Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman is a story of lurking disquiet and haunting disorientation, inspired by the real-life, unsolved disappearance of a female college student.'Shirley Jackson's ...
Is it possible to die a happy death?This is the central question of Camus's astonishing early novel, published posthumously and greeted as a major literary event. It tells the story of a young Alge...
Published in 1972, Enemies, A Love Story is an astonishing novel that blends humour and pathos to create a rich, humane portrayal of a man who cannot escape his past. Herman Broder, a r...
Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class, and includes an introduction by Philip Hen...
Unfinished at the time of his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon is a story of doomed love set against the extravagance of America's booming film industry. This Penguin Modern Classics ed...
In The Sundial Shirley Jackson, author of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, blends family politics and apocalyptic terror to create a disturbing world of sinister relations and the macabre....
A Small Circus is a powerful 1931 portrayal of a German town on the brink of chaos, from bestselling author Hans Fallada (writer of Alone in Berlin)It is summer, 1929, and in a small Ge...
Darkly funny, searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, author of bestselling Alone in BerlinIn these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking and...
A fruity, foxy masterpiece, defender of our wilting faith in mankind' Sunday TimesHorace Rumpole is in a strange state that could only be described as a kind of air-conditioned purgator...
'The most exciting book I have ever read ... a feverish, fascinating novel' Antony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph'I can't take any more of your revolting merciful kindness!'Who wo...
Hailed by George Bernard Shaw as 'useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war', R.C. Sherriff's Journey's End is an unflinching vision of life in the trenches towards the end of the First...
The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge of an alien space; somewhere where, curiously, they are never alone' Michael Hoffman.Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated Americ...
A Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age - The New York TimesStanislaw Lem's set of short stories, written over a period of twenty years, all feature the adventures of space traveller Ijon...
Tristes Tropiques begins with the line 'I hate travelling and explorers', yet during his life Claude Lévi-Strauss travelled from wartime France to the Amazon basin and the dense upland jungl...
Bringing into harsh focus the daily struggle for existence in a Soviet gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is translated by Ralph Parker in Penguin Modern Classic...
Caligula reveals some aspects of the existential notion of 'the absurd' by portraying an emperor so mighty and so desperate in his search for freedom that he inevitably destroys gods, men and himse...
Albinus - rich, married middle-aged and respectable - is an art critic and aspiring filmmaker who lusts after the coquettish young cinema usherette Margot. Gradually he seduces her and convinces hi...
Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and formally daring satire, Vile Bodies reveals the darkness and vulnerability that lurks beneath the glittering surface of the high life.In the years follow...
The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a deadly plague, which condemns its victims to a swift and horrifying death. Fear, isolation and claustrophobia follow as they are forced into quarantine....
'Is it really worth it to die, to be dead, just to prove to everybody that you're not a coward?'On Guadalcanal in the south Pacific, the soldiers of C Company are about to enter the war...