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Into the insular town of 1930s Ferrara, a new doctor arrives. Fadigati is hopeful and modern, and more than anything wants to fit into his new home. But his fresh, appealing appearance soon crumbles w

'Rich or poor, we will keep together and be happy in one another.' Christmas won't be the same this year for Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as their father is away fighting in the

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 soci

Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school headmaster and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from any young m

Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually devoured by legal costs, the romance of Esther Summerson and the secrets of her origin, the sleuthing of Detective Inspector Bucket and the fate of Jo the crossing-sweeper, these are some of the lives Dickens invokes to portray London society, rich and poor, as no other novelist has done. Bleak House, in its atmosphere, symbolism and magnificent bleak comedy, is often regarded as the best of Dickens. A 'great Victorian novel', it is so inventive in its competing plots and styles that it eludes interpretation.

For Joyce, literature 'is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man'. Written between 1914 and 1921, Ulysses has survived bowdlerization, legal action and bitter controversy. An undisputed modernis

A respected literary biographer, Mark is working on the life of Gilbert Strong - a writer about whom he thinks he knows everything. Happily married, and apparently dedicated to a life of letters, he n

'Genius ... bringing ardent intelligence to bear upon poetry, politics and autobiography' Seamus HeaneyEssayist and poet Joseph Brodsky was one of the most penetrating voices of the twentieth century. This prize-winning collection of his diverse essays includes uniquely powerful appreciations of great writers: on Dostoevsky and the development of Russian prose, on Auden and Akhmatova, Cavafy, Montale and Mandelstam.These are contrasted with his reflections on larger themes of tyranny and evil, and subtle evocations of his childhood in Leningrad. Brodsky's insightful appreciation of the intricacies of language, culture and identity connect these works, revealing his remarkable gifts as a prose writer. 'Sparkles with intellect, and combines the precision of scholarship with the passion of the poet' The TimesWinner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Niccolò Machiavelli's brutally uncompromising manual of statecraft, The Prince is translated and edited with an introduction by Tim Parks in Penguin Classics. As a diplomat in turbulent fifteenth-cent

The legend of King Arthur has retained its appeal and popularity through the ages: Mordred's treason, the knightly exploits of Tristan, Lancelot's fatally divided loyalties and his love for Guenevere,

Douglas Yandell, a youngish music critic, is enlisted by Kitty Vandervane to keep an eye on her roving husband - the eminent conductor and would-be radical Sir Roy - as he embarks on yet another affai

Brimming with gluttony, booze and lust, Roger Micheldene is loose in America. Supposedly visiting Budweiser University to make deals for his publishing firm in England, Roger instead sets out to offen

A dark and witty work of hardboiled detective fiction set in the mean streets of New York, Chester Himes's A Rage in Harlem includes an introduction by Luc Sante in Penguin Modern Classics. Jackson's

The night's over for Ulysses Galen. It started going bad for the big Greek when a knife was drawn, then there was an axe, then he was being chased and shot at. Now Galen is lying dead in the middle of

Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opport

The last of John le Carre's espionage novels to feature his most enduring and well-loved character, George Smiley, and a gripping feat of narrative brilliance, The Secret Pilgrim is published in Pengu

Two soldiers travel across Italy at the height of summer, passing through Genoa, Rome and Naples. One of the soldiers is blind, graceful, gleefully vicious and wears a prosthetic arm; the other, twent

Before Mrs Beeton there was Eliza Acton, whose crisp, clear, simple style and foolproof instructions established the format for modern cookery writing, leading to her being called 'the best writer of

Alienated from society, Harry Haller is the Steppenwolf, wild, strange and shy. His despair and desire for death draw him into an enchanted, Faust-like underworld. Through a series of shadowy encounte

Sal Paradise, young and innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment t

If Antoinette Cosway, a spirited Creole heiress, could have foreseen the terrible future that awaited her, she would not have married the young Englishman. Initially drawn to her beauty and sensuality

A Hay Festival and The Poole VOTE 100 BOOKS for Women Selection'Late into the night we talked of love, of its complications. In my father's eyes they were imaginary. .. This conception of rapid, violent and passing love affairs appealed to my imagination. I was not at the age when fidelity is attractive.I knew very little about love.'The French Riviera: home to the Beautiful People. And none are more beautiful than Cécile, a precocious seventeen-year-old, and her father Raymond, a vivacious libertine. Charming, decadent and irresponsible, the golden-skinned duo are dedicated to a life of free love, fast cars and hedonistic pleasures.But then, one long, hot summer Raymond decides to marry, and Cécile and her lover Cyril feel compelled to take a hand in his amours, with tragic consequences. Bonjour Tristesse scandalized 1950s France with its portrayal of teenager terrible Cécile, a heroine who rejects conventional notions of love, marriage and responsibility to choose her own sexual free

Ignatius J Reilly is fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk he is pretty much unhinged, too. But is he bothered by this? No. For this misanthropic crusader

Charles Ryder, a lonely student at Oxford, is captivated by the outrageous and exquisitely beautiful Sebastian Flyte. Invited to Brideshead, Sebastian's magnificent family home, Charles welcomes the a

Tells the story of an orphan who beguiles the world with her astonishing visions, triumphing over the worst of adversity and bringing light to a dark place.

Tells the story of the author's experiences as a young officer in the First World War. This title describes life in the trenches and how the dehumanizing horrors he witnessed left him shell-shocked.

From the moment the author arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, she spent her happiest years on

Features fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends who set out on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his teenage delinquency and the State tries to reform him - but

Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Lucy finds herself torn

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he

'What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not

A collection of interconnected tales devoted to a family living in a fertile valley on the outskirts of Monterey, California, and the effects that one particular family has on them all.

Ex-detective Nick Charles plans to spend a quiet Christmas holed up in a hotel suite with his glamorous wife Nora, their pet Schnauzer and a case of good Scotch. But then a bullet-riddled corpse and a

'I suppose it was conceited of me. But it was fun. And I felt like getting a bit of my own back on some of the people who'd conned and flattered me into wasting all those years.'

In this one-of-a-kind volume, indispensable for students of art, architecture and film, Alex Danchev presents 100 Artists' Manifestos, each reproduced with an introduction on the author and the associ

One of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time Vol. 1: The Way by Swann's is published in a new translation from the French by Lydia Davis in Penguin Classics. The Way by Swann's is one of the great novels of childhood, depicting the impressions of a sensitive boy of his family and neighbours, brought dazzlingly back to life by the famous taste of a madeleine.It contains the separate short novel, A Love of Swann's, a study of sexual jealousy that forms a crucial part of the vast, unfolding structure of In Search of Lost Time. This book established Proust as one of the greatest voices of the modern age - satirical, sceptical, confiding and endlessly varied in his responses to the human condition. Since the original pre-war translation Remembrance of Things Past by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, there has been no completely new rendering of Proust's French original into English. This translation brings to th

Explores the effects of invasion on both the conquered and the conquerors. Dealing with the motivations and emotions of the enemy, this title uncovers profound and often unsettling truths both about w

These sumptuous new hardback editions mark the 70th anniversary of Fitzgerald's death. Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and nig

The Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss has clawed his way up the Tory government ranks and is now Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.), and in pursuit

Little Women is one of the best loved books of all time. Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Thro