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'Woolf is modern ... With Joyce and Eliot she has shaped a literary century' Jeanette WintersonVirginia Woolf tested the boundaries of fiction in these short stories, developing a new language of sens

Outwardly a novel about life in a country-house in whose grounds there is to be a pageant,Between the Actsis also a striking evocation of English experience in the months leading up to the Second World War.Through dialogue, humour and the passionate musings of the characters, Virginia Woolf explores how a community is formed (and scattered) over time.The pageant, a series of scenes from English history, and the private dramas that go on between the acts, are closely interlinked. Through the figure of Miss La Trobe, and author of the pageant, Virginia Woolf questions imperialist assumptions and, at the same time, re-creates the elusive role of the artist.

'An essential book for anyone invested, not only in Vietnamese literature, but the historic power of the national epic . . . and its perennial place in our species' efforts toward self-knowledge. Tim

'Life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the b

'There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves'The Years is the story of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estra

'Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched - love for instance - we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next'Tracing the lives of a group of

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day'Clarissa Dallo

This enthralling tale of a “material girl” in 1930s Berlin is the masterpiece of a literary icon, rediscovered and restored to the same heights as such luminaries as Isherwood and Brecht.In 1931 a young woman writer living in Germany penned her answer to Anita Loos’sGentlemen Prefer Blondesand the era of cinematic glamour:The Artificial Silk Girl. Though a Nazi censorship board banned Irmgard Keun’s work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies, the novel survived, as fresh and relevant today as the day it was written.The Artificial Silk Girlis the story of Doris, beautiful and striving, who vows to write down all that happens to her as the star of her own life story. But instead of scripting what she hopes will be a quick rise to fame and fortune as either an actress or the mistress/wife of a wealthy man, she describes a slow descent into near prostitution and homelessness. Prewar Berlin is not the dazzling and exciting city of promise it seems; Doris unwittingly reveals a bleak, sea

This landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end of the twe

Ford Madox Ford's great masterpiece exploring love and identity during the First World War, in a Penguin Classics edition with an introduction by Julian Barnes. A masterly novel of destruction and reg

As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair is beginning between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on

''A fantasy, impossible but delicious ... an exuberance of life and wit''The Times Literary SupplementFirst masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through the centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf''s own time. Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, this playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf''s own words, a ''writer''s holiday'' which delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.Edited by Brenda Lyons with an Introduction and Notes by Sandra M. Gilbert

A collection of Kafka's greatest stories, including his famous tale of alienation, now in Penguin Black ClassicsThis collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includesMetamorphosis, 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, andThe 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.

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is an inspiring and tragic account of an ordinary life lived in extraordinary circumstances that has enthralled readers for generations. This Penguin Classics ed

The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb new translation by Michael HofmannFranz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks and prostitutes, Franz picks himself up over and over again - until one day he is struck a monstrous blow which might just prove his final downfall.A dazzling collage of newspaper reports, Biblical stories, drinking songs and urban slang,Berlin Alexanderplatzis the great novel of Berlin life: inventing, styling and recreating the city as reality and dream; mimicking its movements and rhythms; immortalizing its pubs, abattoirs, apartments and chaotic streets. From the gutter to the stars, this is the whole picture of the city.Berlin Alexanderplatzbrought fame in 1929 to its author Alfred Döblin, until then an impe

"Radical and inspiring ... Yanagi's vision puts the connection between heart and hand before the transient and commercial" - Edmund de WaalThe daily lives of ordinary people are replete with objects,

For the first time in his career Inspector Maigret receives written summons to the Prefect's office where he learns that he has been accused of assaulting a young woman. With his career and reputation

Thomas Hardy's haunting study of guilt and lost love, now in a beautiful new hardcover edition designed by Coralie Bickford-SmithIn a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby dau

One of the greatest American novels of all time - reissued in a stunning hardback to celebrate the Salinger centenary It's Christmas and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school

Haunting, terrifying and hilarious, The Day of the Oprichnik is a dazzling novel and a fierce critique of life in the New Russia Moscow 2028: Andrei Danilovich Komiaga, oprichnik, member of the czar's

Bassani's six classic books, collected for the first time in English as the epic masterwork they were intended to be. Set in the northern Italian town of Ferrara before, during, and after the Second W

Charlie, a brilliant and beautiful young actress, is lured into 'the theatre of the real' by an Israeli intelligence officer. Forced to play her ultimate role, she is plunged into a deceptive and deli

A special edition of John le Carré's thrilling novel of espionage and betrayal in the Middle East, to tie in with the forthcoming BBC series starring Alexander Skarsgård, Michael Shannon and Florence

Charlie, a brilliant and beautiful young actress, is lured into 'the theatre of the real' by an Israeli intelligence officer. Forced to play her ultimate role, she is plunged into a deceptive and deli

The final novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is a celebration of the American midwest with Cather's strongest heroine at its heart Jim and Antonia meets as children in the wide open plains of Neb

'Splendid ... le Carré shows how endowed he is with the gift of storytelling' The Times Aldo Cassidy is a cautious man. He has a pleasant family, drives a safe, expensive car and wears luxurious cloth

'The book breathes life, anger and excitement' Observer Tessa Quayle, a brilliant and beautiful young social activist, has been found brutally murdered by Lake Turkana in Nairobi. The rumours are that

In the second part of John le Carré's Karla Trilogy, the battle of wits between spymaster George Smiley and his Russian adversary takes on an even more dangerous dimension. George Smiley, now acting h

'One of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet published' Guardian An illegal Muslim immigrant arrives in Hamburg with a traumatic past and the key to a fortune held in a

The concluding part of John le Carré's celebrated Karla Trilogy, Smiley's People sees the last confrontation between the indefatigable spymaster George Smiley and his great enemy, as their rivalry com

You will be a great hero, a general, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Ambassador of France!' For his whole life, Romain Gary's fierce, eccentric motherhad only one aim: to make her son a great man. And she did. T

Jack Kerouac's classic novel about friendship, the search for meaning, and the allure of nature A witty, moving philosophical novel, Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums is a journey of self-discovery throu

A timeless travelogue from the leading light of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller is a jubilant celebration of human discovery As he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, Paris and Londo

'Kerouac's grittiest novel ... sensual and uninhibited' The New York Times Driven mad by three years of endless telegrams, phonecalls, mail, reporters and snoopers in the wake of his hugely successful

A dark love story set in wartime Rome from the author of In Love and Your Face for the World to See Rome, 1944. Robert is a lonely American soldier looking for a girl. Lisa is cold and hungry, obliged

The first novel in the Great Plains trilogy, this is an ode to the American Midwest and the immigrants who transformed it To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their

'A terrific novel' Angela Carter Koko won't do what is expected of her. Defying her family's wishes, she has brought up her eleven-year-old daughter alone in her apartment. And now, after a casual aff

The fifth book in Bassani's Romanzo di Ferrara sequence, and his final novel, The Heron is a taut, poignant portrait of a middle-aged man's reckoning with his life. 'It struggled to keep itself aloft

There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.' The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network

Reinvents the particulars of slavery in America with a comic rage ... The book explodes. Reed's special grace is anger ... a muscular, luminous prose' The New York Times 'It always was, and will alway