Alexander Monro

Alexander Norman has written a number of books with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and has known him personally for over 30 years. He regularly gives lectures on Tibetan history and culture and is fascinated by the country and its people. He lives in the UK.

Alexander Norman

Alexander Piatigorsky

Alexander Pope was born on 21st May 1688.He was brought up a Roman Catholic at a time where the laws of England were prejudicial towards Catholics. He suffered tuberculosis as a child and was crippled by it. He never grew taller than 4'6". He first published The Rape of the Lock when he was twenty-three years old in 1712. He later added to it in 1714 and 1717. It was written to reconcile two families who had fallen out over a similar incident where a young Lord Petre had cut off a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor's head. Pope went on to translate the works of Homer and produce The Dunciad and An Essay on Man. Pope died on 30th May 1744.

Alexander Pope

Alexander Pushkin

Alexander Roy

Alexander Shannon

Alexander Sinclair

Alexander Slater is an author and illustrator from London who loves stories with big ideas and bigger heart. He holds a First Class degree in Graphic Design and Illustration from the University of Hertfordshire and has earned several awards in design and cartooning. When he’s not doodling or daydreaming, he can be found cooking, walking his adorable cockapoo, Bailey, or entertaining his millions of followers on his TikTok account @AlexRabbit

Alexander Slater

Alexander Soderberg previously worked as a scriptwriter and story editor for Swedish television, where he worked on adaptations of well-known crime novels as well as drama and sitcoms.

Alexander Soderberg

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Stille

Alexander Watson is the author of the prize-winning history of the Central Powers in the First World War, Ring of Steel. He is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Alexander Watson

In his lifetime Alexander von Humboldt was a major international celebrity - only Napoleon, it was said, was more well-known. He was born into the Prussian nobility in 1769 and destined for a career in the civil service. In his twenties he combined his position in the Ministry of Mines with his own investigative studies in science, geology and botany. He travelled around Europe, meeting many other adventurers of his age - including Bligh, Banks and Bougainville – and spent many stimulating months with Goethe in Weimar and Jena. He inherited a fortune on the death of his mother and immediately began planning a major expedition. Napoleon's activities thwarted him at every turn, but he succeeded, rather surprisingly, to gain the permission of Carlos IV to visit the Spanish colonies in South America, and set off with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland and many boxes full of scientific instruments, dodging British warships en route. These five extraordinary years of exploration and research gave Humboldt material for a lifetime's writing. But the expenses of publication exhausted his funds and after more than twenty years living in Paris he was obliged to return to Prussia as a chamberlain at the court of Friedrich Wilhelm III. It was hardly to his taste. He did manage one more major expedition across Russia, when he was sixty years old. Tirelessly energetic, he never stopped working and writing. He was mourned worldwide when he died at the age of nearly ninety in 1859.

Alexander von Humboldt

Alexandr Sergeyevitch Pushkin

Alexandra Bell studied Law at university and signed her first book deal at nineteen. Since then, she has written multiple books for both adults and young people. She works at a legal advice charity and lives in Hampshire with her husband, sons, and Sphynx cats.

Alexandra Bell

Alexandra Brinck is a textile designer and repair specialist. Her work focusses on sustainability and mending – from hands-on repair commissions to delivering training programmes for professional repairers as well as running workshops and events for the general public.

Alexandra Brinck

Allie Brosh has enjoyed writing ever since her mother tricked her into writing a story to distract her from her immediate goal of wrapping the cat in duct-tape.  She started her award-winning blog in 2009.  Brosh lives in Bend, Oregon, with her husband Duncan, her two dogs, and six pet rats. Visit HyperboleAndAHalf.blogspot.com.

Alexandra Brosh

Alexandra Bruce

Alexandra Chesterfield is a behavioural scientist with a master's degree in Cognitive and Decision Science. Forever curious about why we do what we do, she currently works in financial services, leading a team of behavioural scientists to help get better outcomes for employees and customers. For four years, she was an elected Councillor in Guildford for the Conservative Party. She has personally experienced the effects of affective polarisation, both in and out of the workplace.

Alexandra Chesterfield

Alexandra Christo is a British author whose characters are always funnier and far more deadly than she is. She studied Creative Writing at university and graduated with the desire to never stop letting her imagination run wild. She currently lives in Hertfordshire with a rapidly growing garden and a never-ending stack of books. Her debut novel To Kill a Kingdom is an international bestseller and her Young Adult fantasy books have been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide.

Alexandra Christo-Cheung

Alexandra Coghlan is a music journalist and critic. She has written for publications including the Spectator, New Statesman, the Independent, Gramophone and Opera magazines, and for ensembles including the BBC Proms, Salzburg Festival, The Academy of Ancient Music and The Sixteen. Alexandra was a choral scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and it was during her time there that she first discovered the beauty of King's College Chapel and the unique sound of the King's College Choir.

Alexandra Coghlan

Alexandra Dudley is a food writer and cook living in London. She is the recipe columnist for Sheerluxe, writer of the bestselling Substack newsletter Come For Supper, and host of the Come For Supper podcast. She has been dubbed a serial dinner party host but believes that the best food is usually simple and cooked at home. She prefers home cooking to restaurant food and believes that the cook should always get the first glass of champagne or slice of pudding.

Alexandra Dudley

Alexandra Fuller is the author of four memoirs, including Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight – a New York Times Notable Book for 2002, the 2002 Booksense Best Non-Fiction book, a finalist for the Guardian’s First Book Award and the winner of the 2002 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize – and the New York Times-bestselling Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, two books of non-fiction, and the novel Quiet Until the Thaw. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, Granta, The New York Times, Guardian and Financial Times.

Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Heminsley is an author, ghostwriter, journalist, broadcaster and speaker. Her bestselling non-fiction work includes Running Like a Girl and Leap In, and her first novel, Under the Same Stars is to be published in 2022. She lives in Hove with her son, and proudly co-parents her LGBT+ family.

Alexandra Heminsley

Alex Hollingsworth co-founded Dig Club and is an experienced and award-winning garden designer, following a successful career in Management Consultancy. Alex trained with the Garden Design Academy of Ireland and also holds an RHS Level 2 Certificate in Horticulture and has had show gardens at Ireland’s ‘Bloom’ and ‘Gardener’s World Live’ in the UK.

Alexandra Hollingsworth

Alexandra Lapierre

Alexandra Massey

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John Updike

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

It's 1969, and the times are changing. America is about to land a man on the moon, the Vietnamese war is in full swing, and racial tension is on the rise. Things just aren't as simple as they used to be - at least, not for Rabbit Angstrom. His wife has left him with his teenage son, his job is under threat and his mother is dying. Suddenly, into his confused life - and home - comes Jill, an eighteen-year-old runaway who becomes his lover. But when she invites her friend to stay, a young black radical named Skeeter, the pair's fragile harmony soon begins to fail ...

Rabbit Redux

It's 1989, and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is far from restful. Fifty-six and overweight, he has a struggling business on his hands and a heart that is starting to fail. His family, too, are giving him cause for concern. His son Nelson is a wreck of a man, a cocaine addict with shattered self-respect. Janice, his wife, has decided that she wants to be a working girl. And as for Pru, his daughter-in-law, she seems to be sending out signals to Rabbit that he knows he should ignore, but somehow can't. He has to make the most of life, after all. He doesn't have much time left ...

Rabbit at Rest

It's 1979 and Rabbit is no longer running. He's walking, and beginning to get out of breath. That's OK, though - it gives him the chance to enjoy the wealth that comes with middle age. It's all in place: he's Chief Sales Representative and co-owner of Springer motors; his wife, at home or in the club, is keeping trim; he wears good suits, and the cash is pouring in. So why is it that he finds it so hard to accept the way that things have turned out? And why, when he looks at his family, is he haunted by regrets about all those lives he'll never live?

Rabbit is Rich

It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre life. Because, as he knows only too well, 'after you've been first-rate at something, no matter what, it kind of takes the kick out of being second-rate'.

Rabbit, Run

Middle-aged, brilliant and bored, Roger Lambert is a professor of Divinity at a New England university. Firmly convinced that religious belief can only justified by recourse to pure faith, he is dismissive when visited by a gangling student who claims, with evangelical zeal, that computer technology is on the brink of proving the existence of God. But when his unhappy wife flings herself into an affair with the younger man, and Roger's faith in his own placid life is thrown into question. With his marriage close to collapse, he finds himself increasingly drawn to his own half-niece, the nineteen-year-old Verna, in this cunning and comic exploration of religion, uncertainty and passion.

Roger's Version

Henry Bech, the celebrated author of Travel Light, has been scrutinized, canonized and vilified by critics and readers across the world. Here, the experiences of this bemused literary icon, one of Updike's greatest creations, are described in hilarious detail, as he travels the world struggling to break his writer's block; returns to his native America to find new success with Think Big, his all-time blockbuster; and visits communist Czechoslovakia, where he is greeted by a dizzyingly adoring public. Brilliantly comic and deeply poignant, The Complete Henry Bech is one of the greatest of all explorations of the writing life and of what happens when an writer becomes a literary celebrity.

The Complete Henry Bech

At the Diamond County Home for the Aged, the inmates prepare for the annual ritual of the Poorhouse Fair, a summer celebration at which the old and infirm sell their produce on stalls to the people of the local town. Bitter, resentful and edging towards senility, the elderly residents of the Home take pride every year in the responsibility and self-respect they gain from this one day. But when the fair goes less well than the old folks had hoped, they are in no doubt who to blame: Conner, the new prefect of the home. Together, they begin to revolt against the younger man, and reassert their own independence.

The Poorhouse Fair

Francois Voltaire

Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them - earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder - sorely testing the young hero's optimism.

Candide, or Optimism

Ann Charters

Beginning in the late 1940's, American literature discovered a four-letter word, and the word was "beat." Beat as in poverty and beatitude, ecstasy and exile. Beat was Jack Kerouac touring the American road in prose as fast and reckless as a V-8 Chevy. It was the junk-sick surrealism of William Burroughs; the wild, Whitmanesque poetry of Allen Ginsberg; and the lumberjack Zen of Gary Snyder. 
The Portable Beat Reader collects the most significant writing of these and fellow members (and spiritual descendants) of the Beat Generation, including Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, Leroi Jones, and Michael McClure. In poetry, fiction, essays, song lyrics, letters, and memoirs, it captures the triumphant rudeness, energy, and exhilaration of a movement that swept through American letters with hurricane force.

The Portable Beat Reader

Qian Zhongshu

Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, Fortress Besieged recounts the exuberant misadventures of the hapless hero Fang Hung-chien, who after aimlessly studying in Europe at his family's expense returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fake university. On the liner back, Fang's life becomes deeply entangled with those of two Chinese beauties - while when he does finally make it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly established university, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls into a marriage of disastrous proportions. A glorious tale of love, marriage, war, calamity, disillusionment and hope, this is one of the greatest Chinese novels: combining Eastern philosophy, Western traditions, adventure, tragicomedy and satire to create a unique feast of delights.

Fortress Besieged

Penelope Lively

Claudia Hampton, a beautiful, famous writer, lies dying in hospital. But, as the nurses tend to her with quiet condescension, she is plotting her greatest work: 'a history of the world ... and in the process, my own'.  Gradually she re-creates the rich mosaic of her life and times, conjuring up those she has known. There is Gordon, her adored brother; Jasper, the charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool, conventional daughter; and Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt. Penelope Lively's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves an exquisite mesh of memories, flashbacks and shifting voices, in a haunting story of loss and desire.

Moon Tiger

Muriel Spark

A man of devilish charm and enterprising spirit, Dougal Douglas is employed to revitalize the ailing firm of Meadows, Meade & Grindley. He succeeds, but not quite in the way his employer intended. Strange things begin to happen as Dougal exerts an uncanny influence on the inhabitants of Peckham Rye and brings lies, tears, blackmail and even murder into the lives of all he meets, from Miss Merle Coverdale, head of the typing pool, to Beauty, the resident femme fatale, and even Mr Druce, the unsuspecting Managing Director himself.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye

John Clellon Holmes

The novel that launched the beat generation's literary legacy describes the world of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Published two months before Kerouac began ON THE ROAD, GO is the first and most accurate chronicle of the private lives the Beats lived before they became public figures. In lucid fictional prose designed to capture the events, emptions and essence of his experience, Holmes describes an individualistic post-World II New York where crime is celebrated, writing is revered, and parties, booze, discussions, drugs and sex punctuate life.

Don DeLillo

Prosperous, good-looking and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell appears on the surface to have everything. But he is a man on the brink of losing his sanity. Trapped in a Manhattan office with soulless sycophants as his only company, he makes an abrupt decision to leave New York for America's mid-west. His plan: to film the small-town lives of ordinary people and make contact with the true heart of his homeland. But as Bell puts his films together in his hotel room, he grows increasingly convinced that there is no heart to find. Modern America has become a land that has reached the end of its reel...

Americana

In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

Libra

E. L. Doctorow

As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents pay a surprise visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment. After a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Decades later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives. But while he is tormented by his past and trying to appreciate his own wife and son, Daniel is also haunted, like millions of others, by the need to come to terms with a country destroying itself in the Vietnam War. A stunning fictionalization of a political drama that tore the United States apart, The Book of Daniel is an intensely moving tale of martyrdom and the search for meaning.

The Book of Daniel

Nikolay Gogol

Author, dramatist and satirist, Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852) deeply influenced later Russian literature with his powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty beaurocracy and base corruption. This volume includes both his most admired short fiction and his most famous drama. A biting and frequently hilarious political satire, The Government Inspector has been popular since its first performance and was regarded by Nabokov as the greatest Russian play every written. The stories gathered here, meanwhile, range from comic to tragic and describe the isolated lives of low-ranking clerks, lunatics and swindlers. They include Diary of a Madman, an amusing but disturbing exploration of insanity; Nevsky Prospect, a depiction of an artist besotted with a prostitute; and The Overcoat, a moving consideration of poverty that powerfully influenced Dostoevsky and later Russian literature.

Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector, & Selected Stories

Peter Schneider

Berlin before the fall of the Wall is a city divided, yet its ordinary residents find ways to live and survive on both sides. There is Robert, teller of barroom anecdotes over beer and vodka, adjusting to a new life in the west; Pommerer, trying to outwit the system in the east; the unnamed narrator, who 'escapes' back-and-forth to collect stories; his beguiling, exiled lover Lena; the three boys who defect to watch Hollywood films; and the man who leaps across the Wall again and again - simply because he cannot help himself. 
 
All are, in their different ways, wall jumpers, trying to lose themselves but still trapped wherever they go. Ultimately, the walls inside their heads prove to be more powerful than any man-made barrier ...

The Wall Jumper

Sloan Wilson

This is the story of Tom and Betsy Rath, a young couple with three children, a nice home, a steady income. They have every reason to be happy, but for some reason they are not. 
Universally acclaimed when it was first published in 1955, the novel captured the mood of a generation. It was a sensational best-seller that was made into an award-winning film with Gregory Peck, it was translated into twenty-six languages, and its title has become a permanent part of our vocabulary. Today, it is more relevant than ever.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

Damon Runyon

Slick, upbeat and funny, these stories inspired the popular musical and film Guys and Dolls. 
 
'Of all the high players this country ever sees, there is no doubt but that the guy they call the Sky is the highest.. He will bet all he has, and nobody can bet any more than this'.

Guys and Dolls

and Other Stories

Maurice Hall is a young man who grows up confident in his privileged status and well aware of his role in society. Modest and generally conformist, he nevertheless finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, whom he encounters at Cambridge, and through Alec, the gamekeeper on Clive's country estate, Maurice gradually experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening. A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster's death in 1970. Compellingly honest and beautifully written, it offers a powerful condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society, and is at once a moving love story and an intimate tale of one man's erotic and political self-discovery.

Maurice

Frank O'Connor

The story of the title deals with a little boy named Larry and his feelings towards his father. When his father returns home from World War II, Larry is resentful and jealous of losing his mother's undivided attention, and finds himself in a constant struggle to win back her affections.

My Oedipus Complex

Truman Capote

A complete collection of short fiction by one of the masters of twentieth-century American literature.

The Complete Stories

Jerome K. Jerome

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and proved so popular that Jerome reunited his now older - but not necessarily wiser - heroes in Three Men on the Bummel, for a picaresque bicycle tour of Germany. With their benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian 'clerking classes', both novels hilariously capture the spirit of their age.

Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel

Jaroslav Hašek

Josef Lada

Hasek's most important work was centered around the deeply funny story of a hapless Czech soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army -- dismissed for incompetence only to be pressed into service by the Russians in World War I (where he is captured by his own troops). A mischief-maker, bohemian and drunk, Hasek demonstrated his wit in this classic novel of the Czech character and preposterous nature of war.

The Good Soldier Svejk

H. E. Bates

When John Franklin brings his plane down into Occupied France at the height of the Second World war, there are two things in his mind - the safety of his crew and his own badly injured arm. It is a stroke of unbelievable luck when the family of a French farmer risk their lives to offer the airmen protection. During the hot summer weeks that follow, the English officer and the daughter of the house are drawn inexorably to each other...

Fair Stood the Wind for France

Donald Barthelme

This collection of pithy, brilliantly acerbic pieces is a companion to Sixty Stories, Barthelme's earlier retrospective volume. Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence.

Forty Stories

H G Wells

A troubled insomniac in 1890s England falls suddenly into a sleep-like trance, from which he does not awake for over two hundred years. During his centuries of slumber, however, investments are made that make him the richest and most powerful man on Earth. But when he comes out of his trance he is horrified to discover that the money accumulated in his name is being used to maintain a hierarchal society in which most are poor, and more than a third of all people are enslaved. Oppressed and uneducated, the masses cling desperately to one dream - that the sleeper will awake, and lead them all to freedom.

The Sleeper Awakes

Anthony Burgess

Kicked out of college and harassed by his lawyer, Miles Faber abandons New York and embarks on a defiant pilgrimage across the Caribbean to find the shrine of Sib Legeru, an obscure poet and painter. But in the streets of Castita's capital, where a wild religious festival is in full swing, a series of bizarre encounters - including his own repulsive doppelgänger (the son of a circus bird-woman) - and disturbing family revelations await Miles, who soon finds himself a willing victim of dynastic destiny. 
 
A darkly surreal comedy of dazzling linguistic inventiveness, MF is an outrageous tale of blood, lust and the machinations of fate.

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these 'souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov, and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov. Dead Souls, Russia's first major novel, is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy.

Dead Souls

KPop Demon Hunters

Kane Chronicles Graphic Novels

Karin Schaeffer

Katie Morag

Katie Price's Perfect Ponies

Keep Calm

Keep Your Friends

Keeper of the Realms

Keiko

Kelly Ann's Diary

Key Words

Key Words with Peter and Jane

Kidnapped - Jon Roscoe

Kiki's Delivery Service

King of

King's Maker

Kingdom of Lies

A gripping historical fiction series set amid England's War of the Roses in which the Houses of Lancaster and York faced each other on the field of battle - and the Tudors won.

Kingmaker

Kings of the Realm

Knights Templar

Knights of the Borrowed Dark

Kurt Wallander

Four of James Ellroy's most popular crime novels featuring the infamous Dudley Smith, which include: 'The Black Dahlia', 'The Big Nowhere', 'L.A. Confidential' and 'White Jazz'.

L.A. Quartet

Lacey Flint has never worked a murder case - until a savage murder, 120 years to the day since Jack the Ripper claimed his first victim, crosses her desk. 
This case sets the precedent that Lacey Flint is never far from danger, or the River Thames, but she will stop at nothing to find the answers.

Lacey Flint

Ladybird Audio Adventures

Ladybird Classics

Ladybird Eco Books

Ladybird Grammar

Ladybird Lane

Introduce your little one to first concepts and themes with Ladybird Learners. From ABC to 123, animals to colours, we've got you covered for fun early learning experiences. The engaging illustrations and clear text offer lots of opportunities to extend young learners' vocabulary and get them talking. 
 
A colourful board book series packed with big learning ideas for curious little minds. 
 
Look out for all the titles in the series: 
 
My First Animals: Ladybird Learners 
My First ABC: Ladybird Learners 
My First Numbers: Ladybird Learners 
My First Colours: Ladybird Learners

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