Series: Penguin Essentials

1984 by George Orwell is a gripping tale set in a dystopian future where the world is embroiled in perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public manipulation. The story unfolds in Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, a province of the superstate Oceania. Here, the Party, led by the enigmatic and omniscient Big Brother, exerts absolute power over...

A landmark in modern literature, Animal Farm by George Orwell is a timeless fable about the dangers of power and corruption. The story begins with Mr Jones, the negligent and frequently intoxicated owner of Manor Farm, who fails to care for his animals. Incited by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, the animals revolt, oust Mr Jones, and seize control of...

New Penguin Essentials edition of Philip K. Dick's haunting vision of the world as it might have been. 'Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.' America, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The winning Axis powers have divided their spoils - the Nazis control New York, while California is ruled by the...

A funny, fresh coming-of-age story, now a Penguin Essential. Meet Oliver Tate, 15. Convinced that his father is depressed ("Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner") and his mother is having an affair with her capoeira teacher, "a hippy-looking twonk", he embarks on a hilariously misguided campaign to bring the family back together. Meanwhile, he...

We're the one percenters, man - the one percent that don't fit in and don't care. 'A phalanx of motorcycles came roaring over the hill from the west... the noise was like a landslide, or a wing of bombers passing over. Even knowing the Angels I couldn't quite handle what I was seeing. It was like Genghis Khan, Morgan's Raiders,...

The Pursuit of Love, Mitford's beloved novel, is published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'Obsessed with sex!' said Jassy, 'there's nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I'm a pygmalionist.' In the end, we got far more information out of a book called Ducks and Duck...

Libra by Don DeLillo, now available as a Penguin Essential, delves deep into the heart of America's most gripping historical moment—the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Set against the backdrop of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 PM, the narrative captures the instant the nation was plunged into turmoil and psychosis. Shots ring...

A magical, cross-century tale of self-discovery from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World - now a Penguin Essential. Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet, there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella's life - an emptiness once filled...

A breath-taking novel about a violent secret that threatens the peace of two interwoven families – now a Penguin Essential. One rainy afternoon in Istanbul a woman walks into a doctor's surgery. 'I want an abortion', she announces. She is nineteen years old, and unmarried. What happens that afternoon is to change her life, and the lives of everyone around...

The Chrysalids, John Wyndham's classic science fiction novel, is published as an Essential for the first time. David Strorm's father disapproves of Angus Morton's unusually large horses, calling them blasphemies against nature. Little does he realise that his own son, his niece Rosalind, and their friends harbour their own secret aberration that would label them as mutants. As David and...

A delightfully satiric comedy of manners and an immensely satisfying love story. 'You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you . . .' Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened...

New edition of the Penguin Essential of the book that made Truman Capote's name. 'Dick became convinced that Perry was that rarity, "a natural killer" - absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows.' On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, a wealthy farmer, his wife and their two...

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi is a profound exploration of the author's life, uniquely framed through the lens of the chemical elements. Drawing on his background as a professional chemist, Levi reflects on his experiences, each chapter ingeniously linked to a specific element of the periodic table. Through this inventive structure, he intimately connects his personal history to the...

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell is a riveting memoir that plunges the reader into the stark realities of poverty in the two renowned cities during the 1920s. The narrative follows Orwell's own experiences as he grapples with destitution, taking on various menial jobs and immersing himself in the lives of the downtrodden. The story begins...

New edition of the Penguin Essential set among the speakeasies of 1930s Manhattan - hardboiled crime at its wisecracking best. 'When I opened my eyes and sat up in bed Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.' Ex-detective Nick Charles attracts trouble like a magnet. He thinks his...

New edition of the Penguin Essential of the best satire ever written. 'His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as a mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.' Jim Dixon has a terrible...

One of the best-known novels of the 20th century, Lolita tells the controversial story of Humbert Humbert who falls in love with twelve-year-old Lolita. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta- the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo....

New edition of the Penguin Essential of the most mesmerising account of heroin addiction ever written. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life. William Burroughs, legendary drug addict, founder member of the Beats and author of Naked Lunch, relates with unflinching realism...

A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas and one of the best-loved comic novels of all time. We are not like other folk, maybe, but there have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort Farm... Sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste has been expensively educated to do everything but earn a living. When she is orphaned at twenty, she decides her only...

The gorgeous, glamorous New York Times bestseller set in 1960s Italy and modern-day Hollywood – now a Penguin Essential. The story begins on the Italian coast in 1962. A young innkeeper watches in disbelief as a beautiful American girl gets out of a boat and climbs towards his hotel. She turns out to be an actress, on the run from...

The Booker longlisted first book from Britain's funniest bestselling novelist, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian begins with: 'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamourous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy...

New Penguin Essentials edition of this blistering, impassioned novel of African-American lives in 1940s America. 'I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.' Defeated and embittered by a country which treats him as a non-being, the invisible man retreats into an underground cell, where he smokes, drinks, listens to jazz, and recounts his search for identity in...

An inventive, thought-provoking and absurd dystopian novel set in a world rampant with overpopulation by the author of A Clockwork Orange – now a Penguin Essential. The Wanting Seed tells the story of Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, who live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of...

A stunningly sensuous novel from the bestselling John Updike, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Villages chronicles Owen Mackenzie's life story, which is rich with sin and seduction, domesticity and debauchery. His marriage to his college sweetheart is swiftly followed by his first betrayal, leading him into a series of affairs. Owen's pursuit of happiness, traversing a...

In the Country of Men is a heartbreaking, beautifully told classic set in the heart of Gaddafi's Libya, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Nine-year-old Suleiman is just awakening to the wider world beyond the games on the hot pavement outside his home and beyond the loving embrace of his parents. He becomes the man of the...

White Teeth by Zadie Smith is an astonishingly accomplished first novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway… One of the most talked about first novels ever, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. It deals with friendship, love, war, three...

The classic Chandler mystery, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Derace Kingsley's wife ran away to Mexico to get a quickie divorce and marry a Casanova-wannabe named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband insisted. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it, he denies everything and sends the private investigator packing with...

The Big Sleep is hard-boiled detective fiction at its best - Raymond Chandler's best-loved novel, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.' Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe...

The daring and electrifying book that inspired one of the most notorious films ever made 'What we were after was lashings of ultraviolence' In this nightmare vision of youth in revolt, fifteen-year-old Alex and his friends set out on a diabolical orgy of robbery, rape, torture and murder. Alex is jailed for his teenage delinquency and the State tries to...

The spell-binding novel that was inspired by Jane Eyre 'There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now... Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?' If Antoinette Cosway, a spirited Creole heiress, could have foreseen the terrible future that awaited her, she would not...

The bestselling comic novel, now a Penguin Essential Unforgettably funny and painfully honest, Jonathan Coe's tale of Benjamin Trotter and his friends' coming of age during the 1970s is a heartfelt celebration of the joys and agonies of growing up. Featuring, among other things, IRA bombs, prog rock, punk rock, bad poetry, first love, love on the side, prefects, detention,...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is a provocative, elegant, and gripping novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America . . .' So speaks the mysterious stranger at...

New edition of the Penguin Essential featuring a schoolmistress you'll never forget... 'Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life . . .' Passionate, free-thinking and unconventional, Miss Brodie is a teacher who exerts a powerful influence over her group of 'special girls' at Marcia Blaine School. They are the Brodie set, the crème...

The acclaimed novel from the author of The Great Railway Bazaar, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies, and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There, his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his...

Leo Gursky is an old man living alone in New York. In Poland sixty years earlier, he wrote a book called The History of Love, inspired by his lover Alma. But when they were parted by the war, circumstances ensured they could never be together again and Leo's book was lost. If only he could find it. If only he...

The novel that became the hip bible of Sixties counterculture 'The unhappiness that I need and long for . . . is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and die with lust. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for.' Alienated from society, Harry Haller is the Steppenwolf, wild, strange and shy. His...

The exhilarating novel that defined the Beat Generation. What's your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Sal Paradise, young and innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment...

Sparkling with humour and sympathy, Mr Loverman is a novel exploring love, culture, and fear within the context of Britain's older Caribbean community—now a Penguin Essential. Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant, wise-cracking local character with a dapper taste in retro suits...

The famous novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Fifty-one years have passed since Fermina rebuffed Florentino and married Juvenal Urbino instead. Swearing his love to her, he lives for the day when he can court her again. When Fermina's husband is killed, Florentino seizes his...

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in a Parisian slum and abandoned on the streets, discovers he has an extraordinary—near superhuman—sense of smell. As he sniffs his way across France, this gift is exploited by Grenouille to make the world's most marvellous perfumes. Patrick Süskind's Perfume is a classic novel of death and sensuality in Paris, published as a Penguin Essential for the...

Lady Chatterley's Lover, bold, passionate, and erotic, is a true classic of the twentieth century, infamously described by D. H. Lawrence as 'the most improper novel in the world'. 'Connie was aware, however, of a growing restlessness...It thrilled inside her body, in her womb, somewhere, till she felt she must jump into water and swim to get away from it;...

Nick Hornby's internationally bestselling first novel, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. High Fidelity, an international bestseller and instantly recognised by critics and readers alike as a classic, helps to explain men to women, and men to men. Rob is good on music—he owns a small record shop and has strong views on what's decent and what...

Enter a sweet but sinister world where fact and fiction merge... My name is Eva, which means "life", according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I...

The Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. A castle at the foot of the Carpathian mountains in the 1930s. Two men, inseparable in their youth, meet for the first time in forty-one years. They have spent their lives waiting for this moment. Four decades earlier, a murky, traumatic event—something to do with...

Evelyn Waugh's classic novel of a glittering, but rapidly vanishing, privileged world. 'I knew Sebastian by sight long before I met him. That was unavoidable for, from his first week, he was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds.' Charles Ryder,...

The dazzling New York novel that inspired the classic 1961 film starring Audrey Hepburn. 'What I've found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in...

Teenager terrible Cecile explores her sexual freedom one hot summer on the French Riviera. ‘Late into the night we talked of love, of its complications. In my father's eyes they were imaginary... This conception of rapid, violent and passing love affairs appealed to my imagination. I was not at the age when fidelity is attractive. I knew very little about...

Austerlitz is Sebald's heartbreaking and profound masterpiece depicting a man's journey through European history, now published as an Essential for the first time. In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity, and he grows up ignorant of his...

A Passage to India is Forster's story of Anglo-Indian society under the Raj, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the 'real India', they seek the guidance of the...

The classic novel spanning every decade of the 20th century, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's—lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century—contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in...

The lyrical and luminous memoir of Kenya that launched a million tourist trails 'I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills . . . Up in this high air you breathed easily . . . you woke up in the morning and thought—Here I am, where I ought to be.' From the moment Karen Blixen...

Meet Ignatius J. Reilly—fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. 'This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians... don't make the mistake of bothering me.' Ignatius J. Reilly—fat, flatulent, eloquent and almost unemployable. By the standards of ordinary folk, he is pretty much unhinged, too. But is...

A bewitching account of a rare and magical childhood on the island of Corfu. ‘What we all need,’ said Larry, ‘is sunshine...a country where we can grow.’ ‘Yes, dear, that would be nice,’ agreed Mother, not really listening. ‘I had a letter from George this morning - he says Corfu's wonderful. Why don't we pack up and go to Greece?’...

The Day of the Triffids is the most famous catastrophe novel of the twentieth century, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.' When a freak cosmic event renders most of the Earth's population blind, Bill Masen—one...

A haunting novel about art and its power to heal, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early. One summer, just after the Great War, Tom Birkin, a demobbed soldier, arrives in the village of Oxgodby. He has been...

Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner's best-known and bestselling Man Booker Prize-winning novel, is now a Penguin Essential. The Hotel du Lac was a dignified building, a house of repute, a traditional establishment, used to welcoming the prudent, the well-to-do, the retired, the self-effacing, and the respected patrons of an earlier era. Into the rarefied atmosphere of the Hotel du Lac...

The beloved Sherlock Holmes novel published as an Essential for the first time. Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound! The death, quite suddenly, of Sir Charles Baskerville in mysterious circumstances is the trigger for one of the most extraordinary cases ever to challenge the brilliant analytical mind of Sherlock Holmes. As rumours of a legendary hound...

The classic Cold War thriller, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. The Cold War is at its most chill. Alec Leamas, a seasoned British Intelligence officer whose entire East German network has been arrested or shot, leaves West Berlin for London, believing his career is over. But his master, Control, knows that Leamas is good for a...

Regeneration is a classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men, now published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'I just don't think our war aims - whatever they may be - and we don't know - justify this level of slaughter.' The poets and soldiers Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are...

The irreverent and highly entertaining fantasy about the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists. All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies. Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of Ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing...

Everything is Illuminated is Jonathan Safran Foer's bestselling debut novel, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. A young man arrives in Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who, fifty years ago, saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with...

New edition of the Penguin Essential about the events of one June day in 1923... Mrs Dalloway tells the story of Clarissa Dalloway, the glittering wife of a Member of Parliament, on a June morning in 1923. She is preparing for a party she is giving that evening. As she walks through London, buying flowers and observing life, her thoughts...

The Western front through the eyes of a survivor There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks; it is most confusing. The parapet of a trench which we don't occupy is built up with ammunition boxes and...

New edition of the Penguin Essential featuring fifteen brilliantly compelling stories about ordinary lives. 'Snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.' From a child grappling with the death...

A mesmerizing study of human character from one of the masters of modern fiction — now a Penguin Essential. The Rain Before it Falls is centred on Rosamund, who lies dying in her remote Shropshire home. Before she passes, she has one last task: to put on tape not just her own story, but the story of the young blind...

The breathtaking novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of the Regeneration trilogy. In the Spring of 1914, a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, but when Kit Neville—himself not long out of the Slade but already a well-known painter—makes...

The Road to Lichfield, the Booker Prize shortlisted first novel by Penelope Lively, is now available for the first time as a Penguin Essential. Ann Linton leaves her family in Berkshire and sets up camp in her father's house when he is taken into a nursing home in distant Lichfield. As she shares his last weeks, she meets David Fielding,...

A gorgeous novel by the Booker-winning author, now a Penguin Essential. Searching through a little-used cupboard at home, Glyn Peters chances upon a photograph he has never seen before. Taken in high summer, many years earlier, it shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man. Glyn's work as a historian should have inured him to unexpected findings and reversals,...

A chilling novel that explores the extremes of childhood cruelty, now published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Some people are coming here today, now you will have a companion. But young Edmund Hooper doesn't want anyone else in Warings, the large and rambling Victorian house he shares with his widowed father. Nevertheless, Charles Kingshaw and his mother...

The classic comedy of a 50s youth trapped inside a Walter Mitty fantasy-world, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar was published in 1959 and captures brilliantly the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small town. It tells the story of Billy Fisher, a Yorkshire teenager unable to stop lying—especially to his three girlfriends. Trapped by...

The gap year classic, available as a Penguin Essential for the first time in the year of its 20th anniversary. A devastatingly funny satire on the whole idea of student travel, and particularly the India back-pack trail. Dave travels to India with Liz because he thinks he might be able to get her into bed. Liz travels to India with...

A story of obsessive young love and overwhelming grief from the Booker Prize-winning author - now a Penguin Essential. 'Billy Gray was my best friend and I fell in love with his mother.' Alexander Cleave, an actor who thinks his best days are behind him, remembers his first unlikely affair as a teenage boy in a small town in 1950s...

The powerful novel which inspired one of the most famous British films of the 60s, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave was published in 1968, and was made into one of the key British films of the sixties. Billy Casper is beaten by his drunken brother, ignored by his mother,...

The final collection of Sherlock Holmes' stories, the world's most beloved detective - now a Penguin Essential. 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' In this, the final collection of Sherlock Holmes adventures, the intrepid detective and his faithful companion Dr Watson examine and solve twelve cases that puzzle clients,...

The Great Gatsby is a dazzling social satire, F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece and a milestone in twentieth-century literature, now beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range. 'There was music from my neighbour's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.'...