After a routine security check by George Smiley, civil servant Samuel Fennan apparently kills himself. When Smiley finds Circus head Maston is trying to blame him for the man's death, he begins his...
Desolation Angels is the wild and soulful story of the legendary road trip that Jack Kerouac took before the publication of On the Road, told through the persona of Jack Duluoz and accompanied by h...
In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer. Carr had come to each of them and conf...
From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed thousands of casualties on both sides. While the Soviet Union talked about a 'peace-keeping' mission, the de...
A cultural landmark and the most shocking novel in the English language, Naked Lunch is an exhilarating ride into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. An unnerving tale of an addict unmoored i...
The exquisite last novel from Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari KawabataIneko has lost the ability to see things. At first it was a ping-pong ball, then it was her fiancé. The ...
Elie Wiesel's harrowing first-hand account of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, Night is translated by Marion Wiesel with a preface by Elie Wiesel in Penguin Modern Classics.
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...
'His first novel is a revelation ... the writing is vivid, serious and extraordinary ... wonderful' The TimesThe Sea is My Brother is Jack Kerouac's very first novel, begun shortly afte...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin begins in Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different w...
Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from...
A colourful, multi-facted chronicle of New York in the early 1920s, Manhattan Transfer ranks with Joyce's Ulysses as a powerful and often lyrical meditation on the modern city. Using experimental m...
A story of sexual and spiritual awakening, Tropic of Capricorn shocked readers as much as Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer. A mixture of fiction and autobiography, it is the story of He...
In 1929 Robert Graves went to live abroad permanently, vowing 'never to make England my home again'. This is his superb account of his life up until that 'bitter leave-taking': from his childhood a...
A chemist by training, Primo Levi became one of the supreme witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In these haunting reflections inspired by the elements of the periodic table, he ranges from you...