The Old Man of the Moon is Shen Fu's intimate and moving account of his marriage - from early passion to the trials of poverty and separation - and his great, enduring love for his wife in eighteen...
'A story for our, and all, times' GuardianThe Plague is Albert Camus's world-renowned fable of fear and courageThe townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, wh...
Jude Fawley, the stonemason excluded not by his wits but by poverty from the world of Christminster privilege, finds fulfilment in his relationship with Sue Bridehead. Both have left earlier marria...
The perfect gift this Christmas season: a generous selection of some of the greatest festive stories of all timeThis is a collection of the most magical, moving, chilling and surprising...
Muriel Spark's classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie features a schoolmistress you'll never forget, in this beautifully repackaged Penguin Essentials edition.'Give me a girl at an impre...
'There is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain'A Japanese teenager is overcome with longing for his male classmate. He imagines his body punctured with arrows, like the bod...
In the heatwave of 1959, four sisters arrive at Applecote Manor to relive their memories of hazy Cotswolds summers.They find their uncle and aunt still reeling from the disappearance of...
'She found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world'Like the clay from which she...
Garin, a country doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is transforming the villagers into zombies. He has with him a vaccine which will prevent ...
Just outside a hotel in Bordeaux, Philippe, a famous writer, chances upon a young man who bears a striking resemblance to his first love. What follows is a look back to Philippe's teenage years, to...
Francis Sancher always said he would come to an unnatural end. So when this handsome newcomer to the Guadeloupean village of Riviere au Sel is found dead, face down in the mud, no one is particular...
Sixty seconds after she wakes from a coma, Maggie's world is torn apart.The police tell her that her daughter Elspeth is dead. That she drowned when the car Maggie had been driving plun...
A riveting, masterfully researched account of the bold innovators who adapted the Chinese language to the modern world, transforming China into a superpower in the processWhat does it t...
One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, ...
A newly married woman longs, irrationally, for a silk umbrella; a husband chases away his wife's beloved cat; a betrayed mother impulsively sacks her housekeeper. Underneath the surface of these p...
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best First Book Shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. ...
'The most accomplished Native American writer of her generation' The New York Times Book ReviewTayo, a young Second World War veteran of mixed ancestry, is coming home. But, returning t...
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.
A story of forbidden sexual passion and thwarted dreams set against the backdrop of a lush summer in rural MassachusettsSeventeen-year-old Charity Royall is desperate to escape life wit...
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...