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...
Grady - beautiful, rich, flame-haired, defiant - is the sort of girl people stare at across a room. The daughter of an important man, who people want to be introduced to. A girl to whom people sens...
Romantics, adventurers, sensualists, melancholics and dreamers inhabit the bizarre and exotic world conjured up in these seven intricately interwoven tales, whose settings range from Tuscany and El...
For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a...
'I'll never understand the fucking Army.'Prew won't conform. He could have been the best boxer and the best bugler in his division, but he chooses the life of a straight soldier in Hawa...
Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress's rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arrang...
The unsettling story of a young woman's descent into mental illness, from the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived at the Castle.'An amazing writer' Neil Gaiman...
Exploring the decadence of Jazz Age New York through a fictionalised version of his own marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned includes an introduction by ...
A new translation of Giorgio Bassani's haunting collection of short stories that evoke 1930s Ferrara, with an introduction by Ali Smith.Isolated lives and a lost world are evoked in the...
When Lolita was first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century.This annotated edition, a revis...
A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of...
'A brave, beautiful book that could double as a handbook to accompany anyone on their journey through cancer' Jackie Kay, New StatesmanThe Cancer Journals is an intimate, poetic and inv...
In 1964, renowned psychotherapist Virginia M. Axline visited a New York school. There she encountered a little boy apart from teachers and children. Dibs sat alone, or gently traced the edge of the...
Bernard Samson returns to Berlin in the final novel in the classic spy trilogy, FAITH, HOPE and CHARITY.Bernard continues to chip away at the mystery of his sister-in-law Tessa Kosinski...