Penguin Classics: General Fiction

Part of a series of new editions of D.H. Lawrence's most famous novels, stories and poems. These three novellas display D. H. Lawrence's brilliant and insightful evocation of human relationships - both tender and cruel - and the devastating results of war. In The Fox, two young women living on a small farm during the First World War find their...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. The Finger explores a myriad of bizarre and compelling vignettes. "He felt a sudden deep pity for the finger joint that lay there on the dresser, a few drops of blood gathering around the white bone."...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. The End 'They didn't seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn't take much interest in them myself.' From the master of...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. She felt a cozy solidarity with the big company of the voluntary dead. Wise-cracking and heartbreaking, these tales of women on the edge by the legendary wit Dorothy Parker show the darkness beneath the surface of...

Tales from the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is bawdy and moving, hilarious and reflective. These stories offer the very best of Boccaccio's Decameron in a brilliant, playful new translation. This hugely enjoyable volume collects the best stories of Boccaccio's masterwork in a fresh, accessible new translation by Peter Hainsworth. It includes such celebrated, thought-provoking tales as Isabella and the Pot...

First paperback publication of the essential tales drawn from the acclaimed new translation. This is the essential one-volume edition of Tales from 1,001 Nights, drawn from the acclaimed landmark translation published in three volumes by Penguin Classics in 2008. It contains 'Aladdin', 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves', 'Sindbad the Sailor', and many others of the most enjoyable and beloved...

Sketches by Boz collected a rich and strange mixture of reportage, observation, fancy and fiction centred on the metropolis. It was Dickens's first book, published when he was twenty-four, and in it, we find him walking the London streets, in theatres, pawnshops, law-courts, prisons, along the Thames, and on the omnibus, missing nothing, recording and transforming urban and suburban life...

A stirring novel of idealist loyalty and sibling love, by one of East Germany's most important writers. 1960. The border between East and West Germany has closed. For Elisabeth, a young painter, the GDR is her generation's chance to build an egalitarian socialist future. For her brother Uli, it is a place of stricture and oppression. Separating them is the...

A selection of ground-breaking short stories, from the author of Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf tested the boundaries of fiction in these short stories, developing a new language of sensation, feeling and thought, and recreating in words the 'swarm and confusion of life'. Defying categorisation, the stories range from the more traditional narrative style of Solid Objects through the fragile impressionism...

First time in Black Classics for Lawrence—previously in PMC. Lawrence was one of the great short story writers of the 20th century. This new collection of ten stories shows the variety of Lawrence's achievement. The works develop from early realism towards myth and fairy tale, murder and ghost stories.

One of the great masterpieces of Russian literature. Throughout his life, Isaac Babel was torn by opposing forces, by the desire both to remain faithful to his Jewish roots and yet to be free of them. This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales, including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish...

A collection of some of Dostoyevsky's finest short stories. With their penetrating psychological insight and their emphasis on human dignity, respect, and forgiveness, Dostoyevsky's early short stories contain the seeds of the themes that came to his major novels. Poor Folk, the author's first great literary triumph, is the story of a tragic relationship between an impoverished copy clerk and...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. 'The illegible signature of teetering disaster' Three great stories—The Aurelian, Signs and Symbols, and Lance—the latter is both a derisive attack on science fiction and an attempt to imagine the real pain and horror that would...

A selection of Lafcadio Hearn's brilliantly entertaining and eerie ghost stories, regarded as major classics in Japan. In this collection of classic ghost stories from Japan, beautiful princesses turn out to be frogs, paintings come alive, deadly spectral brides haunt the living, and a samurai delivers the baby of a Shinto goddess with mystical help. Here are all the phantoms...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series "Oh, my dear, relations are like drugs, - useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the truly wise avoid them" Taking respite from the Man of Wrath, her children, and her stifling household, Elizabeth discovers...

The heartbreaking story of two orphans fighting for survival at the end of World War Two, published in English for the first time. In the dying days of the War, Seita and Setsuko must fend for themselves. Firebombs have obliterated their home in Kobe, leaving them searching for shelter and scrambling to survive in the depths of the countryside. But,...

The new paperback series - Penguin English Library Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family...

The bestselling novel by cult writer Wang Xiaobo, a satire of the Cultural Revolution, in its first full English translation. ‘Life is but a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed.’ Twenty-one-year-old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping, and dreaming of losing his virginity. His dreams come true in the shape...

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. Katherine Mansfield's perceptive and resonant writing helped to define the modern short story, observing apparently trivial incidents to create quietly devastating revelations of inner lives. Graceful, delicate and burning with emotion, Mansfield's stories were integral...

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. Dorothy Parker was the most talked-about woman of the decadent 1920s, notorious as a hard-drinking bad girl with a talent for endlessly quotable one-liners. In the stories collected here, she brilliantly captures the spirit of...

A dreamlike, chimerical masterpiece from a lost pre-war Europe—critically acclaimed and rightly revered. Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War, receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a bizarrely peaceful land where festivities are in full...

A haunting, dreamlike portrayal of the encroaching horror of the Holocaust onto a genteel MittelEuropean resort town. A masterpiece ... the greatest novel of the Holocaust - The Guardian Badenheim 1939, a resort town near the forests of Vienna, is preparing for the arts festival of the summer season. The hotel workers and local tradespeople rush to prepare the small...

A new selection and translation of the best of de Maupassant's short stories. Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes, and small-minded bourgeoisie, as well as the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series. 'It would be a dull world if we all thought alike.' After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with...

The cult classic from one of France's most stylish writers Impish, foul-mouthed Zazie arrives in Paris from the country to stay with her uncle Gabriel. All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement and is soon caught up in a comic adventure that...

Conrad's last great novel, featuring one of his most fascinating heroes, Victory is a psychological thriller, a tragic romance and a commentary on the lies that we tell ourselves. Axel Heyst, a dreamer and a restless drifter, believes he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from others. Then he becomes involved in the operation of a coal company on...

A gripping novel that ultimately questions our capacity for moral strength and the depths of human integrity. It was I who removed de P- this morning. With these chilling words, Victor Haldin shatters the solitary, industrious existence of Razumov, his fellow student at St Petersburg University. Razumov aims to overcome the denial of his noble birth by a brilliant career...

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience, and together form a triumphant conclusion to Flaubert's literary career. With elegant simplicity, A Simple Heart relates the story of Felicite - an uneducated serving-woman who retains her Catholic faith despite a life of desolation and loss. Inspired by a stained-glass window...

A savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, from the author of Mrs. Dalloway. The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. A work of fluid...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Everything was dead, everything unreal; the dark mob was made up of stiff lay-figures One of America's greatest writers explores mob violence, voyeurism, and betrayal in these unforgettable tales of Californian life.

A hardboiled story of abduction and murder in the Los Angeles hills. Private Detective Lew Archer doesn't believe in coincidences... A forest fire has mysteriously broken out in the hills above southern California. Meanwhile, Lew Archer has been asked by a desperate mother to find her six-year-old son. Instead, he discovers the boy's wealthy father, murdered, and buried in a...

A hardback series for le Carre collectors The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy. He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs...

An updated translation of this risqué and comic account of three travellers. The Satyricon is one of the most outrageous and strikingly modern works to have survived from the ancient world. Most likely written by an advisor of Nero, it recounts the adventures of Encolpius and his companions as they travel around Italy, encountering courtesans, priestesses, con men, brothel-keepers, and...

One of Poland's most significant twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance, and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride - but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over...

Michael Hulse's new translation perfectly conveys the unsettling beauty of the original and is accompanied by an introduction on Rilke's life and the biographical and literary influences on the Notebooks. This edition also includes suggested further reading, a chronology, and notes. While his old furniture rots in storage, Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris, with little...

A new collection of Rudyard Kipling's short stories, selected and edited by Jan Montefiore. Rudyard Kipling is one of the most magical storytellers in the English language. This new selection brings together the best of his short writings, following the development of his work over fifty years. They take us from the harsh, cruel, vividly realised world of the 'Indian'...

Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johannes Kreisler. As the two versions break off and alternate at dramatic moments, two wildly different characters emerge from the confusion - Murr, the confident scholar, lover, carouser...

This volume includes Family Happiness, The Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil, and Father Sergius. The four stories are all about love, but they take very different attitudes towards it. Tolstoy knows that his readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill their loved ones; they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the...

The House on the Hill is a devastating novel set in wartime Italy, written by the great twentieth-century author Cesare Pavese, now available in a new translation by Tim Parks. Shortlisted for The Society of Authors Translation Award 2022. In June 1943, Allied aircraft are bombing industrial Turin, and Fascist Italy seems to be on its knees. Corrado, a teacher,...

The History of Mr Polly tells the story of Mr Polly, an ordinary middle-aged man exhausted by his wife's nagging and his monotonous job as the owner of a regional gentleman's outfitters. Confronted with the looming threat of bankruptcy, Mr Polly decides that the only escape from his frustrating existence is to burn down his shop and take his own...

One of the most startling literary debuts of all time, now in Penguin Black Classics. As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair begins between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river...

When Benjamin Button's father arrives at the hospital, he is surprised and ashamed to find his new baby boy is a weathered, aged man, to all appearances no younger than seventy years old. As time goes by, young Benjamin comes to no longer require a cane, his hair ceases to be grey, his limbs become less frail, his wrinkles less...

The Awakening and Selected Stories by Kate Chopin is a groundbreaking depiction of a woman who dares to defy the expectations of society in the pursuit of her desire. When The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. However, a century after her death,...

First time in Black Classics for this famous Victorian retelling of the stories of Shakespeare's plays - sells 8-10,000/year in its PPC edition. As children, Charles and Mary Lamb took great delight in exploring their benefactor's extensive library; as adults, they began writing children's books together that also appealed to all generations. In Tales from Shakespeare, they wished to bring...

Sketches from a Hunter's Album, Turgenev's first major prose work, is a series of twenty-five sketches that capture the observations and anecdotes of the author during his travels through Russia, fuelled by his passion for hunting. His album is filled with moving insights into the lives of those he encounters—peasants and landowners, doctors and bailiffs, neglected wives and bereft mothers....

Jay Rubin's translation of Soseki's cherished novel, new to Penguin Classics. One of Soseki's most beloved works of fiction, the novel depicts the 23-year-old Sanshiro leaving the sleepy countryside for the first time in his life to experience the constantly moving 'real world' of Tokyo, its women and university. In the subtle tension between our appreciation of Soseki's lively humour...

Ruth is the story of Ruth Hilton, an orphaned young seamstress who captures the attention of a gentleman, Henry Bellingham, who is captivated by her simplicity and beauty. When she loses her job and home, he offers her comfort and shelter, only to cruelly desert her soon after. Nearly dead with grief and shame, Ruth is given the chance of...

One of George Eliot's most ambitious and imaginative novels, Romola is set in Renaissance Florence during the turbulent years following the expulsion of the powerful Medici family, during which the zealous religious reformer Savonarola rose to control the city. At its heart is Romola, the devoted daughter of a blind scholar, married to the clever but ultimately treacherous Tito. His...

Petersburg by Andrei Bely is a vivid, memorable, and striking story set at the heart of the 1905 Russian revolution. This colourful evocation of Russia's capital during the short, turbulent period of the first socialist revolution is considered Bely's masterpiece. The story follows Nikolai Ableukhov's journey as he is caught up in the revolutionary politics of those seminal days. Exploring...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Of Dogs and Walls offers an evocative glimpse into the subtle nuances of human experience. 'Though their house was new, the wall had been there a long time.' In these two stories, which have never before...

Night and Day is new to Modern Classics. Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William, and her dangerous attraction to the lower-class Ralph. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other women—women’s rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine’s mother, struggling to weave...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. New York City in 1979 by Kathy Acker is a vivid tale of art, sex, blood, junkies, and whores in New York's underground. This work comes from the cult literary icon Kathy Acker, renowned for her...

The beloved Australian classic, published in a stunning Penguin Clothbound Classics edition for the first time. My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin's debut novel, follows the vivacious and rebellious sixteen-year-old Sybylla Melvyn—closely modelled on Franklin herself—as she fights to break free of restrictive bush life. Growing up on her parents' outback farm, Sybylla is desperate to read, write, sing, and achieve...

The Penguin English Library edition of the classic gothic novel that inspired Sarah Perry's new novel Melmoth The Penguin English Library Edition of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin 'My hour is come ... the clock of eternity is about to strike, but its knell must be unheard by mortal ears!' This violent, profound, baroque, and blackly humorous novel is...

A Russian heir to Charles Dickens, Leskov is one of the great, underrated voices of nineteenth-century Russia. An outsider from the literary establishment of his day, Nikolai Leskov is one of the most unique voices of nineteenth-century Russia, combining a profound religious spirit with a fascination for idiosyncratic characters, lurid crimes, comic absurdity and the joy of pure story. This...

A fantastically unique work of science fiction that has fascinated generations of readers with its clever blend of social satire and mathematical theory. A work that still poses provocative questions about perception and reality, Flatland is a brilliant parody of Victorian society where all existence is limited to length and breadth—its inhabitants unable even to imagine a third dimension. The...

When the young nobleman Harold Transome returns to England from the colonies with a self-made fortune, he scandalises the town of Treby Magna with his decision to stand for Parliament as a Radical. But after the idealistic Felix Holt also returns to the town, the difference between Harold's opportunistic values and Holt's profound beliefs becomes apparent. Forthright, brusque and driven...

Between the Acts is Virginia Woolf's final novel, now featured in Penguin Black Classics. Outwardly, it is a novel about life in a country house where a pageant is to be held in the grounds. However, it is also a striking evocation of the English experience in the months leading up to the Second World War. Through dialogue, humour, and...

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. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to...

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. Karen Blixen, author of the acclaimed memoir Out of Africa, was also a master of the short story form. Her tales offer luminous meditations on rebirth and redemption, and on the mystery and unexpectedness of...

When the elderly Allan Armadale makes a terrible confession on his death-bed, he has little idea of the repercussions to come, for the secret he reveals involves the mysterious Lydia Gwilt: flame-haired temptress, bigamist, laudanum addict, and husband-poisoner. Her malicious intrigues fuel the plot of this gripping melodrama: a tale of confused identities, inherited curses, romantic rivalries, espionage, money—and murder....

A new translation of one of the most popular satires on the Russian Revolution and on Soviet society - first time in Penguin Classics. This is Bulgakov's semi-autobiographical story of a writer who fails to sell his novel and fails to commit suicide. When his play is taken up by the theatre, literary success beckons, but he has reckoned without...

This collection of Chekhov's finest early writing reveals a young writer mastering the art of the short story. The Steppe, which established his reputation, is the unforgettable tale of a boy's journey to a new school in Kiev, travelling through majestic landscapes towards an unknown destiny. Gusev depicts an ocean voyage, where the sea takes on a terrifying, primeval power;...

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. The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. In such conditions, Virginia Woolf takes to London's streets in...

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. Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories, shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which...

In Youth is Pleasure is a gay classic coming-of-age novel and an unforgettable slice of British interwar upper-middle-class life. Orvil Pym does not fit in. A waifish, eccentric, sensitive fifteen-year-old, he hates school and longs to be alone. Spending his Summer holidays in a genteel Surrey hotel with his mysterious father and two brothers who don't understand him, he explores...

A major anthology of great Japanese short stories, now in Penguin Classics. This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story, from its modern origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable works being written today. Short story writers already well-known to English-language readers are all included here—Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata—but also many surprising new finds....

Mad, lascivious, sadistic and ridiculous, the provincial schoolteacher Peredonov torments his students and has hallucinatory fantasies about acts of savagery and degradation, yet to everyone else he is an upstanding member of society. A dark classic of Russia's silver age, this blackly funny novel recounts a schoolteacher's descent into sadism, arson and murder. As he pursues the idea of marrying...

When Reverend Josiah Crawley, the impoverished curate of Hogglestock, is accused of theft, it causes a public scandal, sending shockwaves through the world of Barsetshire. The Crawleys desperately try to remain dignified while they are shunned by society, but the scandal threatens to tear them, and the community, apart. Drawing on his own childhood experience of genteel poverty, Trollope gives...

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous. Fantastical tales of mazes, puzzles, lost labyrinths, and bookish mysteries, from the unique imagination of a literary magician.

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield comes with a new introduction by Ali Smith. Katherine Mansfield's clear, sparkling, and perceptive short stories revolutionised the genre, and this collection represents the whole range of her writing. Moving and resonant, full of light and colour, they span from short, sharp studies to longer, richer tales. This volume encompasses her three major works:...

The paperback publication of the first volume of the new, substantially complete translation of one of the best-known and most influential classics of world literature. Every night for three years, the vengeful King Shahriyar sleeps with a different virgin, executing her the next morning. To end this brutal pattern and save her own life, the vizier's daughter, Shahrazad, begins to...

A major new translation of a classic of Chinese literature almost completely unknown to the English-speaking world. The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese fiction. With their elegant prose, witty wordplay, and subtle charm, the 104 stories in this selection reveal a world in which nothing...

A unique new selection, bringing together Akutagawa's undisputed masterpieces and several less well-known tales, never before translated into English. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan's foremost stylists—a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty, and wild humour. Rashomon and In a Bamboo Grove inspired Kurosawa's magnificent film and depict a past in which...

In the fourth of the Palliser stories, Trollope follows Phineas Finn's return to the dangerous world of Westminster politics. When his political rival is murdered, Phineas is thrown under suspicion and eventually finds himself standing trial at the Old Bailey. The situation is complicated by the presence of two women in his life: his old flame Lady Laura, whose estranged...

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. Akutagawa was one of the towering figures of modern Japanese literature and is considered the father of the Japanese short story. This paradigmatic selection, which includes the stories that inspired Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, showcases the...

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. Filled with rich description and luxurious beauty, these ten tales of loss and longing from one of Japan's greatest writers show the pull between duty and desire, ecstasy and death. Experience stories of a mother lost...

A marvel of psychological insight from one of the most important Italian literary figures of the twentieth century. This enormously engaging, strange novel is both an engrossing saga of a family and a hilarious account of addiction and failure. Its helpless hero, notionally undergoing psychiatric help, manages spectacularly to fail to give up smoking, run his business, or make sense...

Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centres on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries, a new stepsister, Cynthia, enters Molly's quiet life. Loveable but worldly and troubling, Cynthia's arrival alters Molly's daily life. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood...