Penguin Classics

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich is a hauntingly powerful oral history that delves into the seldom-heard experiences of Soviet women during the Second World War. Through meticulous storytelling and unwavering commitment to truth, Alexievich illuminates the profound and often heart-wrenching realities faced by these women, transcending the boundaries of conventional war narratives. This extraordinary book presents the...

The Consolation of Philosophy by Ancius Boethius is a profound philosophical work that intricately weaves together prose and verse to explore some of the most enduring questions of human existence. The narrative centres around Boethius himself, once a prominent public figure and a distinguished scholar, who finds solace in philosophy during a period of great personal adversity. Imprisoned on charges...

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. Jorge Luis Borges remains one of the most influential short story writers of the twentieth century, whose spellbinding tales of magic, mystery, and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of...

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...

Launching a major new paperback series - Penguin English Library. The Penguin English Library Edition of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. 'The frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain...' Moby-Dick is one of the most expansive feats of imagination in the whole of literature -...

Launching a major new paperback series - Penguin English Library The Penguin English Library Edition of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens 'Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!' Described by Dickens as 'the best story I have written', A Tale of Two Cities interweaves thrilling historical drama with heartbreaking...

The new paperback series - Penguin English Library "The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!" Marianne Dashwood wears her heart on her sleeve, and when she falls in love with the dashing but unsuitable John Willoughby, she ignores her...

The new paperback series - Penguin English Library 'I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall.' Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than...

In le Carré's first post-Cold War novel, a night manager at a Cairo hotel helps British Intelligence penetrate the secret world of ruthless arms dealers. At the start of it all, Jonathan Pine is merely the night manager at a luxury hotel. But when a single attempt to pass on information to the British authorities—about an international businessman at the...

The new paperback series - Penguin English Library Pride and Prejudice 'No sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes ... ' When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor...

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race, and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, Another Country tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

A new edition of James's chilling novella, edited by David Bromwich. 'The apparition had reached the landing half-way up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window where, at the sight of me, it stopped short.' The Turn of the Screw tells the story of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans....

During an eventful season at Bath, young, naive Catherine Morland experiences the joys of fashionable society for the first time. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine's love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father's mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, her imagination influenced by novels...

Fairy tales, ghost stories, detective fiction and comedies of manners - the stories collected in this volume made Oscar Wilde's name as a writer of fiction, showing breathtaking dexterity in a wide range of literary styles. Victorian moral justice is comically inverted in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and The Canterville Ghost, and society's materialism comes under sharp, humorous criticism in...

Bored on a hot afternoon, Alice follows a White Rabbit down a rabbit-hole without giving a thought about how she might get out. And so she tumbles into Wonderland: where animals answer back, a baby turns into a pig, time stands still at a disorderly tea party, croquet is played with hedgehogs and flamingos, and the Mock Turtle and Gryphon...

The Twelve Caesars, written by Suetonius and masterfully translated by Robert Graves, offers an unparalleled glimpse into the lives of the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Domitian. This revised edition (9780140449211) retains the classic translation that has long been celebrated for its vividness and precision, but comes with entirely new editorial material, providing fresh insights into these historical figures....

The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the artist's 'eternal imagination'.

Written in 1908, A Room with a View is one of E.M. Forster's earliest and most celebrated works. Forster's social comedy is a witty observation of the English middle classes as they holiday abroad in Florence. One of these tourists is Lucy Honeychurch, a young girl whose heart is awakened by her experiences in Italy.

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series. 'The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude' When The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its...

Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series. The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening. To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books Saadat Hasan Manto, the most widely read and translated writer in the Urdu language, captured the devastation and absurdity of the partition of India and Pakistan like no other. The Price of Freedom brings together ten of his best stories, focusing on human voices from the religious fracture that forever unhinged...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security In 1666, Margaret Cavendish had a vision—there was a crack in reality at the North Pole leading to a utopian parallel universe, where gender roles, scientific orthodoxy, and political norms had been razed to...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'I'm not the sort of husband you dream of when you're walking alone along the avenue in the evening, am I? And it would be a disaster, wouldn't it?' How does love die? This question lies at the heart of Tolstoy's desperately sad novella. It tells the story of seventeen-year-old Masha...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side; to kill a man with a borrowed rifle and feel nothing but shame. Moving and shrapnel-sharp, A Moment...

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books My delight in playing turned to a lust for playing, my lust for playing into a compulsion to play, a mania, a frenetic fury that filled not only my waking hours but also came to invade my sleep. I could think of nothing but chess, I thought only in chess moves...

Stefan Zweig's classic novella of obsession, madness and chess. In 1941, a cruise ship is heading to Buenos Aires, and on board, a group of eager passengers challenge the reigning world chess champion to a match. At first, they lose pitifully, until a kind stranger aids them by whispering instructions. He is a masterful chess player, and as they play,...

46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. The monstrous thought came into my mind as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man.

46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love. Virginia Woolf's delightful biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, which asks what it means to be...

46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946 \"I did have hallucinations, but did they harm anyone? Who did they harm, that's what I'd like to know!'

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.

Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Do I wish to keep up with the times? No. My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. The great American poet, novelist, and environmental activist argues for a life lived...

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...

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 Problem that Has No Name poses the question: 'What if she isn't happy - does she think men are happy in this world? Doesn't she know how lucky she is to be a woman?' The...

Playful, sharp and fantastical: a new selection of writing by Leonora Carrington, the last great Surrealist. In 1940, Leonora Carrington — a twenty-two-year-old British-born Surrealist artist — was persuaded to flee France and the advancing German army for Spain. Already suffering from a psychotic break occasioned by the arrest of her lover by the Nazi authorities, she was soon confined...

A superb murder mystery set in the snowy wastes of ancient northern China. Judge Dee is again in relentless pursuit of evil in one of van Gulik's most strange, atmospheric, and ingenious murder mysteries. Set in a remote, freezing part of China, the novel twists together a girl's disappearance, the theft of some jewels, and a horrifying beheading. And, just...

A beautiful and merciless novel about the tyranny of the family—and a highly acclaimed bestseller in Italy. On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I've changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I've erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They've been the best ten years of my life. A...

A riveting thriller about an ordinary man's quest for extraordinary vengeance. Charlie Heller is a CIA cryptographer, a quiet man in a back-room job. He's not a spy, let alone an assassin. But when his beloved fiancée is murdered by terrorists and his employers refuse to pursue her killers, Heller decides to take matters into his own hands. Pursuing the...

A new selection of six short stories by one of Japan's most iconic twentieth-century writers. An adolescent girl narrates her day in an existential masterpiece that explores what it means to be a forming person in a fomenting society. A woman writes a farewell note to her husband, an artist who has driven her away with his counterfeit profundity and...

Essential reading for mystery fans: the first masterpiece by the doyenne of American noir. Sailor, former henchman and trouble-accruing gangster, travels from Chicago to Santa Fe, New Mexico, looking for revenge and for money. But it's hard to make a dishonest buck when everything seems to be against him. It is Fiesta, it is hot, thousands of people are crowding...

A new translation by David Bellos of the last great novel by France's greatest novelist. In the turmoil of the French Revolution, the year 1793 represented the peak of bloody revolutionary violence. Victor Hugo plunges into this tumultuous period with a story of courage and betrayal across the political classes. As the revolution rages, three characters—a nobleman turned revolutionary, a...

A profound exploration of colonialism, from one of the Caribbean's most powerful literary voices. A powerful reimagining of the age of European exploration, Natives of My Person tells the story of a nameless Commandant who sets sail under imperial orders—somewhere between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries—to locate the fabled island of San Cristobal, a place shrouded in myth and promise....

A bestseller in France, this is the first English translation of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès' fascinating, impassioned letters. You and I met and fell in love passionately, impatiently, dangerously. I regret nothing and I feel that these last days I've lived are enough to justify a life. - Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, 1st July 1944 Their affair began...

A dazzling tapestry of myth, fantasy and folk tale from Argentina's great writer of speculative fiction, in a translation by Ursula K. Le Guin. In city squares and golden palaces, a series of storytellers recount the history of the greatest Empire that never was: a history in which orphans rise from the underworld to the throne, mad emperors raze cities,...

Powys' great visionary novel at last in Penguin Modern Classics One of the great cult novels, a book that can be read and re-read throughout a lifetime, A Glastonbury Romance is John Cowper Powys' masterpiece. Set in a beautifully imagined fictional version of the West Country, the novel inhabits a twentieth century under siege from older and stranger forces. An...

A luminous tour through the poems of one of nature's most brilliant and devoted observers. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I...

Three thousand years of encounters with malevolent beings that have invaded our waking lives and our nightmares. A Penguin Classic For millennia, societies have told tales of their fears incarnate—otherworldly couriers of plague, death, temptation, and moral decline. The Penguin Book of Demons summons these supernatural creatures—and the humans who have hunted and been haunted by them—across cultures and continents:...

The Last Man by Mary Shelley is a landmark novel that invented the human extinction genre and initiated climate fiction. It imagines a world where newly forged communities and reverence for nature rise from the ashes of a pandemic-ravaged society. This edition is now available for the first time in Penguin Classics, with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit. Written while...

An acerbic tale of marital warfare and emotional estrangement, in a brilliant new translation. In the oppressive silence of the sitting room, the woman finally smoothed out the paper and, without putting on her glasses, read the two words her husband had written—The cat. Amidst the din of their Parisian neighbourhood, Émile and Marguerite live in total silence. After a...

Part of the new Penguin James Joyce collection—reissues of Joyce's work with fresh new settings and contemporary introductions and notes by leading scholars. Following the events of one single day in Dublin, the 16th of June 1904, and what happens to the characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, Ulysses is a monument to the human condition. It...

The Vagabond is Colette's subversive and witty tale of a dancer in Belle Époque France, presented here in a fresh new Penguin Classics translation. Renée, aged thirty-three and divorced from her serially unfaithful husband, reinvents herself as a dancer in France's music halls. When a wealthy suitor appears, promising marriage and stability, Renée must choose between the security he represents...

The best in short fiction from around the world, from celebrated anthologist and author John Freeman and award-winning novelist Rabih Alameddine. In The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages and sensibilities come together in a globe-spanning and long overdue tour of modern fiction. In 'Super-Frog Saves Tokyo', Haruki Murakami presents a man who believes...

An essential exploration of Polish literature, with a foreword by Olga Tokarczuk. The thirty-nine superb stories of The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories run the length of the literal and imaginative creation of Poland, from 1918 (when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of colonisation by neighbouring empires) to the present. The stories include 'Miss Winczewska', by the...

The poems published in Joyce's own lifetime are collected in a new edition, with an introduction and notes by scholar Clare Hutton. It is only James Joyce's towering genius as a novelist that has led to his comparative neglect as a poet. And yet his poems not only occupy a pivotal position in Joyce's career, they are also magnificently assured...

James Joyce's final, dazzlingly experimental masterpiece, with a new introduction by Brian Fox. Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, is his masterpiece of the night, as Ulysses is of the day. Supreme linguistic virtuosity conjures up the dark underground worlds of sexuality and dream. Joyce undermines traditional storytelling and all official forms of English and confronts the different kinds of betrayal—cultural,...

James Joyce's only surviving play in a new edition with an introduction and annotations by Andrew Gibson. After ten long years spent away from Dublin, Richard, Bertha and their young illegitimate son Archie are back home. Despite expectations of comfort and domesticity, the couple's return to the place where they first met triggers an existential questioning, an anxiousness which is...

A feminist cult classic about love, independence and what it means to be an individual. 'I want to have him, I really do. I just don't want him to have me.' Martina and Gustav, students in 1970s Stockholm, meet and fall immediately into coupledom. But what is coupledom? A route to marriage? A declaration of co-dependency? A new dimension of...

Part of the new Penguin James Joyce collection—reissues of Joyce's work with fresh new settings and contemporary introductions and notes by leading scholars. Dubliners, Joyce's first major work and written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated...

Colette's irresistible depiction of a childhood in rural France, in a lush new translation by Belinda Jack. 'I was an independent, stray dog who answered to no one...' Claudine lives in a large house with a rose-filled garden and a vegetable patch smelling of tomato leaves and apricots. Beyond her house is the village, where travelling performers stop for the...

Joyce's lyrical, poetic, semi-autobiographical novel in a new annotated edition, with an introduction by Joseph Brooker. The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a universal testament to the...

Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, a limited-run series of twelve influential and beloved American classics in a bold series design offering a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback. Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition For the seventieth anniversary of Penguin Classics, the Penguin Orange Collection celebrates the heritage of Penguin’s...

From the best-selling author of Tokyo Express, a chilling tale where Japanese tradition and Western crime collide - now available in English for the first time. Musashino, 1959. A young Japanese flight attendant is found strangled on the icy banks of the river. The police suspect foul play - but the deeper they dig, the more they collide with a...

A beautiful, pensive journey through trees in Japan, by celebrated writer Aya Koda - translated into English for the first time. 'Trees are not just living things, but feeling beings, like us. Better keep a watchful eye over them...' Ezo spruce, hinoki, cherry blossoms. Persimmon, maple, cypress. The trees of Japan cast a spell on those who visit its landscape....

The classic - and very funny - account of the dark side of American politics. American political life ... has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. How can a country be captured by rumours, surreal conspiracy theories, and the most brazen of conmen? The historian Richard Hofstadter asked these questions in the 1960s, amid fears...

Set in a vanished rural world of ghosts and devils, this is a beautiful coming-of-age novel from the Polish Nobel Laureate. The Issa Valley begins with, 'Thomas was born in the village of Gine at that time of year when a ripe apple thumps to the ground during an afternoon lull.' So a boy's life begins in a winding river...

Letter to My Judge is a dark, psychological tale of deadly obsession, presented here in a masterful new translation. My dear Judge, I would like one man, just one, to understand me. And I really hope that man can be you. In a small town in western France, Dr Charles Alavoine seems to lead the perfect life—his own medical practice,...

The major devotional work by one of the greatest Christian mystics and Spanish poets. O living flame of love, how tenderly you scorch me The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T.S. Eliot and Mary Oppen. This...

May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then. Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before—of...

The authoritative original English version of a beloved classic. One of the world's best-loved stories of shipwreck and survival, The Swiss Family Robinson portrays a family's struggle to create a new life for themselves on a strange and fantastic tropical island. Blown off course by a raging storm, the family—a Swiss pastor, his wife, their four young sons, plus two...

One of the central novels in the American canon with a new foreword by Tom Perrotta and an introduction by Hawthorne scholar Robert Milder. The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta. At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New...

The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain tells the intriguing tale of two boys who, despite their identical looks and shared birthday, lead remarkably different lives. Edward Tudor is a prince and the heir to King Henry VIII, while Tom Canty is a destitute pauper. However, their lives take an unexpected turn when fate intervenes and Edward finds himself...

"We know the old adage about judging books by their covers, but how could you not when the covers are as lovely as these?" – Vogue (U.K.) The jacket design by Coralie Bickford-Smith reflects the elegance and glamour of the Art Deco period paired with the modern aesthetic of mechanical repetition. Each jacket comes with a detachable bookmark. Anthony and...

Charming boyhood adventure tale and perennial seller, this novel is updated with a new introduction by Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. A consummate prankster with a quick wit,...

Possibly the worthiest contender for the title of The Great American Novel, this perennial bestseller is updated with a new introduction by Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. The classic boyhood adventure tale, updated with a new introduction by noted Mark Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen and a foreword by Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The...

The classic novel of a boy raised by apes in the African jungle, now the basis for a major motion picture, The Legend of Tarzan, starring Alexander Skarsgård, Margot Robbie, Samuel L. Jackson, and Djimon Hounsou. Originally published in 1914, Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes, the ideal image of pure animalistic power at odds with the civilized world, appealed to...

Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse’s iconic countercultural novel about the search for authenticity in an inauthentic world, in a new translation. A Penguin Classic At first glance, Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality, he is the Steppenwolf: wild, strange, alienated from society, and repulsed by the modern age. But as he is drawn into a series...

An iconic novel dressed in a fierce design by acclaimed fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo. This couture-inspired collection also features Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, The Scarlet Letter and Wuthering Heights. Ruben Toledo's breathtaking drawings have appeared in such high-fashion magazines as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Visionaire. Now he's turning his talented hand to illustrating the gorgeous deluxe...

An iconic novel dressed in a fierce design by acclaimed fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo. This couture-inspired collection also features The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice. Orphaned Jane Eyre endures an unhappy childhood, hated by her aunt and cousins and then sent to comfortless Lowood School. But life there improves and Jane...

A deluxe edition of Mary Shelley's haunting adventure about ambition and modernity run amok. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. Now a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova and cover art by Ghost World creator Daniel Clowes, Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and...

Set against the frozen waste of a harsh New England winter, Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is a tale of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual tensions, published with an introduction and notes by Elizabeth Ammons in Penguin Classics. Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious, and hypochondriac wife, Zeenie. But when...

The masterpiece of Steinbeck’s later years—at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis. Part of the Penguin Orange Collection, Winner of the 2016 AIGA + Design Observer 50 Books | 50 Covers competition and a limited-run series of American classics designed with a modern take on the iconic Penguin paperback. A Penguin Classic In...