ride into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. An unnerving tale of an addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, Naked Lunch’s formal innovation, formerly taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution has exerted its influence authors like Thomas Pynchon and J. G. Ballard; on the relationship of art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media in general.
“Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him. Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister’s recent death.When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it’s unclear who saves whom. And when they pair up on a project to discover the ‘natural wonders’ of their state, both Finch and Violet make more important discoveries: It’s only with Violet that Finch can be himself – a weird, funny, live-out-loud guy who’s not such a freak after all. And it’s only with Finch that Violet can forget to count away the days and start living them. But as Violet’s world grows, Finch’s begins to shrink. How far will Violet go to save the boy she has come to love?An intense, gripping YA novel, perfect for fans of John Green, Jay Asher, Rainbow Rowell, Gayle Forman and Jenny Downham.”
“The exploits of Tom Sawyer, a consummate prankster with a quick wit, captivate children of all ages. Yet through the novel’s humorous escapades, from the episodes of the whitewashed fence and the ordeal in the cave to the trial of Injun Joe, Mark Twain explores deeper themes within the adult world Tom will one day join. These include the baser human instincts of dishonesty and superstition, murder and revenge, starvation and slavery. This edition features a new introduction and notes by leading Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen.”
Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor’s warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love – and its threatened loss – the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.
When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy Aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy her freedom, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. Then she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Gilbert Osmond. Charming and cultivated, Osmond sees Isabel as a rich prize waiting to be taken. In this portrait of a ‘young woman affronting her destiny’, Henry James created one of his most magnificent heroines, and a story of intense poignancy.
A Room of One’s Own, Woolf’s blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, remains a powerful reminder of a woman’s need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.
Offering essential advice on battlefield tactics, managing others and employing cunning, discipline and deception to outwit your opponent, Sun-tzu’s The Art of War has provided leaders with the ultimate guide to survival and success for more than two thousand years, whether in battle or in business.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is the Bible of realpolitik, a tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, and how to hold on to it in a dangerous world. How can a leader be strong? Is it better to be feared than loved? This work of a fifteenth-century Florentine diplomat is still read today for its shrewd political lessons.
Freud’s epoch-making insights revolutionized our perception of who we are, forming the foundation for psychoanalysis. In Civilization and its Discontents he considers the incompatibility of civilization and individual happiness. Focusing on what he perceives to be one of society’s greatest dangers; ‘civilized’ sexual morality, he asks, does repression compromise our chances of happiness?
The Iliad is the first and the greatest literary achievement of Greek civilization – an epic poem without rival in the literature of the world, and the cornerstone of Western culture. The story centres on the critical events in the last year of the Trojan War, which lead to Achilleus’ killing of Hektor and determine the fate of Troy. But Homer’s theme is not simply war or heroism. With compassion and humanity, he presents a universal and tragic view of the world, of human life lived under the shadow of suffering and death, set against a vast and largely unpitying divine background.
When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.
The Pearl is Steinbeck’s flawless parable about wealth and the evil it can bring. When Kino, an Indian pearl-diver, finds ‘the pearl of the world’ he believes that his life will be magically transformed. He will marry Juana in church and their little boy, Coyotito, will be able to attend school. Obsessed by his dreams, Kino is blind to the greed, fear and even violence the pearl arouses in him and his neighbours. Written with haunting and lyrical simplicity, The Pearl sets the values of the civilized world against those of the primitive and finds them tragically inadequate.
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’.
Taken from the poverty of her parents’ home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle’s absence in Antigua, the Crawford’s arrive in the neighbourhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen’s first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social position and moral integrity, one of her most profound.
This is the novel Dickens regarded as his ‘favourite child’ and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experiences from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the ‘umble Uriah Heep, along with Mr Micawber, a portrait of Dickens’s own father which evokes a mixture of love, nostalgia and guilt.
The story of Mowgli, the man-cub who is brought up by wolves in the jungles of Central India, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. As he embarks on a series of thrilling escapades, Mowgli encounters such unforgettable creatures as the bear Baloo, the graceful black panther Bagheera and Shere Khan, the tiger with the blazing eyes. Other animal stories in The Jungle Books range from the dramatic battle between good and evil in ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’ to the macabre comedy ‘The Undertakers’. With The Jungle Books Rudyard Kipling drew on ancient beast fables, Buddhist philosophy and memories of his Anglo-Indian childhood to create a rich, symbolic portrait of man and nature, and an eternal classic of childhood.
Norman Mailer’s The Fight focuses on the 1974 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire. Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in the ring. Foreman’s genius employed silence, serenity and cunning. He had never been defeated. His hands were his instrument, and ‘he kept them in his pockets the way a hunter lays his rifle back into its velvet case’. Together the two men made boxing history in an explosive meeting of two great minds, two iron wills and monumental egos.
“The story of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is very difficult to describe. Usually we give some clues about the book on the cover, but in this case we think that would spoil the reading of the book. We think it is important that you start to read without knowing what it is about.If you do start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy called Bruno. And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence. We hope you never have to cross such a fence.”
In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to ‘capture the present’. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.
A Breath of Life is Clarice Lispector’s final novel, ‘written in agony’, which she did not live to see published. Sensual and mysterious, it is a mystical dialogue between a god-like author and the creation he breathes life into: the speaking, shifting, indefinable Angela Pralini. As he has created Angela, so, eventually, he must let her die, for life is merely ‘a kind of madness that death makes.’ This is a unique, elegiac meditation on the creation of life, and of art.
G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white ‘as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed’. There she sees a cockroach – black, dusty, prehistoric – crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector’s spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works.
Clarice Lispector’s sensational, prize-winning debut novel Near to the Wild Heart was published when she was twenty-three and earned her the name ‘Hurricane Clarice’. It tells the story of Joana, from her wild, creative childhood, as the ‘little egg’ who writes poems for her father, through her marriage to the faithless Otávio and on to her decision to make her own way in the world. As Joana, endlessly mutable, moves through different emotional states, this impressionistic, dreamlike and fiercely intelligent novel asks if any of us ever really know who we are.
Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macabéa’s fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector’s audacious last novel is a haunting portrayal of innocence in a bad world.
“That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,” Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers. After years of research on three continents, drawing on previously unknown manuscripts and dozens of interviews, Benjamin Moser demonstrates how Lispector’s development as a writer was directly connected to the story of her turbulent life. From Chechelnik to Recife, Naples and Bern to Washington and Rio de Janeiro, Why This World strips away the mythology surrounding this extraordinary figure and shows how Clarice Lispector transformed her own struggles into a universally resonant art.
They call themselves ‘Captains of the Sands’, a gang of orphans and runaways who live by their wits and daring in the torrid slums and sleazy back alleys of Bahia. Led by fifteen-year-old ‘Bullet’, the band – including a crafty liar named ‘Legless’, the intellectual ‘Professor’, and the sexually precocious ‘Cat’ – pulls off heists and escapades against the privileged of Brazil. But when a public outcry demands the capture of the ‘little criminals’, the fate of these children becomes a poignant, intensely moving drama of love and freedom in a shackled land. Captains of the Sands captures the rich culture, vivid emotions, and wild landscape of Bahia with penetrating authenticity and brilliantly displays the genius of Brazil’s most acclaimed author.
“Edited by Andrew Biswell With a Foreword by Martin AmisFifteen-year-old Alex likes lashings of ultraviolence. He and his gang of friends rob, kill and rape their way through a nightmarish future, until the State puts a stop to his riotous excesses. But what will his re-education mean?A dystopian horror, a black comedy, an exploration of choice, A Clockwork Orange is also a work of exuberant invention which created a new language for its characters. This critical edition restores the text of the novel as Anthony Burgess originally wrote it, and includes a glossary of the teen slang ‘Nadsat’, explanatory notes, pages from the original typescript, interviews, articles and reviews, shedding light on the enduring fascination of the novel’s ‘sweet and juicy criminality’.”
Anna Karenina seems to have everything – beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life – and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.
Mark Twain’s tale of a boy’s picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other work had done before. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the ‘sivilizing’ Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures that draw him to feuding families and the trickery of the unscrupulous ‘Duke’ and ‘Dauphin’. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents – of slavery, adult control and, above all, of Huck’s struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim.
“The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine. Each person responds in their own way to the lethal disease: some resign themselves to fate, some seek blame, and a few, like Dr Rieux, resist the terror.An immediate triumph when it was published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France’s suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.”
“Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in turmoil. Over several drunken nights he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. From this successful former lawyer and seemingly model citizen a compelling, self-loathing catalogue of guilt, hypocrisy and alienation pours forth.The Fall (1956) is a brilliant portrayal of a man who has glimpsed the hollowness of his existence. But beyond depicting one man’s disillusionment, Camus’s novel exposes the universal human condition and its absurdities – and our innocence that, once lost, can never be recaptured …”
“In this profound and moving philosophical statement, Camus poses the fundamental question: Is life worth living? If human existence holds no significance, what can keep us from suicide?As Camus argues, if there is no God to give meaning to our lives, humans must take on that purpose themselves. This is our ‘absurd’ task, like Sisyphus forever rolling his rock up a hill, as the inevitability of death constantly overshadows us. Written during the bleakest days of the Second World War, The Myth of Sisyphus argues for an acceptance of reality that encompasses revolt, passion and, above all, liberty.This volume contains several other essays, including lyrical evocations of the sunlit cities of Algiers and Oran, the settings of his great novels The Outsider and The Plague.Albert Camus is the author of a number of best-selling and highly influential works, all of which are published by Penguin. They include The Fall, The Outsider and The First Man. He is remembered as one of the few writers to have shaped the intellectual climate of post-war France, but beyond that, his fame has been international.Translated by Justin O’BrienWith an Introduction by James Wood”
“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.Captain Ahab is an eerily compelling madman who focuses his distilled hatred and suffering (and that of generations before him) into the pursuit of a creature as vast, dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. More than just a novel of adventure, this is a haunting social commentary populated with some of the most enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith and the nature of perception.”
The story of Mowgli, the man-cub who is brought up by wolves in the jungles of Central India, is one of the greatest literary myths ever created. As he embarks on a series of thrilling escapades, Mowgli encounters such unforgettable creatures as the bear Baloo, the graceful black panther Bagheera and Shere Khan, the tiger with the blazing eyes. Other animal stories in The Jungle Books range from the dramatic battle between good and evil in ‘Rikki-tikki-tavi’ to the macabre comedy ‘The Undertakers’. With The Jungle Books Rudyard Kipling drew on ancient beast fables, Buddhist philosophy and memories of his Anglo-Indian childhood to create a rich, symbolic portrait of man and nature, and an eternal classic of childhood.
“The multi-million #1 bestseller, now a major motion picture starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort. “”I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.””Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning author John Green’s most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.** A thought-provoking love story from the New York Times bestselling author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns and – with David Levithan – Will Grayson, Will Grayson.** John Green has over 2.6 million Twitter followers, and over 2.1 million subscribers to Vlogbrothers, the YouTube channel he created with his brother, Hank. ** ‘Electric . . . Filled with staccato bursts of humor and tragedy’ – Jodi Picoult** ‘A novel of life and death and the people caught in between, The Fault in Our Stars is John Green at his best. You laugh, you cry, and then you come back for more’ – Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief”
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.
The Divine Comedy describes Dante’s descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide; his ascent of Mount Purgatory and encounter with his dead love, Beatrice; and finally, his arrival in Heaven. Examining questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, the poem is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human redemption. This major translation, described by Bernard O’Donoghue as ‘likely to be the best modern version of Dante’, is published here for the first time in a single volume.
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
Victor Hugo’s tale of injustice, heroism and love follows the fortunes of Jean Valjean, an escaped convict determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat: by his own conscience, when, owing to a case of mistaken identity, another man is arrested in his place; and by the relentless investigations of the dogged policeman Javert. It is not simply for himself that Valjean must stay free, however, for he has sworn to protect the baby daughter of Fantine, driven to prostitution by poverty.
“We set about founding the best city we could, because we could be confident that if it was good we would find justice in it’ The Republic, Plato’s masterwork, was first enjoyed 2,400 years ago and remains one of the most widely-read books in the world: as a foundational work of Western philosophy, and for the richness of its ideas and virtuosity of its writing. Presented as a dialogue between Plato’s teacher Socrates and various interlocutors, it is an exhortation to philosophy, inviting its readers to reflect on the choices to be made if we are to live the best life available to us. This complex, dynamic work creates a picture of an ideal society governed not by the desire for money, power or fame, but by philosophy, wisdom and justice.”
Tesla’s life is as interesting for his idiosyncrasy as it is for his brilliance. The inventor’s mind knew no limits and his incredible sense of possibility rings through his memoir. This authorative volume of My inventions includes three additional articles by Tesla which were published in The Electrical Experimenter magazine and represent the breadth of his interests: “Tesla would pour Lightning from Airships to Consuem Foe” (1916), “The Action of The Eye” (1893), “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy” (1900). Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else, contributes an introduction to Tesla’s works, separating fact from fiction (there are published works out there that attest Tesla was an alien), while maintaining the natural awe of Tesla’s eccentric existence.
“Yasha the magician – sword swallower, fire eater, acrobat and master of escape – is famed for his extraordinary Houdini-like skills. Half Jewish, half Gentile, a free thinker who slips easily between worlds, Yasha has an observant wife, a loyal assistant who travels with him and a woman in every town. Now, though, his exploits are catching up with him, and he is tempted to make one final escape – from his marriage, his homeland and the last tendrils of his father’s religion. Set in Warsaw and the shtetls of the 1870s, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s second novel is a haunting psychological portrait of a man’s flight from love.Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature”
“One girl. Two boys. The biggest decision of her life . . .Just when Isabel thinks she had everything mapped out, life proves that when it comes to love, you can never have all the answers . . . Isabel has only ever loved two boys, Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher. She’s grown up with them, and can’t imagine life without them.One broke her heart, the other made her happier than she ever thought she’d be. But each brother is keeping a secret from Isabel, and this summer she must choose between the Fisher boys, once and for all. Which brother will it be?”
“The Penguin English Library Edition of The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe’… an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity…’Horror, madness, violence and the dark forces hidden in humanity abound in this collection of Poe’s brilliant tales, including – among others – the bloody, brutal and baffling murder of a mother and daughter in Paris in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, the creeping insanity of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, the Gothic nightmare of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and the terrible doom of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.The Penguin English Library – 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.”
At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself; these profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for writers and artists of all kinds. This book also contains the ‘Letter from a Young Worker’, a striking polemic against Christianity written in letter-form, near the end of Rilke’s life. In Lewis Hyde’s introduction, he explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. Charlie Louth’s afterword discusses the similarities and contrasts of the two works, and Rilke’s religious and sexual wordplay. This edition also contains a chronology, notes, and suggested further reading.
“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. At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she had been persuaded by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. What happens when they encounter each other again is movingly told in Jane Austen’s last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension, but, above all,it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.”
“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. Taken from the poverty of her parents’ home in Portsmouth, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with her cousin Edmund as her sole ally. During her uncle’s absence in Antigua, the Crawford’s arrive in the neighbourhood bringing with them the glamour of London life and a reckless taste for flirtation. Mansfield Park is considered Jane Austen’s first mature work and, with its quiet heroine and subtle examination of social position and moral integrity, one of her most profound.”
“This is the essential one-volume edition of Tales from 1,001 Nights, drawn from the acclaimed landmark translation published in 3 volumes by Penguin Classics in 2008. It contains ‘Aladdin’, ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, ‘Sindbad the Sailor’ and many others of the most enjoyable and beloved tales from the Arabian Nights.This new translation was described as ‘magnificent’ and ‘the most ambitious and thorough translation’ in the Guardian and lauded in the Telegraph as ‘outstanding’. The Sunday Times said ‘The new Penguin edition is the one to have’.”
“From the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, a stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece, the first since the 1958 original.Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yuri Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds, and in love with the tender and beautiful nurse Lara. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have restored the rhythms, tone, precision, and poetry of Pasternak’s original, bringing this classic of world literature gloriously to life for a new generation of readers.”
When Isabel Archer, a beautiful, spirited American, is brought to Europe by her wealthy aunt Touchett, it is expected that she will soon marry. But Isabel, resolved to enjoy her freedom, does not hesitate to turn down two eligible suitors. Then she finds herself irresistibly drawn to Gilbert Osmond. Charming and cultivated, Osmond sees Isabel as a rich prize waiting to be taken. In this portrait of a ‘young woman affronting her destiny’, Henry James created one of his most magnificent heroines, and a story of intense poignancy.
Isaac Bashevis Singer’s work explores humanity in all of its guises. This collection of forty-seven short stories, selected by Singer himself from across the whole of his career, brings together the best of his writing. From the supernatural ‘Taibele and Her Demon’ to the poignant ‘The Unseen’, and from gentle humour in ‘Gimpel the Fool’ to tragedy with ‘Yentl the Yeshiva Boy’, these tales explore good and evil, passion and restraint, religious fervour and personal failings, within the traditional shtetls of pre-war Eastern Europe and post-war America.
“The apparition had reached the landing half-way up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window where, at the sight of me, it stopped short’The Turn of the Screw tells the story of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans. Unsettled by a sense of intense evil in the house, she soon becomes obsessed with the idea that something malevolent is stalking the children in her care.”
“As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) knew how quickly political fortunes could rise and fall. The Prince, his tough-minded, pragmatic handbook on how power really works, made his name notorious and has remained controversial ever since. How can a leader be strong and decisive, yet still inspire loyalty in his followers? When is it necessary to break the rules? Is it better to be feared than loved? Examining regimes and their rulers the world over and throughout history, from Roman Emperors to renaissance Popes, from Hannibal to Cesare di Borgia, Machievalli answers all these questions in a work of realpolitik that still has shrewd political lessons for today. Tim Parks’s acclaimed contemporary translation renders Machiavelli’s no-nonsense original as alarming and enlightening as when it was first written. His introduction discusses Machiavelli’s life and reputation, and explores the historical background to the work.”
“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 designWhen Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the ‘Master’ and his imminent arrival. In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.”
“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. George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as ‘one of the few English novels written for adult people’.”
“One girl. Two boys. An impossible decision to make . . . When something is perfect, you hope it lasts forever. But Isabel’s lazy, long hot summers at her family friends’ beach house are over.Conrad is the only boy she’s ever loved. But he’s left for college, taking her heart with him. Jeremiah, his gorgeous younger brother, is still Isabel’s best friend – but maybe friendship isn’t enough for him anymore . . . Isabel just wants everything to stay the same, because change means moving on. But if she stops looking back, could she find a future she never knew she wanted?”
Anthology’ comes from the Greek word that stands for garlands – a bouquet of flowers. An anthology then, should be a small token of something much larger. In the case of flowers, they bring to mind the colour & fragrance of the fields, of a season. Coelho’s anthology, therefore, is not only a collection of texts or poems, but a gift, something arranged according to his sensitivities, to give to others. The selection of books presented in this volume have been chosen as if from a vast field of flowers, stretching infinitely into time’s horizon. Coelho’s selection is ordered in to the four elements, symbolizing both our world on all its directions, and the way we dwell in it, the way we say it. In ‘Earth’ we find writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde and D H Lawrence; in ‘Air’ Nelson Mandela and Gabriel Garcia Marques; in ‘Fire’ Rumi and Mary Shelley; in ‘Water’ Hans Christian Anderson and Machiavelli.
“As Seen on BBC Between the CoversThis European masterpiece from the Nobel prizewinner explores the lure and degeneration of ideas in an introverted community on the eve of the First World War.Hans Castorp is ‘a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man’ when he goes to visit his cousin in an exclusive sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. What should have been a three week trip turns into a seven year stay. Hans falls in love and becomes intoxicated with the ideas he hears at the clinic – ideas which will strain and crack apart in a world on the verge of the First World War.’Magnificent… a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love’ Jonathan Coe, Guardian’The greatest German novelist of the 20th century’ Spectator”
After her parents’ bitter divorce, young Maisie Farange finds herself shuttled between her selfish mother and vain father, who value her only as a means for provoking each other. Maisie – solitary, observant and wise beyond her years – is drawn into an increasingly entangled adult world of intrigue and sexual betrayal, until she is finally compelled to choose her own future. What Maisie Knew is a subtle yet devastating portrayal of an innocent adrift in a corrupt society. Part of a relaunch of three James titles.
“Everything that happened this past summer, and every summer before it, has all led up to this. To now.Every year Isabel spends a perfect summer at her favourite place in the world – the Fisher family’s beach house. It has everything a girl could want: a swimming pool, a private stretch of sandy beach . . . and two boys. Unavailable, aloof Conrad – who she’s been in love with forever – and friendly, relaxed Jeremiah, the only one who’s ever really paid her any attention.But this year something is different. This year, the boys seem to really notice Isabel for the first time. It’s going to be an amazing summer – and one she’ll never forget . . .”
“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. When this volume of Shakespeare’s poems first appeared in 1609, he had already written most of the great plays that made him famous. The 154 sonnets – all but two of which are addressed to a beautiful young man or a treacherous ‘dark lady’ – contain some of the most exquisite and haunting poetry ever written, and deal with eternal subjects such as love and infidelity, memory and mortality, and the destruction wreaked by Time. Also included is A Lover’s Complaint, originally published with the sonnets, in which a young woman is overheard lamenting her betrayal by a heartless seducer.”
“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. Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth – four “”little women”” enduring hardships and enjoying adventures in Civil War New England The charming story of the March sisters, Little Women has been adored by generations. Readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo’s hand, cried over little Beth’s death, and dreamed of traveling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. Future writers have found inspiration in Jo’s devotion to her writing. In this simple, enthralling tale, both parts of which are included here, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature’s most beloved women.”
“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. ‘I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,’ wrote Dodgson, describing how Alice was conjured up one ‘golden afternoon’ in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. In the magical world of Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom, order is turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig; time is abandoned at a tea-party; and a chaotic game of chess makes a 7-year-old a Queen.”
“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. The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens’s tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters – the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.”
“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. Beautiful, clever, rich – and single – Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protégée Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen’s most flawless work.”
“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. Constance Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband’s gamekeeper and embarks on a passionate affair that brings new life to her stifled existence. Can she find a true equality with Mellors, despite the vast gulf between their positions in society? One of the most controversial novels in English literature, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an erotically charged and psychologically powerful depiction of adult relationships.”
“The Catcher in Rye is the ultimate novel for disaffected youth, but it’s relevant to all ages. The story is told by Holden Caulfield, a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the ‘phony’ aspects of society, and the ‘phonies’ themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection.Lazy in style, full of slang and swear words, it’s a novel whose interest and appeal comes from its observations rather than its plot intrigues (in conventional terms, there is hardly any plot at all). Salinger’s style creates an effect of conversation, it is as though Holden is speaking to you personally, as though you too have seen through the pretences of the American Dream and are growing up unable to see the point of living in, or contributing to, the society around you.Written with the clarity of a boy leaving childhood, it deals with society, love, loss, and expectations without ever falling into the clutch of a cliche.”
“The ghost is the most enduring figure in supernatural fiction. He is absolutely indestructible… He changes with the styles in fiction but he never goes out of fashion. He is the really permanent citizen of the earth, for mortals, at best, are but transients’ – Dorothy ScarboroughThis new selection of ghost stories, by Michael Newton, brings together the best of the genre. From Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ through to Edith Wharton’s ‘Afterword’, this collection covers all of the most terrifying tales of the genre. With a thoughtful introduction, and helpful notes, Newton places the stories contextually within the genre and elucidates the changing nature of the ghost story and how we interpret it.”
Okonkwo is the greatest warrior alive, famous throughout West Africa. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy. Chinua Achebe’s stark novel reshaped both African and world literature. This arresting parable of a proud but powerless man witnessing the ruin of his people begins Achebe’s landmark trilogy of works chronicling the fate of one African community, continued in Arrow of God and No Longer at Ease.
“The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge of an alien space; somewhere where, curiously, they are never alone’ Michael Hoffman.Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated American couple, are finding it more than a little difficult to live with each other. Endeavouring to escape this predicament, they set off for North Africa intending to travel through Algeria – uncertain of exactly where they are heading, but determined to leave the modern world behind. The results of this casually taken decision are both tragic and compelling.”
Following a baseball game that nearly became a religious war, two Jewish boys become friends. Danny comes from the strict Hasidic sect that keeps him bound in centuries of orthodoxy. Reuven is brought up by a father patently aware of the twentieth century. Everything tries to destroy their friendship, but they use honesty with each other as a shield and it proves an impenetrable protection.
When Arkady Petrovich comes home from college, his father finds his eager, naive son changed almost beyond recognition, for the impressionable Arkady has fallen under the powerful influence of the friend he has brought with him. A self-proclaimed nihilist, the ardent young Bazarov shocks Arkady’s father by criticizing the landowning way of life and by his outspoken determination to sweep away traditional values of contemporary Russian society. Turgenev’s depiction of the conflict between generations and their ideals stunned readers when Fathers and Sons was first published in 1862. But many could also sympathize with Arkady’s fascination with its nihilist hero whose story vividly captures the hopes and regrets of a changing Russia.
“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. Pip doesn’t expect much from life…His sister makes it clear that her orphaned little brother is nothing but a burden on her. But suddenly things begin to change. Pip’s narrow existence is blown apart when he finds an escaped criminal, is summoned to visit a mysterious old woman and meets the icy beauty Estella. Most astoundingly of all, an anonymous person gives him money to begin a new life in London.Are these events as random as they seem? Or does Pip’s fate hang on a series of coincidences he could never have expected?”
“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. Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby she ignores her sister Elinor’s warning that her impulsive behaviour leaves her open to gossip and innuendo. Meanwhile Elinor, always sensitive to social convention, is struggling to conceal her own romantic disappointment, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love – and its threatened loss – the sisters learn that sense must mix with sensibility if they are to find personal happiness in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.”
“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. Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succès de scandale and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to fascinate and disturb.”
“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. In a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere …As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the strange, grim house Wuthering Heights. It is a place he will never forget. There he will come to learn the story of Cathy: how she was forced to choose between her well-meaning husband and the dangerous man she had loved since she was young. How her choice led to betrayal and terrible revenge – and continues to torment those in the present. How love can transgress authority, convention, even death.”
“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. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships,gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.”
“This exciting anniversary edition has a new introduction and scholarly references by William Bynum, and the cover design is by Damien Hirst. It replaces our existing 1968 edition. The Origin of Species is one of the most important and influential books of its time and remains one of the most significant contributions to philosophical and scientific thought. The theories Darwin sets out here had an immediate and profound impact on the literature and philosophical thought of his contemporaries, and continue to provoke thought and debate today. Written for the general public of the 1850’s, The Origin of Species laid out an evolutionary view of the world which challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the fixity of species. He also set forth the results of his pioneering work on the interdependence of species: the ecology of animals and plants.”
Journey to the Centre of the Earth is an 1864 science-fiction novel by Jules Verne (published in the original French as Voyage au centre de la Terre). The story involves a professor who leads his nephew and hired guide down a volcano in Iceland to the ‘centre of the Earth’. They are involved in many adventures, encountering prehistoric animals and natural hazards, and eventually come to the surface again in southern Italy. Verne’s own belief, expressed in the novel as the viewpoint of a character, is that the inside of the Earth does in fact differ from that which the characters encounter.
A historical romance, Sontag’s book is based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his wife, Emma, and Lord Nelson in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Passionately examining the shape of Western civilization since the Age of Enlightenment, Sontag’s novel is an exquisitely detailed picture of revolution, the fate of nature, art and love.
Geoffrey Braithwaite is a retired doctor haunted by an obsession with the great French literary genius, Gustave Flaubert. As Geoffrey investigates the mystery of the stuffed parrot Flaubert borrowed from the Museum of Rouen to help research one of his novels, we learn an enormous amount about the writer’s work, family, lovers, thought processes, health and obsessions. But we also gradually come to learn some important and shocking details about Geoffrey himself.
The story of In America is inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland’s most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son, Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska’s subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name Helena Modjeska.
Why Read the Classics? is an elegant defence of the value of great literature by one of the finest authors of the last century. Beginning with an essay on the attributes that define a classic (number one – classics are those books that people always say they are ‘rereading’, not ‘reading’), this is an absorbing collection of Italo Calvino’s witty and passionate criticism.
The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power – as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.
“A complex, intense American novel of family from the winner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureWith an introduction by Richard HughesEver since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, the novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart, this is a novel about lovelessness – ‘only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?'”
“The perfect gift for Valentine’s DayPossession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once a literary detective novel and a triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars investigating the lives of two Victorian poets. Following a trail of letters, journals and poems they uncover a web of passion, deceit and tragedy, and their quest becomes a battle against time.”
Fading southern belle Blanche Dubois depends on the kindness of strangers and is adrift in the modern world. When she arrives to stay with her sister Stella in a crowded, boisterous corner of New Orleans, her delusions of grandeur bring her into conflict with Stella’s crude, brutish husband Stanley. Eventually their violent collision course causes Blanche’s fragile sense of identity to crumble, threatening to destroy her sanity and her one chance of happiness.
Big Daddy’ Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta, is about to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday. His two sons have returned home for the occasion: Gooper, his wife and children, Brick, an ageing football hero who has turned to drink, and his feisty wife Maggie. As the hot summer evening unfolds, the veneer of happy family life and Southern gentility gradually slips away as unpleasant truths emerge and greed, lies, jealousy and suppressed sexuality threaten to reach boiling point. Made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a masterly portrayal of family tensions and individuals trapped in prisons of their own making.
Notes from Underground’ (1864) is a study of a single character, ‘the real man of the Russian majority’, and a revelation of Dostoyevsky’s own deepest beliefs. One of his best critics has said of the first part that it forms his ‘most utterly naked pages. Never afterwards was he so fully and openly to reveal the inmost recesses, unmeant for display, of his heart.’ ‘The Double’ (1846) is the nightmarish story of Mr Golyadkin, a man who is haunted or possessed by his own double. Is ‘Mr Golyadkinjunior’ really a double or simply a fearful side of his own nature? This uncertainty is what gives urgency and horror to a tale which may be read as a classic study of human breakdown.
“From the moment that Gjorg’s brother is killed by a neighbour, his own life is forfeit: for the code of Kanun requires Gjorg to kill his brother’s murderer and then in turn be hunted down. After shooting his brother’s killer, young Gjorg is entitled to thirty days’ grace – not enough to see out the month of April. Then a visiting honeymoon couple cross the path of the fugitive. The bride’s heart goes out to Gjorg, and even these ‘civilised’ strangers from the city risk becoming embroiled in the fatal mechanism of vendetta.”
Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched to Albania to recover his country’s dead. Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission, and their conversations brings out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task. As they descend from the callous trivialities of their gruesome business, past and present, to suffering self-disgust, the author gives us glimpses of the lives of the people whose graves they are unearthing.
Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse. In this imaginative fable of ageing and the other stories collected here – including ‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’ in which an ill-meant gift haunts a family’s misfortunes, ‘The Four Fists’ where a man’s life shaped by a series of punches to his face, and the revelry, mobs and anguish of ‘May Day’ – F. Scott Fitzgerald displays his unmatched gift as a writer of short stories.
Burroughs’ first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through junk neighbourhoods in New York, New Orleans and Mexico City, through time spent kicking, time spent dealing and time rolling drunks for money, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report (by a writer trained in anthropology at Harvard) from the American post-war drug underground. A cult classic, it has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone. This definitive edition painstakingly recreates the author’s original text word for word.
Written when Mishima was only twentysix, Forbidden Colors is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but who lacks the ability to love. As in Mann’s Death in Venice, the older man’s longing for the beauty of youth is associated with aestheticism and death.
“Young D’Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the King’s elite guards, but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men he has come to swear allegiance to – Porthos, Athos and Aramis, inseparable friends: the Three Musketeers. Soon part of their close band, D’Artagnan’s loyalty to his new allies puts him in the deadly path of Cardinal Richlieu’s machinations. And when the young hero falls in love with the beautiful but inaccessible Constance, he finds himself in a world of murder, conspiracy and lies, with only the Musketeers to depend on. A stirring nineteenth-century tale of friendship and adventure, The Three Musketeers continues to be one of the most influential and popular pieces of French literature. Richard Pevear’s introduction investigates the controversy of Dumas’ literary collaborators, and how important serialisation was to the book’s success. This edition also includes notes on the text.”
“Sherlock Holmes stars in Doyle’s most famous detective story. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RUTH RENDELLINCLUDES ‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND’The Baskerville family curse tells of how a terrifying, supernatural hound roams the moors around Baskerville Hall and preys on members of the family in revenge for a ghastly crime committed by one of their ancestors. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead in the grounds, with a large animal footprint near his lifeless body, the locals are convinced that the hound is back. It is up to Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to uncover the truth and keep the new heir to the hall safe from danger.**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped Our World**”
“This edition has a NEW introduction by PAULO COELHO. Siddhartha is perhaps the most important and compelling moral allegory our troubled century has produced. Integrating Eastern and Western spiritual traditions with psychoanalysis and philosophy, this strangely simple tale, written with a deep and moving empathy for humanity, has touched the lives of millions since its original publication in 1922. Set in India, Siddhartha is the story of a young Brahmin’s search for ultimate reality after meeting with the Buddha. His quest takes him from a life of decadence to asceticism, from the illusory joys of sensual love with a beautiful courtesan, and of wealth and fame, to the painful struggles with his son and the ultimate wisdom of renunciation”
A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers’s best stories, including her beloved novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose café serves as the town’s gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes “Wunderkind,” McCullers’s first published story written when she was only seventeen about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist.
“Mr Jones of Manor Farm is so lazy and drunken that one day he forgets to feed his livestock. The ensuing rebellion under the leadership of the pigs Napoleon and Wellington leads to the animals taking over the farm. Vowing to eliminate the terrible inequities of the farmyard, the renamed Animal Farm is organized to benefit all who walk on four legs. But as time passes, the ideals of the rebellion are corrupted, then forgotten. And something new and unexpected emerges …Animal Farm – the history of a revolution that went wrong – is George Orwell’s brilliant satire on the corrupting influence of power.”
“Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth in London, chief city of Airstrip One. Big Brother stares out from every poster, the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening, and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent – even in the mind. For those with original thoughts they invented Room 101 …Nineteen Eight-Four is George Orwell’s terrifying vision of a totalitarian future in which everything and everyone is slave to a tyrannical regime.”
When middle-aged Martha and her husband George are joined by the younger Nick and Honey for late-night drinks after a party, the stage is set for a night of drunken recriminations and revelations. Battle-lines are drawn as Martha and George drag their guests into their own private hell of a marriage.
Carson McCullers’ prodigious first novel was published to instant acclaim when she was just twenty-three. Set in a small town in the middle of the deep South, it is the story of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute, and a disparate group of people who are drawn towards his kind, sympathetic nature. The owner of the café where Singer eats every day, a young girl desperate to grow up, an angry socialist drunkard, a frustrated black doctor: each pours their heart out to Singer, their silent confidant, and he in turn changes their disenchanted lives in ways the could never imagine. Moving, sensitive and deeply humane, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores loneliness, the human need for understanding and the search for love.
Emerging from the grit and stigma of poverty to a life of fairytale privilege under the wing of her aunt, the beautiful and financially ambitious Kate Croy is already romantically involved with promising journalist Merton Densher when they become acquainted with Milly Theale, a New York socialite of immense wealth. Learning of Milly’s mortal illness and passionate attraction to Densher, Kate sets the scene for a romantic betrayal intended to secure her lasting financial security. As the dying Milly retreats within the carnival splendour of a Venetian palazzo, becoming the frail hub of a predatory circle of fortune-seekers, James unfolds a resonant, brooding tale of doomed passion, betrayal, human resilience and remorse.
At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon’s army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants, to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace (1868-9), Tolstoy entwines grand themes – conflict and love, birth and death, free will and fate – with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.
“The devil comes to Moscow wearing a fancy suit. With his disorderly band of accomplices – including a demonic, gun-toting tomcat – he immediately begins to create havoc.Disappearances, destruction and death spread through the city like wildfire and Margarita discovers that her lover has vanished in the chaos. Making a bargain with the devil, she decides to try a little black magic of her own to save the man she loves …”
Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now her husband is dead. Finally – after fifty-one years, nine months and four days – Florentino has another chance to declare his eternal passion and win her back. Will love that has survived half a century remain unrequited?
An acknowledged masterpiece, this is the story of seven generations of the Buendía family and of Macondo, the town they have built. Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and miracles. A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book and only Aureliano Buendía can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny. Blending political reality with magic realism, fantasy with comic invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century.
On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.
“On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl’s imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.”
In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verloc, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awry, Verlac must deal with the repercussions of his actions.
Nostromo, published in 1904, is one of Conrad’s finest works. Nostromo — though one hundred years old — says as much about today’s Latin America as any of the finest recent accounts of that region’s turbulent political life. Insistently dramatic in its storytelling, spectacular in its recreation of the subtropical landscape, this picture of an insurrectionary society and the opportunities it provides for moral corruption gleams on every page with its author’s dry, undeceived, impeccable intelligence.
Heart of Darkness has been considered for most of this century as a literary classic, and also as a powerful indictment of the evils of imperialism. It reflects the savage repressions carried out in the Congo by the Belgians in one of the largest acts of genocide committed up to that time. Conrad’s narrator encounters at the end of the story a man named Kurtz, dying, insane, and guilty of unspeakable atrocities. First appearing as a three-part series in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, it was soon after published as a novella, in 1902 in the volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories.
The Dowells, a wealthy American couple, have been close friends with the Ashburnhams for years. Edward Ashburnham, a first-rate soldier, seems to be the perfect English gentleman, and Leonora his perfect wife, but beneath the surface their marriage seethes with unhappiness and deception. Our only window on the strange tangle of events surrounding Edward is provided by John Dowell, the husband he deceives. Gradually Dowell unfolds a devastating story, in which everyone’s honesty is in doubt. This extraordinary novel of passion and betrayal is a masterpiece of narrative skill and emotional depth.
In Ponyboy’s world there are two types of people. There are the Socs, the rich society kids who get away with anything. Then there are the greasers, like Ponyboy, who aren’t so lucky. Ponyboy has a few things he can count on: his older brothers, his friends, and trouble with the Socs, whose idea of a good time is beating up greasers like Ponyboy. At least he know what toe xpect — until the night things go too far…
Ayn Rand’s story of Howard Roark, a brilliant architect who dares to stand alone against the hostility of second-hand souls. First published in 1943, this best-selling novel is a passionate defense of individualism and presents an exalted view of man’s creative potential; it is a book about ambition, power, gold and love.
Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world–and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man’s body, but about the murder–and rebirth–of man’s spirit.
“Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when Zeenie’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a “”hired girl,”” Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.In one of American fiction’s finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton’s other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read novel.”
Headstrong and naïve, the young Italian aristocrat Fabrizio del Dongo is determined to defy the wrath of his right-wing father and go to war to fight for Napoleon. He stumbles on the Battle of Waterloo, ill-prepared, yet filled with enthusiasm for war and glory. Finally heeding advice, Fabrizio sneaks back to Milan, only to become embroiled in a series of amorous exploits, fuelled by his impetuous nature and the political chicanery of his aunt Gina and her wily lover. Judged by Balzac to be the most important French novel of its time, The Charterhouse of Parma is a compelling novel of extravagance and daring, blending the intrigues of the Italian court with the romance and excitement of youth.
Forster’s social comedy is a witty observation of the English middle classes as they holiday abroad in Florence. One of these tourists is Lucy Honeychurch, a young girl whose heart is awakened by her experiences in Italy.
Despised for his weakness and regarded by his family as little more than a stammering fool, the nobleman Claudius quietly survives the intrigues, bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the imperial Roman dynasties. In I, Claudius he watches from the sidelines to record the reigns of its emperors: from the wise Augustus and his villainous wife Livia to the sadistic Tiberius and the insane excesses of Caligula. Written in the form of Claudius’ autobiography, this is the first part of Robert Graves’s brilliant account of the madness and debauchery of ancient Rome, and stands as one of the most celebrated, gripping historical novels ever written.
~The Red Badge of Courage,” written in 1895 by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), is considered by many literary critics to be one of the greatest of all American novels. This is a book about the Civil War, and one Union soldier’s struggle with his inner demons as he prepares for, and fights his first battle.
The King James Bible or Authorized Version (1611) comprises the Old Testament, the Apocrypha and the New Testament, from God’s creation of the heaven and earth and the fall of man in Genesis, through the life Jesus Christ, to St John the Divine’s foretelling of the end of the world and God’s final judgment in Revelation. Among the most influential texts of all time and the cornerstone of the Christian faith, the King James Bible is the work of the great scholars and theologians of the early seventeenth century and reflects their desire for greater stability in the Christian religion. They revised and retranslated existing versions, including that of William Tyndale, to create a standardized Bible that would be accessible to all speakers and readers of English. Definitive and highly readable, this superb edition brings new vigour to one of the finest pieces of English prose.
Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane’s natural independence and spirit – which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre (1847) dazzled and shocked readers with its passionate depiction of a woman’s search for equality and freedom.
Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that ‘all is for the best’. But when his love for the Baron’s rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them – earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder – sorely testing the young hero’s optimism.
Welcome to America at the turn of the twentieth century, where the rhythms of ragtime set the beat. Harry Houdini astonishes audiences with magical feats of escape, the mighty J. P. Morgan dominates the financial world and Henry Ford manufactures cars by making men into machines. Emma Goldman preaches free love and feminism, while ex-chorus girl Evelyn Nesbitt inspires a mad millionaire to murder the architect Stanford White. In this stunningly original chronicle of an age, such real-life characters intermingle with three remarkable families, one black, one Jewish and one prosperous WASP, to create a dazzling literary mosaic that brings to life an era of dire poverty, fabulous wealth, and incredible change – in short, the era of ragtime.
Kafka on the Shore follows the fortunes of two remarkable characters. Kafka Tamura runs away from home at fifteen, under the shadow of his father’s dark prophesy. The aging Nakata, tracker of lost cats, who never recovered from a bizarre childhood affliction, finds his pleasantly simplified life suddenly turned upside down. Their parallel odysseys are enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerising dramas. Cats converse with people; fish tumble from the sky; a ghostlike pimp deploys a Hegel-spouting girl of the night; a forest harbours soldiers apparently un-aged since WWII. There is a savage killing, but the identity of both victim and killer is a riddle. Murakami’s new novel is at once a classic tale of quest, but it is also a bold exploration of mythic and contemporary taboos, of patricide, of mother-love, of sister-love. Above all it is an entertainment of a very high order.
Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is a member of Russia’s dying aristocracy – a man so lazy that he has given up his job in the Civil Service, neglected his books, insulted his friends and found himself in debt. Too apathetic to do anything about his problems, he lives in a grubby, crumbling apartment, waited on by Zakhar, his equally idle servant. Terrified by the bustle and activity necessary to participate in the real world, Oblomov manages to avoid work, postpone change and – finally – risks losing the love of his life. Written with sympathetic humour and compassion, Oblomov made Goncharov famous throughout Russia on its publication in 1859, as readers saw in this story of a man whose defining characteristic is indolence, the portrait of an entire class in decline.
With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin – the new guest at The Coach and Horses – is at first assumed to be a shy accident-victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that has made him invisible, and is locked in a struggle to discover the antidote. Forced from the village, and driven to murder, he seeks the aid of an old friend, Kemp. The horror of his fate has affected his mind, however – and when Kemp refuse to help, he resolves to wreak his revenge.
When a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year 802,701 AD, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment and peace. Entranced at first by the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man, he soon realises that this beautiful people are simply remnants of a once-great culture – now weak and childishly afraid of the dark. They have every reason to be afraid: in deep tunnels beneath their paradise lurks another race descended from humanity – the sinister Morlocks. And when the scientist’s time machine vanishes, it becomes clear he must search these tunnels, if he is ever to return to his own era.
Handsome, ambitious Julien Sorel is determined to rise above his humble provincial origins. Soon realizing that success can only be achieved by adopting the subtle code of hypocrisy by which society operates, he begins to achieve advancement through deceit and self-interest. His triumphant career takes him into the heart of glamorous Parisian society, along the way conquering the gentle, married Madame de Rênal, and the haughty Mathilde. But then Julien commits an unexpected, devastating crime – and brings about his own downfall. The Red and the Black is a lively, satirical portrayal of French society after Waterloo, riddled with corruption, greed and ennui, and Julien – the cold exploiter whose Machiavellian campaign is undercut by his own emotions – is one of the most intriguing characters in European literature.
On the day of his wedding, Conrad, heir to the house of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances. His calculating father Manfred fears that his dynasty will now come to an end and determines to marry his son’s bride himself – despite the fact he is already married. But a series of terrifying supernatural omens soon threaten this unlawful union, as the curse placed on Manfred’s ancestor, who usurped the lawful Prince of Otranto, begins to unfold. First published pseudonymously in 1764, purporting to be an ancient Italian text from the time of the crusades, The Castle of Otranto is a founding work of Gothic fiction. With its compelling blend of sinister portents, tempestuous passions and ghostly visitations, it spawned an entire literary tradition and influenced such writers as Ann Radcliffe and Bram Stoker.
Published shortly after his death, the Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza’s greatest work – an elegant, fully cohesive philosophical system that strives to provide a coherent picture of reality, and to comprehend the meaning of an ethical life. Following a logical step-by-step format, it defines in turn the nature of God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage to the emotions, and the power of understanding – moving from a consideration of the eternal, to speculate upon humanity’s place in the natural order, the nature of freedom and the path to attainable happiness. A powerful work of elegant simplicity, the Ethics is a brilliantly insightful consideration of the possibility of redemption through intense thought and philosophical reflection.
This collection includes many of the famous cases – and great strokes of brilliance – that made the legendary Sherlock Holmes one of fiction’s most popular creations. With his devoted amanuensis, Dr Watson, Holmes emerges from his smoke filled rooms in Baker Street to grapple with the forces of treachery, intrigue and evil in such cases as ‘The Speckled Band’, in which a terrified woman begs their help in solving the mystery surrounding her sister’s death, or ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, which portrays a European king blackmailed by his mistress. In ‘Silver Blaze’ the pair investigate the disappearance of a racehorse and the violent murder of its trainer, while in ‘The Final Problem’ Holmes at last comes face to face with his nemesis, the diabolical Professor Moriarty – ‘the Napoleon of crime’.
In late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche (1844-1900) set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written. In this extraordinary work Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome – Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ – and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his ‘forthcoming revelation of all values’. Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce Homo gives the final, definitive expression to Nietzsche’s main beliefs and is in every way his last testament.
One of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer (1788-1860) believed that human action is determined not by reason but by ‘will’ – the blind and irrational desire for physical existence. This selection of his writings on religion, ethics, politics, women, suicide, books and many other themes is taken from Schopenhauer’s last work, Parerga and Paralipomena, which he published in 1851. These pieces depict humanity as locked in a struggle beyond good and evil, and each individual absolutely free within a Godless world, in which art, morality and self-awareness are our only salvation. This innovative – and pessimistic – view has proved powerfully influential upon philosophy and art, directly affecting the work of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Wagner among others.
“With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls’ boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster and her own complex feelings, first for the school’s English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels, Charlotte Brontë’s last and most autobiographical novel is a powerfully moving study of isolation and the pain of unrequited love, narrated by a heroine determined to preserve an independent spirit in the face of adverse circumstances.”
This is the novel Dickens regarded as his ‘favourite child’ and is considered his most autobiographical. As David recounts his experience from childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist, Dickens draws openly and revealingly on his own life. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters are Rosa Dartle, Dora, Steerforth, and the ‘umble Uriah Heep, along with Mr Micawber, a portrait of Dickens’s own father which evokes the mixture of love, nostalgia and guilt.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger’s, a form of autism. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour’s dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his whole world upside down.
In the vaulted Gothic towers of Notre-Dame lives Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bellringer. Mocked and shunned for his appearance, he is pitied only by Esmerelda, a beautiful gypsy dancer to whom he becomes completely devoted. Esmerelda, however, has also attracted the attention of the sinister archdeacon Claude Frollo, and when she rejects his lecherous approaches, Frollo hatches a plot to destoy her that only Quasimodo can prevent. Victor Hugo’s sensational, evocative novel brings life to the medieval Paris he loved, and mourns its passing in one of the greatest historical romances of the nineteenth century.
One night in the reform club, Phileas Fogg bets his companions that he can travel across the globe in just eighty days. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, he immediately sets off for Dover with his astonished valet Passepartout. Passing through exotic lands and dangerous locations, they seize whatever transportation is at hand – whether train or elephant – overcoming set-backs and always racing against the clock.
“Visiting an idyllic German village, Werther, a sensitive young man, falls in love with sweet-natured Lotte. Though he realizes that Lotte is to marry Albert, he is unable to subdue his passion and his infatuation torments him to the point of despair. The first great ‘confessional’ novel, it draws both on Goethe’s own unrequited love for Charlotte Buff and on the death of a close friend. The book was an immediate success and a cult rapidly grew up around it, resulting in numerous copycat deaths as well as violent criticism and suppression for its apparent support of suicide. Goethe’s exploration of the mind of an artist at odds with society and ill-equipped to cope with life remains as poignant as when it was first written.”
The story of Abelard and Heloise remains one of the world’s most celebrated and tragic love affairs. Through their letters, we follow the path of their romance from its reckless and ecstatic beginnings when Heloise became Abelard’s pupil, through the suffering of public scandal and enforced secret marriage, to their eventual separation.
“Gilbert Markham is deeply intrigued by Helen Graham, a beautiful and secretive young woman who has moved into nearby Wildfell Hall with her young son. He is quick to offer Helen his friendship, but when her reclusive behaviour becomes the subject oflocal gossip and speculation, Gilbert begins to wonder whether his trust in her has been misplaced.It is only when she allows Gilbert to read her diary that the truth is revealed and the shocking details of the disastrous marriage she has left behind emerge…Told with great immediacy, combined with wit and irony, THE TENANTOF WILDFELL HALL is a powerfully involving read.”
Spanning thirteen centuries from the age of Trajan to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, DECLINE & FALL is one of the greatest narratives in European Literature. David Womersley’s masterly selection and bridging commentary enables the readerto acquire a general sense of the progress and argument of the whole work and displays the full variety of Gibbon’s achievement.
“Writing at the time of Napoleon’s greatest campaigns, Prussian soldier and writer Carl von Clausewitz created this landmark treatise on the art of warfare, which presented war as part of a coherent system of political thought.In line with Napoleon’s own military actions, he illustrated the need to annihilate the enemy and make a strong display of one’s power in an ‘absolute war’ without compromise. But he was also careful to distinguish between war and politics, arguing that war could only be justified when debate was no longer adequate, and that if undertaken, its aim should ultimately be to improve the wellbeing of the nation.”
Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religiouspieties or meek submission, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic & free.
Wilde was both a glittering wordsmith and a social outsider. His drama emerges out of these two perhaps contradictory identities, combining epigrammatic brilliance and shrewd social observation. Includes Lady Windermere’s Fan, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, A Florentine Tragedy and The Importance of Being Earnest, which appears in full with the “Grigsby” scene which originally made up the fourth act.
Aesop was probably a prisoner of war, sold into slavery in the early sixth century BC, who represented his masters in court and negotiations, and relied on animal stories to put across his key points. All these fables, full of humour, insight and savage wit, as well as many fascinating glimpses of ordinary life, have now been brought together for the first time in this definitive and fully annotated modern edition.
With Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote what is regarded as the first English novel, and created one of the most popular and enduring myths in literature. Written in an age of exploration and enterprise, it has been variously interpreted as an embodiment of British imperialist values, as a portrayal of ‘natural man’, or as a moral fable. But above all it is a brilliant narrative, depicting Crusoe’s transformation from terrified survivor to self-sufficient master of an island.
Bored on a hot afternoon, Alice follows a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole – without giving a thought about how she might get out. And so she tumbles into Wonderland: where animals answer back, a baby turns into a pig, time stands still at a disorderly tea party, croquet is played with hedgehogs and flamingos, and the Mock Turtle and Gryphon dance the Lobster Quadrille. In a land in which nothing is as it seems and cakes, potions and mushrooms can make her shrink to ten inches or grow to the size of a house, will Alice be able to find her way home again?
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned shipis wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the ‘Master’ and his imminent arrival. In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.
The story of the orphan Oliver, who runs away from the workhouse only to be taken in by a den of thieves, shocked readers when it was first published. Dickens’s tale of childhood innocence beset by evil depicts the dark criminal underworld of a London peopled by vivid and memorable characters – the arch-villain Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy. Combining elements of Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel and popular melodrama, Dickens created an entirely newkind of fiction, scathing in its indictment of a cruel society, and pervaded by an unforgettable sense of threat and mystery.
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.
Laurence Sterne’s great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate ‘hero’ Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters.
In the summer of 1348, as the Black Death ravages their city, ten young Florentines take refuge in the countryside. They amuse themselves by each telling a story a day for the ten days they are destined to remain there – a hundred stories of love, adventure and surprising twists of fate. Less preoccupied with abstract concepts of morality or religion than earthly values, the tales range from the bawdy Peronella hiding her lover in a tub to Ser Cepperallo, who, despite his unholy effrontery, becomes a Saint. The result is a towering monument of European literature and a masterpiece of imaginative narrative.
Captain Ahab is an eerily compelling madman who focuses his distilled hatred and suffering (and that of generations before him) into the pursuit of a creature as vast, dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. More than just a novel of adventure, this is a haunting social commentary populated with some of the most enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith and the nature of perception.
When brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov is murdered, the lives of his sons are changed irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family’s rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murderer, Dostoyevsky’s dark masterpiece evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone’s faith in humanity is tested.
Published as a ‘shilling shocker’, Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark psychological fantasy gave birth to the idea of the split personality. The story of respectable Dr Jekyll’s strange association with ‘damnable young man’ Edward Hyde, the hunt through fog-bound London for a killer, and the final revelation of Hyde’s true identity is a chilling exploration of humanity’s basest capacity for evil. The other stories in this volume also testify to Stevenson’s inventiveness within the gothic genre: ‘Olalla’, a tale of vampirism and tainted family blood, and ‘The Body Snatcher’, which shows the murky underside of medical practice.
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil lanes of London, they are all drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror and soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.
A terrifying encounter with an escaped convict in a graveyard on the wild Kent marshes; a summons to meet the bitter, decaying Miss Havisham and her beautiful, cold-hearted ward Estella; the sudden generosity of a mysterious benefactor – these form a series of events that change the orphaned Pip’s life forever, and he eagerly abandons his humble origins to begin a new life as a gentleman. Dickens’s haunting late novel depicts Pip’s education and development through adversity as he discovers thetrue nature of his ‘great expectations’.
When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her ‘cousin’ Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy’s novels.
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.
The award-winning new translation of the great Russian novel.
Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading romances of chivalry that he determines to become a knight errant and pursue bold adventures, accompanied by his squire, the cunning Sancho Panza. As they roam the world together, the aging Quixote’s fancy leads them wildly astray. At the same time the relationship between the two men grows in fascinating subtlety. Often considered to be the first modern novel, Don Quixote is a wonderful burlesque of the popular literature its disordered protagonist is obsessed with.
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’.
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.
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman inthe eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succès de scandale and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to fascinate and disturb.
Obsessed by creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life by electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley’s chilling gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world’s most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.
Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him. As Heathcliff’s bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.
George Eliot’s most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as ‘one of the few English novels written for adult people’.
One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer’s Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode in the Trojan War. At its centre is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his refusal to fight after being humiliated by his leader Agamemnon. But when the Trojan Hector kills Achilles’ close friend Patroclus, he storms back into battle to take revenge – although knowing this will ensure his own early death. Interwoven with this tragic sequence of events are powerfully moving descriptions of the ebb and flow of battle, of the domestic world inside Troy’s besieged city of Ilium, and of the conflicts between the Gods on Olympus as they argue over the fate of mortals.
The epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats – shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmityof the sea-god Poseidon – Odysseus must test his bravery and native cunning to the full if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.
In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight’s account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath’s Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the Cook.
Between the First World War and the Wall Street Crash the French Riviera was the stylish place for wealthy Americans to visit. Among the most fashionable are the Divers, Dick and Nicole who hold court at their villa. Into their circle comes Rosemary Hoyt, a film star, who is instantly attracted to them, but understands little of the dark secrets and hidden corruption that hold them together. As Dick draws closer to Rosemary, he fractures the delicate structure of his marriage and sets both Nicole and himself on to a dangerous path where only the strongest can survive. In this exquisite, lyrical novel, Fitzgerald has poured much of the essence of his own life; he has also depicted the age of materialism, shattered idealism and broken dreams.
It is September 1938 and during a heatwave Europe tensely awaits the outcome of the Munich conference, where they will learn if there is to be a war. In Paris people are waiting too, among them Mathieu, Jacques and Philippe, each wrestling with their own love affairs, doubts and angsts – and none of them ready to fight. The second volume in Sartre’s wartime Roads to Freedom trilogy, The Reprieve cuts between locations and characters to build an impressionistic collage of the hopes, fears and self-deception of an entire continent as it blinkers itself against the imminent threat of war.
For Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, life in Paris was based upon the rue de Fleurus and the Saturday evenings and ‘it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’. Picasso was there with ‘his high whinnying spanish giggle’, as were Cezanne and Matisse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. As Toklas put it – ‘The geniuses came and talked to Gertrude Stein and the wives sat with me’. A light-hearted entertainment, this is in fact Gertrude Stein’s own autobiography and a roll-call of all the extraordinary painters and writers she met between 1903 and 1932. Audacious, sardonic and characteristically self-confident, this is a definitive account by the American in Paris.
Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafés and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs to procure a safe abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Beyond all this, filtering an uneasy light on his predicament, rises the distant threat of the coming of the Second World War.
The writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering. In these poems he adopted four separate personae: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and himself, using them to express ‘great swarms of thought and feeling’. While each personae has its own poetic identity, together they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa’s poets and poetry contribute to the ‘mysterious importance of existence’.
A portrait of New York City, drawn by describing the interconnected lives of dozens of people – bankers, chefs, bums, cabdrivers and others. Written in an impressionistic style, with vivid descriptions and bursts of overheard conversation, it has more in common with films than traditional novels.
Follows a man’s thoughts and dreams during a single night. It is also a book that participates in the re-reading of Irish history that was part of the revival of the early 20th century. The author also wrote “Ulysses”, “Dubliners” and “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”.
Holly Golightly, glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while down. She’s up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts. She’s a shoplifter, a delight, a drifter, a tease. She hasn’t got a past.She doesn’t want to belong to anything or anyone. Not to ‘Rusty’ Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town. Not to Salvatore ‘Sally’ Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing. Not to a starving writer. Not even to her one-eyed rag-bag pirate of a cat. One day Holly might find somewhere she belongs. Until then she’s travelling.
“Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century’ Anthony Burgess, ObserverFollowing the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It has survived censorship, controversy and legal action, and even been deemed blasphemous, but remains an undisputed modernist classic: ceaselessly inventive, garrulous, funny, sorrowful, vulgar, lyrical and ultimately redemptive. It confirms Joyce’s belief that literature ‘is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man’. ‘The most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape’ T. S. Eliot ‘Intoxicating … a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare’ Guardian”
Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach … Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby – young, handsome, fabulously rich – always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.
The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus’s Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist’s ‘eternal imagination’.
It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate…and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half brother look on powerless to help him. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his only escape from a world he cannot understand. UNDER THE VOLCANO is one of the century’s great undisputed masterpieces.
Joyce’s first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.
“Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote’s comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frighteningly human. The book that made Capote’s name, In Cold Blood is a seminal work of modern prose, a remarkable synthesis of journalistic skill and powerfully evocative narrative.”
“The return of the beautiful Countess Olenska into the rigidly conventional society of New York sends reverberations throughout the upper reaches of society. Newland Archer, an eligible young man of the establishment is about to announce his engagement to May Welland, a pretty ingénue, when May’s cousin, Countess Olenska, is introduced into their circle. The Countess brings with her an aura of European sophistication and a hint of scandal, having left her husband and claimed her independence. Her sorrowful eyes, her tragic worldliness and her air of unapproachability attract the sensitive Newland and, almost against their will, a passionate bond develops between them. But Archer’s life has no place for passion and, with society on the side of May and all she stands for, he finds himself drawn into a bitter conflict between love and duty.”
The biting cold and the aching silence of the far North become an unforgettable backdrop for Jack London’s vivid, rousing, superbly realistic wilderness adventure stories featuring the author’s unique knowledge of the Yukon and the behavior of humans and animals facing nature at its cruelest.
We are in Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin’s novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.
Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth – four “little women” enduring hardships and enjoying adventures in Civil War New England The charming story of the March sisters, Little Women has been adored by generations. Readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo’s hand, cried over little Beth’s death, and dreamed of traveling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. Future writers have found inspiration in Jo’s devotion to her writing. In this simple, enthralling tale, both parts of which are included here, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature’s most beloved women.
Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the long life-and-death struggle between Athens and Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling its author’s ambitious claim. Thucydides himself (c.460-400 BC) was an Athenian and achieved the rank of general in the earlier stages of the war. He applied thereafter a passion for accuracy and a contempt for myth and romance in compiling this factual record of a disastrous conflict.

Informações sobre o Livro

Título do livro : Art of War, The
Autor : Tzu, Sun
Idioma : Inglês
Editora do livro : PENGUIN BOOKS
Capa do livro : Mole
Ano de publicação : 2009
Quantidade de páginas : 384
Altura : 19 cm
Largura : 13 cm
Peso : 251 g
Com páginas para colorir : Não
Com realidade aumentada : Não
Gênero do livro : Direito, política e ciências sociais
Subgêneros do livro : Filosofia, Política
Tipo de narração : Novela
Idade mínima recomendada : 15 anos
Data de publicação : 22-08-2023