'Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.'America, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The winning Axis powers have divided their spoils: the Nazis...
Child of Fortune is deceptively gentle and dreamlike, teetering on the edge of tragedy. It covers a year in the life of a single mother with an eleven-year-old daughter, combining a complex interio...
A timeless travelogue from the leading light of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac's Lonesome Traveller is a jubilant celebration of human discoveryAs he roams the US, Mexico, Morocco, P...
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 cun...
In Stephen Fry's vivid retelling we gaze in wonder as wise Athena is born from the cracking open of the great head of Zeus and follow doomed Persephone into the dark and lonely realm of the Underwo...
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 ...
Jane hasn't lived anywhere longer than six months since her son was born five years ago. Now, in the idyllic coastal town of Pirriwee, Jane feels like she finally belongs. She finds friends in the ...
When 'The Awakening' was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. But a century after her de...
Walter Mitty is an ordinary man living an ordinary life. But he has dreams - vivid, extraordinary day dreams - in which the life he leads is one of excitement and even adventure, in which he - a we...
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 increasin...
Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself.Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana...
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love sto...
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 l...
Eugene Gant, born in 1900 to hard-drinking stone-cutter Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, grows up in small-town America. Both lonely outsider and passionate chronicler of American life, Eugene exp...
The Silmarillion is an account of the Elder Days, of the First Age of Tolkien’s world. It is the ancient drama to which the characters in The Lord of the Rings look back, and in whose events ...
Alex Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in Berlin for his British masters, and has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants...
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 ...
Shocking, banned and the subject of obscenity trials, Henry Miller's first novel Tropic of Cancer is one of the most scandalous and influential books of the twentieth century -- new to Penguin Mode...
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 d...
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 Fi...