Beginning with a dilemma about whether he spends more money on reading or smoking, George Orwell's entertaining and uncompromising essays go on to explore everything from the perils of second-hand ...
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...
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...
A selection of 'greatest hits' essays from the bestselling non-fiction writer. From criminology to ketchup, job interviews to dog training, Gladwell takes everyday subjects and shows us surprising ...
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...
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...
Lou Clark has lots of questions.Like how it is she's ended up working in an airport bar, spending every shift watching other people jet off to new places.Or why the flat she's owned for...
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...
Charles Dickens describes in Night Walks his time as an insomniac, when he decided to cure himself by walking through London in the small hours, and discovered homelessness, drunkenness and vice on...
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is t...
In one of the most influential philosophical works ever writen, John Stuart Mill explores the risks and responsibilities of liberty. Examining the tyranny that can come both from government and fro...
Holden Caulfield, a seventeen-year-old dropout, has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Throughout, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the 'phonies' themselves: the headmast...
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...
Gabriel García Márquez has been one of the literary giants of the past century; his body of work is an undisputed cultural landmark and a touchstone for countless readers and writers ...
A new translation by David Horrocks.At first sight Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society and repul...
Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her b...
Set in the days of the Empire, with the British ruling in Burma, Burmese Days describes both indigenous corruption and Imperial bigotry, when 'after all, natives were natives – interesting, n...
Lou Clark has lots of questions.Like how it is she's ended up working in an airport bar, spending every shift watching other people jet off to new places.Or why the flat she's owned for...
Adaring critique of communism and how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain, Camus' essay examines the revolutions in France and Russia, and argues that since they were both guilty of producing...