Alfie Small is a keen explorer, just like his older cousin, Charlie. And just like Charlie, Alfie is fearless! He loves adventures, speedboats, dragons and sword-fighting. He does NOT like wrinkly old pirates and interfering puffins. Unlike Charlie, Alfie always makes sure he gets back home in time for tea!

Alfie Small

Alfie Teale

Alfred Assollant was born in 1827. He was a teacher, journalist, writer and outspoken opponent of Napoleon III. He wrote more than thirty books over thirty years, including historical fiction, collected essays and a treatise on the rights of women, but only The Marvellous (But Authentic) Adventures of Captain Corcoran, published in 1867, was a success. In the 1870s, his wife, son and daughter died in quick succession and Assollant found himself poverty-stricken. In 1886 he also died, all but forgotten despite the continuing success of Corcoran, in a paupers’ hospital in Paris. 
 
Sam Miller was born and brought up in London. He studied History at Cambridge University and Politics at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, before joining the BBC in 1986, for which he has worked, on and off, ever since. In the early 1990s he was the BBC World Service TV and radio correspondent in Delhi, and on his return to the UK in 1993 was the presenter of the BBC’s current affairs programme, South Asia Report. Later he became the head of the Urdu service and subsequently Managing Editor, South Asia. He was posted back to Delhi in 2002 and has remained there ever since. He is the author of Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity (2009), Blue Guide: India (2012) and most recently A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes, which was published by Jonathan Cape in 2014.

Alfred Assollant

Alfred Döblin

Alfred Hayes

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Tennyson

Alfred Tong

Alfred de Musset

Alfred de Vigny

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood (1869 – 1951) was one of the most influential horror writers of the twentieth century. Transcending the boundaries of conventional writing in the genre, his tales are celebrated for their atmospheric descriptions, psychological depth, and their deep interest in phenomena outside of conventional human experience. A lover of nature, his writing is imbued with a mysticism and awe for his surroundings, and much of his work is concerned with the beauty and terror to be found in moutainscapes and dark forests. Blackwood's influence extends beyond horror literature, inspiring authors across various genres and with his evocative storytelling and philosophical insight.

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Ali Abdaal is a doctor, entrepreneur, amateur magician, and the world's most-followed productivity expert. 
 
Ali became intrigued by the science of productivity while juggling the demands of medical training at Cambridge University with building his business. While working as a doctor in the UK's National Health Service, Ali started to document his journey towards living a healthier, happier, more productive life online. In the years since, Ali's evidence-based videos, podcasts and articles about the human mind have reached hundreds of millions of people all around the world. 
 
In 2021, Ali took a break from his medical practice to focus full-time on his work popularising the science of human flourishing and high performance. Here, he reveals everything he has learnt from a decade studying the secrets of feeling better and achieving more.

Ali Abdaal

His Excellency Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi is the former Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. One of the most powerful economic and political jobs in the world, he held this post from August 1995 to May 2016. 
 
Prior to that he held a wide range of leadership positions in the Kingdom's national oil company, Saudi Aramco. He was the first Saudi national to be named President of the company in 1984 and became the first Saudi CEO in 1988. Al-Naimi joined the company, then called Aramco, as an office boy in 1947. A Bedouin, he was born in the deserts of eastern Arabia in 1935.

Ali Al-Naimi

Ali Campbell

Ali Cronin

After graduating from university with a degree in mental health, Ali Land spent a decade working as a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Nurse in hospitals and schools in the UK and Australia. Ali is now a full-time writer and lives in Scotland. Her first novel, Good Me Bad Me, was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into over twenty languages. 
 
Follow Ali on Twitter and Instagram @byAliLand

Ali Land

Ali is a leading expert in spiralizing and launched the world-renowned blog Inspiralized.com.

Ali Maffucci

Ali McDowall is a designer, life coach, and creative mentor with a passion for helping others connect, reflect, and grow. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2008 with a degree in Design for Performance, she worked in the arts until becoming a mother in 2013. Her own journey then led her into coaching, where she now supports fellow creatives through mentoring, vision board workshops, and networking events that centre on open, honest conversation and inspiring panel talks. Ali lives in Bath with her husband and two children.

Ali McDowall

Ali Millar was born and raised in the Scottish Borders, and now lives in England with her husband and four children. She has an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Edinburgh Napier University, and has worked as a cultural producer for Summerhall in Edinburgh, for whom she has interviewed dozens of writers including Marina Warner, Rachel Cusk, Emma Jane Unsworth, and Etgar Keret. She has also chaired events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Ali Millar

Ali Pantony is a freelance writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Grazia, BBC Three, Refinery29, Vice, Red and Evening Standard. Almost Adults is her debut novel. 
 
Ali was born in Maidstone, Kent, and lives in North London. You can follow Ali on Twitter and Instagram @alipantony

Ali Pantony

Ali Pye has illustrated more than 30 books, which have been published around the world. She is the author of several picture books, and the 'Harry Stevenson' young fiction series. Ali studied fashion at Central St Martins before taking an MA in illustration at Kingston University. She lives in London with her family, two guinea pigs and the world's greediest spaniel.

Ali Pye

Ali Recanati, the farmer's wife, joined Farmer J with a branding obsession, strong views on pickles and an eye for everything beautiful and bold. Now CMO and co-pilot of the brand, she brings the creative spark and mischief to Farmer J — from breakfast raves to the perfect field tray.

Ali Recanati

Ali Sethi

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

Ali Smith

Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent, served on the front lines against Al Qaeda and gained an international reputation as a top counter-terrorism operative and interrogator. He has been profiled in The New Yorker and featured in books, newspaper articles, and documentaries around the globe.

Ali Soufan

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Jorge Luis Borges

<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>

'Nobody before Borges had ever attempted this strange and wonderful mixture of arcana, popular literature, national myth, the nature of time and classical themes.  Now we can see it in all its intense and disturbing brilliance, certain that we will never see anything like it again' - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday

Fictions

Evelyn Waugh

The more startling for the economy of its prose and plot, this novel's story, set among the manicured lawns and euphemisms of Whispering Glades Memorial Park in Hollywood, satirizes the American way of death and offers Waugh's memento mori.

The Loved One

Vladimir Nabokov

When Lolita was first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. 
 
This annotated edition, a revised and considerably expanded version of the 1970 edition, does full justice to the textual riches of Lolita, illuminating the elaborate verbal textures and showing how they contribute to the novel's overall meaning. Alfred Appel, Jr. also provides fresh observations on the novel's artifice, games and verbal patternings and a delightful biographical vignette of Nabokov. The annotations themselves were prepared in consultation with Nabokov while newly identified allusions were confirmed by him during the final years of his life.

The Annotated Lolita

Barry Hines

Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a disillusioned teenager growing up in a small Yorkshire mining town. Violence is commonplace and he is frequently cold and hungry. Yet he is determined to be a survivor and when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk he discovers a passion in life. Billy identifies with her proud silence and she inspired in him the trust and love that nothing else can. Intense and raw and bitingly honest, A Kestrel for a Knave was first published in 1968 and was also made into a highly acclaimed film, Kes, directed by Ken Loach.

A Kestrel for a Knave

Kingsley Amis

Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain's new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.

Lucky Jim

Truman Capote

Holly Golightly, glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while down.  She's up all night drinking cocktails and breaking hearts.  She's a shoplifter, a delight, a drifter, a tease.  She hasn't got a past.She doesn't want to belong to anything or anyone.  Not to 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town.  Not to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing.  Not to a starving writer.  Not even to her one-eyed rag-bag pirate of a cat.  One day Holly might find somewhere she belongs.  Until then she's travelling.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Anaïs Nin

In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning. 
 
Her second volume of erotic writings, Little Birds, is also published by Penguin.

Delta of Venus

Roald Dahl

Contains: The Umbrella Man; Dip in the Pool; The Butler; The Hitchhiker; Mr Botibol; My Lady Love, My Dove; The Way Up to Heaven; Parson's Pleasure; The Sound Machine; The Wish.

Ten Short Stories

Anthony Burgess

In this nightmare vision of a not-too-distant future, fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends rob, rape, torture and murder - for fun. Alex is jailed for his vicious crimes and the State undertakes to reform him - but how and at what cost?

A Clockwork Orange

Samuel Beckett

This new collection brings together First Love, The Calamative, The End and The Expelled; these four novellas are among the first major works of Beckett's decision to use French as his language of literary composition. Rich in verbal and situational humour, they offer a fascinating insight into many of the issues which preoccupied Beckett all his working life. As the first novella reveals, nobody writes with quite such cruel and unnervingly clever wit as Beckett...

First Love and Other Novellas

Muriel Spark

When an unbridled schoolmistress with advanced ideas is in her prime the classroom can take on a new identity and no one can predict what will happen. Jean Brodie is a teacher whose unconventional ideas put her at odds with the other members of staff at the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh, as she endeavours to shape the lives of the select group of girls who form her &quot;set&quot;.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Nancy Mitford

In one of the wittiest novels of them all, Nancy Mitford casts a finely gauged net to capture perfectly the foibles and fancies of the English upper class. Set in the privileged world of the county house party and the London season, this is a comedy of English manners between the wars by one of the most individual, beguiling and creative users of the language.

Love in a Cold Climate

J L Carr

A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years. 
 
Adapted into a 1987 film starring Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh, A Month in the Country traces the slow revival of the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War.

A Month in the Country

Malcolm Lowry

It is the Day of the Dead. The fiesta in full swing. In the shadow of Popocatepeti ragged children beg coins to buy skulls made of chocolate...and the ugly pariah dogs roam the streets. Geoffrey Firmin, HM ex-consul, is drowning himself in liquor and Mescal, while his ex-wife and half brother look on powerless to help him. As the day wears on, it becomes apparent that Geoffrey must die. It is his only escape from a world he cannot understand. UNDER THE VOLCANO is one of the century's great undisputed masterpieces.

Under the Volcano

James Baldwin

This is the fictional story of the great gospel singer Arthur Montana. Arthur was found dead in the basement of a London pub at the age of thirty-nine, yet he lies on in this memoir. Written by Hall, his brother and manager, it is in part a subtle and moving study of the treacherous ebb and flow of memory. 
 
Set against a vividly drawn background of the civil rights movement of the sixties, Just Above My Head explores how Arthur discovers his love for Jimmy - 'with his smile like a lantern and a voice like Saturday nights' - and portrays how profoundly racial politics can shape the private business of love.

Just Above My Head

We are in Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin's novel is Tish nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Varlan Shalamov

It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite.

Kolyma Tales

Yevgeny Zamyatin

In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful &lsquo;Benefactor&rsquo;, the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity &ndash; until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the inspiration for George Orwell&rsquo;s 1984. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction

R. K. Narayan

While the colourful sweetmeats are frying in the kitchen, Jagan immerses himself in his copy of the Bhagavad Gita. A widower of firm Gandhian principles, Jagan nonetheless harbours a warm and embarrassed affection for his wastrel son Mali. Yet even Jagan's patience begins to fray when Mali descends on the sleepy city of Malgudi full of modern notions, with a new half-American wife and a grand plan for selling novel-writing machines. From different generations and different cultures, father and son are forced to confront each other, and are taken by surprise . . .

The Vendor of Sweets

This is the story of Nataraj, who earns his living as a printer in the little world of Malgudi, an imaginary town in South India. Nataraj and his close friends, a poet and a journalist, find their congenia l days disturbed when Vasu, a powerful taxidermist, moves in with his stuffed hyenas and pythons, and brings his dancing-women up the printer's private stairs. When Vasu, in search of larger game, threatens the life of a temple elephant that Natara j has befriended, complications ensue that are both laughable and tragic.

The Man-eater of Malgudi

In this wry, funny, bittersweet story, love gets in the way of progress when Raman, a sign painter, meets the thrillingly independent Daisy, who wishes to bring birth control to the city of Malgudi.

The Painter of Signs

Isak Dinesen

Karen Blixen

Isak Dinesen takes up the absorbing story of her life in Kenya begun in the unforgettable Out of Africa, which she published under the name of Karen Blixen. With warmth and humanity these four stories illuminate her love both for the African people, their dignity and traditions, and for the beauty and wildness of the landscape. The first three were written in the 1950s and the last, 'Echoes from the Hills', was written especially for this volume in the summer of 1960 when the author was in her seventies. In all they provide a moving final chapter to her African reminiscences.

Shadows on the Grass

Elsa Morante

History

A Novel

Georgi Markov

The Portrait of My Double

And Other Dystopian Novellas

Rasmus Daugbjerg

A troll lives in the forest. Her fate is tied to the earth. Far away sits a power-hungry king. People fear him. They have little choice but to follow his command, to slaughter the animals and cut down trees. 
 
As the townspeople torment the earth, the troll’s duties become heavier: she must kill them, and she suffers for it. Fearing both the king, whose cruel hands direct their lives, and the troll’s punishment when they follow the king’s orders, Karoline, Erik, Johan, Petra and Kaj grow increasingly desperate. 
 
Translated from Danish by Hazel Evans.

Troll

Ágota Kristóf

Sent to a remote village to live with their grandmother, twins Claus and Lucas devise physical and mental exercises to render themselves invulnerable to the ongoing horrors of war and living under a totalitarian regime. When their bond is tested, their collective ‘we’ shatters and the boys become isolated in different countries. Lucas is challenged to prove his identity and that of his missing brother, a defector to ‘the other side’. 
 
Kristóf’s haunting and unforgettable masterpiece has been an international phenomenon ever since its first publication in French 40 years ago. Distilling the brutally fracturing effects of war and displacement onto identity and memory, and our need for stories in our search for unity and meaning, The Notebook Trilogy is stark fable of timeless relevance.

The Notebook Trilogy

Anne Serre

Virtue and Rosalind is a literary hall of mirrors, in which we view our narrator through the stories she chooses to tell, sweeping us up into a dizzying whirl. Central to her life are her relationships with other women, and their shared love of art. But, whether she is recalling a memory, attending a football match or reading fan mail, are the women who share her existence companions, projections, or merely refractions of a self perpetually in motion? 
 
International Booker shortlistee Anne Serre once again affirms herself a master of literary form and innovation. Lavish in scope, yet entirely unadorned and direct in style, Virtue and Rosalind leaves the reader with the sensation of having absorbed a whole library in one sitting – all in the company of a shrewd and hilarious friend, as we ourselves become a surface onto which she imprints her dazzling storytelling.

Virtue and Rosalind

Colette

Chéri: spoiled, petulant, beautiful, aged twenty-five. Léa: magnificent, brilliant, remorseless, aged forty-nine. They are in love, but their relationship exists beyond the bounds of social acceptability and must one day come to an end, no matter the cost. 
 
A succès de scandale on publication for its depiction of transgressive love, Colette’s celebrated novella is also a profound and compelling exploration of the passage of time, the body and ageing, mirrors, self-perception, self-knowledge and the tragedy of mortality.

Chéri

‘Fine teeth, my girl. With teeth like that I’d have gobbled up Paris and the rest of the world.' 
 
Gigi, a teenage girl in fin-de-siècle Paris, is being groomed by her family to become a high-class courtesan, just like her aunt and grandmother before her. But despite their best efforts, their timid protégée may have other ideas for her future... 
 
Colette's famous novella is a sly and delicate depiction of exploitation and resistance, and is paired here with the wonderful short novel ‘The Cat’.

Gigi

Mircea Cartarescu

Theodoros

Little Pop-Ups

Little Princesses

Little Puffin Clothbound Classics

Little Red Train

Little Swan Ballet

Little Town of Marrowville

Little World

Lives of the Artists

Living Autobiography

Living World

Stella Rimington brings all her experience as the first woman Director General of MI5 to bear in a heart-stopping thriller series that takes us deep into a wilderness of mirrors where nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted.

Liz Carlyle

Lizzie and Lucky

Lockwood & Co.

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter join forces in this seminal sci-fi series. 
Long Earth is series of parallel worlds that are similar to Earth, which can be reached by using an inexpensive device called a "Stepper". The closer worlds are almost identical to our Earth but the further you get the more they differ. They all share one similarity: humans have never existed there, at least not as we know them . . .

Long Earth

Set in the turbulent eighteenth century, Lord John is the lonely, tormented and courageous English officer first seen in the Outlander novels. He is a man who fights for the crown, his honour and his own secrets.

Lord John Grey

Lore Olympus

Lorien Legacies Reborn

Lost Boys

Lost Soul Series

Lottie

Lottie Brooks

Love & Hockey

Love in the Fast Lane

Love’s Academic

Meet Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alexander VI and member of 15th century Rome's most notorious family. Scandal and tragedy follow her everywhere as she struggles to choose between love and loyalty.

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