Penguin-Prison20Flatlay-main-image-1800×1200201.jpg

Reading lists

Must-read classic books set in prison

The Invisible Writing

The second volume of the eye-opening adventure story that is Arthur Koestler's autobiography - Koestler is the acclaimed author of anti-Soviet dystopia Darkness at Noon

A brilliant and deeply moving record of a whole generation as well as of an individual

He is a journalist of ideas on a very high level - the kind we lack and need in this country - who functions midway between the realms of art and of society, but whose function is indispensable, if thought is to be part of culture

Perhaps the most remarkable autobiography since the confessions of Rousseau

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. He attended the University of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris. For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he came to England, adopting the language with his first book in English, Scum of the Earth. His publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests, and include Darkness at Noon, Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia.

The second volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon. 
 
Taken together, Arthur Koestler's volumes of autobiography constitute an unrivalled study of a twentieth-century life. The Invisible Writing picks up where the first volume, Arrow in the Blue, ended, with Koestler joining the Communist Party. This second volume goes on to detail some of the most important, gruelling and electrifying experiences in his life. 
 
This book tells of Koestler's travels through Russia and remote parts of Soviet Central Asia and of his life as an exile. It tells of how he survived in Franco's prisons under sentence of death and in concentration camps in Occupied France and ends with his escape in 1940 to England, where he found stability and a new home.

Arrow in the Blue

The remarkable first autobiography by the internationally acclaimed author of Darkness at Noon

The first volume of the remarkable autobiography of Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noon. 
 
In 1931, Arthur Koestler joined the Communist Party, an event he felt to be second only in importance to his birth in shaping his destiny. Before that point, he lived a tumultuous and varied existence. He was a member of the duelling fraternity at the University of Vienna; a collective farm worker in Galilee; a tramp and street vendor in Haifa; the editor of a weekly paper in Cairo; the foreign correspondent of the biggest continental newspaper chain in Paris and the Middle East; a science editor in Berlin; and a member of the North Pole expedition of the Graf Zeppelin. 
 
Written with enormous zest, joie de vivre and frankness, Arrow in the Blue is a fascinating self-portrait of a remarkable young man at the heart of the events that shaped the twentieth century. 
 
The second volume of Arthur Koestler's autobiography is The Invisible Writing.

A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

The Sleepwalkers

Arthur Koestler's extraordinary history of humanity's changing vision of the universe 
 
In this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' and 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also provides vivid and judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists and makes clear the role that political bias and unconscious prejudice played in their creativity.

The Sleepwalkers is a valuable and provocative book . . . a work with a noble aim

The greatest part of this massive work is a close and valuable study of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo . . . He writes tensely, with passion, as though personally involved, about events that took place more than 300 years ago

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was an extraordinary polymath, writer and political polemicist. His most famous works include the novels Darkness at Noon and Arrival and Departure, his autobiographical writings, including Spanish Testament and Scum of the Earth, and his visionary non-fiction, including The Ghost in the Machine, The Case of the Midwife Toad and The Sleepwalkers.

In this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' and 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also provides vivid and judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists and makes clear the role that political bias and unconscious prejudice played in their creativity.

Darkness At Noon

'One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it' New Statesman

A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of...all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualised drama of prison psychology

[Darkness At Noon] is written from terrible experience. From knowledge of the men whose struggles of mind and body he describes. Apart from its sociological importance, it is written with a subtlety and an economy which class it as great literature. I have read it twice without feeling that I have learned more than half of what it has to offer me- Koestler approaches the problem of ends and means, of love and truth and social organisation, through the thoughts of an old Bolshevik, Rubashov, as he awaits death in a GPU prison

Along with Animal Farm and 1984, this book formed part of the essential bookshelf of those intellectuals who repudiated their early illusions about the Soviet Union

It brilliantly portrays the chilling tyranny of Soviet Communism

One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it.

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. He attended the university of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris. For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he came to England. He wrote The Gladiators in Hungarian, Darkness at Noon in German, and Arrival and Departure in English. He set up the Arthur Koestler Award (now the Koestler Trust) which awards prizes for creative achievements to prisoners, detainees and patients in special hospitals. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia.

Darkness at Noon is set in an unnamed country ruled by a totalitarian government. Rubashov, once a powerful player in the regime, finds the tables turned on him when he is arrested and tried for treason. His reflections on his previous life and his experiences in prison form the heart of this moving and though-provoking masterpiece.

The Gladiators

SALES POINTS: *-'THE GLADIATORS is a philosophical novel dealing with the -nature of revolution; a melancholy commentary on the failure -of politics to respond to men's inner needs.  Mr Koestler is more -concerned with ideas than people.  He is revealing to us the -dialectic of history, with a moral, if we choose to take it, for our -own times.  But he is never didactic and his story, is vivid in action -as in argument' Sunday Times*-'In THE GLADIATORS this episode in Roman history is lifted -out of the mustiness of the textbooks by a novelist of unusual -sympathy and understanding' Sean O'Faolain*-'A book which anyone who is wondering what will happen to -us will do well to read' New Statesman

Arthur Koestler's first novel, set in the late Roman Republic, tells the story of the revolt of Spartacus and man's search for Utopia. The first of three novels concerned with the 'ethics of revolution', it addresses the age-old debate of whether the end justifies the means, an argument continued in his classic novels Darkness at Noon and Arrival and Departure.

Arrival and Departure

The third novel of Arthur Koestler's trilogy.

Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905.  He attended the university of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris.  For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War.  In 1940 he came to England.  He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia.

This was the third novel of Arthur Koestler's trilogy on ends and means - the other two are THE GLADIATORS and DARKNESS AT NOON - and the first he wrote in English.  The central theme is the conflict between morality and expediency, and in this novel Koestler worked it out in terms of individual psychology.  Peter Slavek starts out as a brave young revolutionary, but suffers a breakdown.  On the analyst's couch he is made to discover, in Koestler's own words, 'that his crusading zeal was derived from unconscious guilt'.

Arthur Koestler

Philip Boehm

Darkness at Noon is the sort of novel that transcends ordinary limitations...written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling, and with such persuasive simplicity

Darkness at Noon [is] a guided tour of a totalitarian mind... it gave me a deep, life-long interest in politics

One of the most celebrated political novels of the 20th century

A brilliant new translation of Koestler's long-lost original manuscript. A chilling and unforgettable 20th century classic. 
 
From a prison cell in an unnamed country run by a totalitarian government Rubashov reflects. Once a powerful player in the regime, mercilessly dispensing with anyone who got in the way of his party’s aims, Rubashov has had the tables turned on him. He has been arrested and he’ll be interrogated, probably tortured and certainly executed. 
 
Darkness at Noon is as gripping as a thriller and a seminal work of twentieth-century literature. Published in Great Britain in 1940, it was feted by George Orwell, went on to be translated into thirty languages and is considered the finest work of pre-eminent European master, Arthur Koestler. And yet the novel’s worldwide reputation has, for over seventy years, been based on the first incomplete and inexpert English translation – Koestler’s original manuscript was lost when he fled the German occupation of Paris in 1940. 
 
In 2016, a student discovered that long-lost manuscript in a Zurich archive. At last, with the publication of this new translation of the rediscovered original, Koestler’s masterpiece can be experienced afresh and in its entirety for the first time. 
 
THE NEW TRANSLATION BY PHILIP BOEHM

Arthur Koestler

Books by Arthur Koestler

Articles featuring Arthur Koestler

Must-read classic books set in prison

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter