'The eyes that glanced at me shone with a pale-green light'A crazed vivisectionist engineers a new super-breed of monstrous 'Beast Men' on a remote Pacific island, in H. G. Wells's Vict...
A coiffured con man travels across Russia's rural backwaters, buying the souls of dead serfs from their owners to make his fortune, in Gogol's exuberant, bravura masterwork: the greatest comedy in ...
Why has inequality increased in the Western world - and what can we do about it? In The Great Divide, Joseph E. Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in his best-selling book The Price of In...
'40,000 francs, which lay before him in a heap of gold and banknotes.'Written in twenty-six days to pay off Dostoyevsky's own roulette debts, The Gambler is a graphic psychological stud...
Why has inequality increased in the Western world - and what can we do about it? In The Great Divide, Joseph E. Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in his best-selling book The Price of In...
Until I met John Smith, Number Four, I'd been on the run alone, hiding and fighting to stay alive. Together we are much more powerful. But it could only last so long before we had to separate to fi...
From the international bestselling author of Gomorrah, this is a deeply personal and candid portrait of Italy today: a place of trafficking and toxic waste, where votes can be bought and sold, wher...
A book as rich and sprawling as the seductive metropolis it evokes, Rio de Janeiro builds a kaleidoscopic portrait of this city of extremes, and its history of conflict and corruption. Award-winnin...
Thoreau's account of his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods remains an inspiration to the environmental movement - a call to his fellow men to abandon their striving, materi...
A profound influence on medieval Europe's view of the wider world, this thirteenth-century account of a Venetian merchant's amazing experiences in the court of the great Mongol leader, Kubilai Khan...
Richard Duke of York is dead, his ambitions in ruins, his head spiked on the walls of the city.King Henry VI is still held prisoner. His Lancastrian Queen rides south with an army of victorio...
Britain is in the depths of recession. A left-leaning young Oxford academic and his barrister girlfriend take an off-peak holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. By seeming chance they bump int...
Michel de Montaigne was the originator of the modern essay form; in these diverse pieces he expresses his views on relationships, contemplates the idea that man is no different from any animal, arg...
Aprofound consolation to early believers, these two books from the Bible deeply influenced the rise of the Christian church: the apocalyptic Revelation portraying the religion's ultimate triumph ov...
On the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birth, Penguin is publishing the definitive biography of this extraordinary novelist, by acclaimed literary biographer Claire HarmanC...
Not simply an investigation into melancholy, these unique essays form part of a panoramic celebration of human behaviour from the time of the ancients to the Renaissance. God, devils, old age, diet...
Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded...
Their troubled courtship long behind them, Jenny Bunn and Patrick Standish have settled into London life. Patrick works in publishing and Jenny teaches sick children in a hospital. They have reache...
Asearing vision of the human condition - Schopenhauer's perception of the importance of art, morality and self-awareness in a blind struggle against a Godless, meaningless world radically transform...
On 26 April 1986, at 1.23am, a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come....