In 1935 Italy declared war on Abyssinia and Evelyn Waugh was sent to Addis Ababa to cover the conflict. His acerbic account of the intrigue and political machinations leading up to the crisis is coupl
Jody Tiflin is given a red pony, and later he is promised the colt of a bay mare. Yet both of these gifts bring him tragedy as well as joy, and Jody is taught not only the harsh lessons of life and de
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 Shak
Presents chronologically works such as "Paterson", selections from "White Shroud", "Cosmopolitan Greetings", and including the poems "Howl" and "Kaddish" as well as songs, and notes by Ginsberg. This
Time hardly mattered in the village of Mucker, the birthplace of poet and writer Patrick Kavanagh. Full of wry humour, Kavanagh’s unsentimental and evocative account of his Irish rural upbringing desc
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 the
Primo Levi was among the greatest witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In this gripping novel, based on a true story, he reveals the extraordinary lives of the Russian, Polish and Jewish partisans
Virginia Woolf tested the boundaries of fiction in these short stories, developing a new language of sensation, feeling and thought, and recreating in words the 'swarm and confusion of life'. Defying
Exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy for his opposition to Mussolini, Carlo Levi entered a world cut off from history and the state, hedged in by custom and sorrow, without comfort or solace,
Flora Thompson's immortal trilogy, containing "Lark Rise", "Over To Candleford" and "Candleford Green", is a heartwarming portrayal of country life at the close of the 19
Beware the blood-soaked razor of Sweeney Todd, demon barber of Fleet Street! Johanna Oakley's lover, Mark, has gone missing in suspicious circumstances. And the man who was meant to deliver Mark's las
For over thirty years Reger, a music critic, has sat on the same bench in front of a Tintoretto painting in a Viennese museum, thinking and railing against contemporary society, his fellow men, artist
Presents an account of the author's childhood in Czernowitz, Ukraine. This title portrays a twilit world suspended between the dying ways of an imperial past and the terrors of the twentieth century.
`The story of his chronic stomach ailment was the story of his life. Yet all his livelong days he was obliged to bolt down the braised porkolt gravies, soupy goulashes and watery broths bathing the si
Covers radical public poems of Leopardi on history and politics; philosophical satires; his great, dark, despairing odes such as "To Silvia"; and, later masterworks such as "The Setting of the Moon",
The short story is one of the most varied and exciting genres in American literature. This collection brings together many of its finest examples from the early nineteenth century to the present. It c
Introducing Bombay CID's most dogged, dutiful officer, and one of the greatest, most engaging creations in all detective fiction, H.R.F. Keating's The Perfect Murder: The First Inspector Ghote Mystery
An autobiography, in which the author - painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer - relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawi
Captures the essence of Marrakesh: the crowds, the smells - of spices, camels and the souks - and the sounds of the city, from the cries of the blind beggars and the children's call for alms to the un
Offers insights into the creativity of Franz Kafka and the torment he suffered as a man, a lover, and a writer. This book explores the letter that Kafka wrote to his fiancee, from their first tender m
For Willi Kufult, prison life means staying out of trouble, keeping his cell clean, snagging a precious piece of tobacco - and dreaming of the day of his release. Then he gets out. As Willi tries to m
In Berlin there lived a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable and happy but one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress he loved. He was not loved in return, however, and
Shiva Naipaul was the brother of V. S. Naipaul and author of Firefles and The Chip-Chip Gatherers. The Chip-Chip Gatherers, his second novel, was winner of the Whitbread Literary Award in 1973 and is
Brought up in a stifling, emotionless home in the north of England, Clara finds freedom when she wins a scholarship and travels to London. There, she meets Clelia and the rest of the Denham family: br
To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics we are publishing an incredibly desirable and collectable postcard collection of 100 Modern Classics authors. Following the success of
Described as a 'riveting read' by Sarah Waters and acclaimed by crime writers such as Andrew Taylor, The Pursued is a dark, gripping 1930s psychological thriller by C. S. Forester, the author of Hornb
Survivor, genius, perfumer, and killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more
The author who most epitomises the decadent jazz age and 'the lost generation' of post-World War One America, Fitzgerald remains a best-selling author worldwide. Collected here in this covetable and m
The Penguin English Library Edition of The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope "He is so scandalously weak, and she is so radically vicious, that they cannot but be wrong together. The v
The Penguin English Library Edition of Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens 'The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light' Dombey and Son is both a
The Penguin English Library Edition of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad 'There is something in a treasure that fastens upon a man's mind. He will pray and blaspheme and still persevere, and will curse the da
Introduction by Jeffrey EugenidesWritten in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the aut
From Evelyn Waugh, the author of beloved novels such as Brideshead Revisited, A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies, this is the biography of Ronald Knox - priest, classicist, prolific writer and one of t
My First Wife is Jakob Wassermann's intense, powerful account of a marriage - and its ruinous collapse - translated by the award-winning translator of Alone in Berlin, Michael Hofmann. It is the story
In February 1822 the writer and adventurer Edward John Trelawny arrived in Pisa to make the acquaintance of his heroes Shelley and Byron, leaving a broken marriage and an exotic seafaring career behin
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a generation of French soldiers found themselves haunted by defeat and disappointment. One of these soldiers was Alfred de Vigny, an aristocratic poet who also serve
A narrative of the suffering of Dalton 'Diddy' Harron, told through his own observations. He works in advertising for a microscope manufacturer, is thirty-three and divorced and a month ago tried to c
This selection of John Donne's most powerful prose shows that the man remembered predominantly for his poetry was also a preacher, and a prose writer of extraordinary power. In it, he explores the met
Explores a mans desperate desire for freedom. It finds him in the midst of his stormy marriage to the volatile, duplicitous Mona, and joyfully quitting his dreary job for a hand-to-mouth existence in
