A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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Georges Simenon

<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>

'Powerful . . . unputdownably gripping' Guardian 
 
'The island itself. Its throbbing heat as if in a belljar under the sun, the scorpion in his son's bed, the deafening sound of cicadas' 
 
During his first holiday on the island of Porquerolles Dr Mahé caught a glimpse of something irresistible. As the memory continues to haunt him, he falls prey to a delusion that may offer an escape from his conventional existence - or may destroy him. This is the first English translation of The Mahé Circle, Simenon's dark, malevolent depiction of an ordinary man trapped in mundanity and consumed by obsession. 
 
'Extraordinary . . . Simenon is one of the most important writers of the 20th century' Independent

The Mahé Circle

C.S. Forester

Described as a 'riveting read' by Sarah Waters and acclaimed by crime writers such as Andrew Taylor, The Pursued is a dark, gripping 1930s psychological thriller by C. S. Forester, the author of Hornblower. 
 
The story begins when Marjorie, a young woman, arrives home one summer evening and finds her sister, dead, with her head in the oven. She looks peaceful, as if she is asleep. Their mother suspects, however, that Dot's death was far from natural - and that she knows who the killer is. So, slowly and meticulously, she plots her terrible revenge. 
 
C. S. Forester's 1935 thriller The Pursued, lost for decades, rewrote the traditions of crime fiction to create a dark, twisted portrayal of obsession and retribution.

The Pursued

Ross Macdonald

Private detective Lew Archer has better things to do than take on an investigation for Alex Kincaid, a young man claiming that his new bride, Dolly, has gone missing. Snapped by a hotel photographer on the day of their wedding, the beautiful girl vanished only hours after and Alex has heard nothing since. But when Archer begins digging, he finds evidence that links Dolly to brutal murders that span two decades, and a terrible secret. 
 
In this byzantine and compelling tale, Ross Macdonald explores the darkest experiences that can bind a family together - and tear it apart. 
 
Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

The Chill

Twenty years ago, Anthony Galton vanished, along with his streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of the Galton fortune. Now his dying mother wants him found, and Lew Archer is on the case: is Anthony hiding somewhere, happy and eager not to be discovered? But what Archer finds - a headless skeleton, a clever con and a terrified blonde - reveals a game whose stakes are so high that someone is willing to kill. 
 
The Galton Case is a wonderfully devious and poetic look at poverty, greed, murder and identity. 
 
Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

The Galton Case

Lew Archer, world-weary private investigator, is hired by Larry and Irene Chalmers when they suspect that their troubled son Nick is involved in their own burglary. But when a fellow investigator - one who's been working with Nick - turns up dead, Archer soon realizes this isn't simply about some stolen loot. To help their son, Archer must uncover the truth about a kidnap years ago, and discover why the handgun from a decades-old killing apparently turns up at every new and terrible murder. 
 
In The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald exposes the damage families can cause one another in the name of love, lies and greed. 
 
Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.

The Goodbye Look

Hans Fallada

For Willi Kufult, prison life means staying out of trouble, keeping his cell clean, snagging a precious piece of tobacco - and dreaming of the day of his release. 
 
Then he gets out. 
 
As Willi tries to make a new life for himself in Hamburg, finding a job and even love, he still cannot escape his past. Gradually he becomes sucked into a world of drink, desperation and deceit, and with one terrible act, he is ensnared in a noose of his own making... 
 
Hans Fallada's dark and moving 1934 novel brilliantly describes a seedy criminal underworld of shabby lives and violent deeds, showing how our actions always catch up with us.

Once a Jailbird

Kingsley Amis

A mummy is stolen from a small town museum along with some Roman coins and a soaking wet man collapses in fourteen year old Peter Furneaux's living room bleeding from the head. What was a suspected student prank is followed by murder. At first it is impossible to see the connection, but the eccentric Colonel Manton does. With Peter's help the Colonel unravels a mystery that strikes fear into the heart of a genteel suburban neighbourhood and gives Peter rather more excitement than he bargained for at the tennis club social. This meticulously paced thriller shows Amis at his most subtle and daring.

The Riverside Villas Murder

At the Universal Advertising Agency on the Strand, London, a murder is being planned. Three men have been discovered taking bribes and face the grim prospect of the dole queue, unless they can get rid of the person who caught them. Their ringleader, thick-set and vicious Mr Morris, soon discovers that killing is far easier than he thought - and that he even has a talent for it. He might, he feels, be superhuman. But as he will discover, there is no such thing as the perfect crime, and no deed goes unpunished. 
 
Taking us into a 1930s London of grimy back streets, smoky cafes and shabby rooms, Plain Murder, C. S. Forester's second crime novel, is a brilliantly atmospheric and gripping portrayal of the dark heart of a killer.

Plain Murder

John le Carré

When the Department - faded since the war and busy only with bureaucratic battles - hears rumour of a missile base near the West German border, it seems like the perfect opportunity to regain some political standing in the Intelligence market place. The Cold War is at its height and the Department is dying for a piece of the action. 
 
Swiftly becoming carried away by fear and pride, the Department and her officers send deactivated agent Fred Leiser back into East Germany, armed only with some schoolboy training and his memories of the war. 
 
In the land of eloquent silence that is Communist East Germany, Leiser's fate becomes inseparable from the Department's.

The Looking Glass War

Barley Blair is not a Service man: he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul whose only loves are whisky and jazz. But it was Barley who, one drunken night at a dacha in Peredelkino during the Moscow Book Fair, was befriended by a high-ranking Soviet scientist who could be the greatest asset to the West since perestroika began, and made a promise. Nearly a year later, his drunken promise returns to haunt him. A reluctant Barley is quickly trained by British Intelligence and sent to Moscow to liaise with a go-between, the beautiful Katya. Both are lonely and disillusioned. Each is increasingly certain that if the human race is to have any future, all must betray their countries ... 
 
In his first post-glasnost spy novel, le Carré captures the effect of a slow and uncertain thaw on ordinary people and on the shadowy puppet-masters who command them.

The Russia House

The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training academy.  He asks his old mentor, George Smiley, to address his passing-out class. There are no laundered reminiscences; Smiley speaks the truth - perhaps the last the students will ever hear. As they listen, Ned recalls his own painful triumphs and inglorious failures, in a career that took him from the Western Isles of Scotland to Hamburg and from Israel to Cambodia. He asks himself: Did it do any good? What did it do to me? And what will happen to us now? In this final Smiley novel, the great spy gives his own humane and unexpected answers.

The Secret Pilgrim

H. R. F. Keating

In a small, provincial town in the heart of India, a politician's wife has done her husband's career a great service, by dying under suspicious circumstances. That the corpse and the trail have been cold for fifteen years hasn't saved Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID from being sent to investigate. But what chance does he have when his chief suspect is so powerful, when the whole district is against him, and when a holy man is fasting to the death to protest his prying? 
 
But still the good inspector dutifully goes, carrying just the honour of his police force and a box of double-sized eggs . . .

Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg

Some crooks have tried to snatch the plump son of a business tycoon, and have accidentally made off with his playmate instead. But they're not changing their plan: a payment is to be delivered to them or a small corpse is to be delivered to Inspector Ghote. 
 
But what kind of ransom can a mere tailor's boy demand? And, as something more unpleasant than just a ransom note arrives from the kidnappers, are the police helping keep the boy in one piece?

Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

In the house of Lala Varde, a vast man of even greater influence, an attack has taken place. Varde's secretary, Mr Perfect, has been struck on his invaluable business head. And try as Inspector Ghote might to remain conscientious and methodical, his investigation is beset on all sides by cunning, disdain and corruption. And then there's the impossible theft of a single rupee to be dealt with . . . 
 
The Perfect Murder introduced Inspector Ghote: Bombay CID's most dutiful officer, and one of the greatest, most engaging creations in all detective fiction.

The Perfect Murder: The First Inspector Ghote Mystery

What had until recently been a police sergeant is now lying at Ghote's feet bleeding its last. An accident it may have been, but Ghote saw exactly what happened, and it's his duty to arrest the killer. Isn't it? Or can the inspector better serve his beloved police force by disposing of the body, by concealing a crime? And if he does, will he manage to keep his terrible secret? 
 
As an Inquiry begins beneath the first torrents of monsoon rain - will he even want to?

Under a Monsoon Cloud: An Inspector Ghote Mystery

Dashiell Hammett

Ex-detective Nick Charles plans to spend a quiet Christmas holed up in a hotel suite with his glamorous wife Nora, their pet Schnauzer and a case of good Scotch. But then a bullet-riddled corpse and a missing inventor (not to mention the attentions of a beautiful young woman) force him out of retirement and back into business. Trying to make sense of false leads, suspicious alibis and mistaken identities, Nick and Nora are thrown into a world of gangsters, hoodlums and speakeasies, where no-one can be trusted. 
 
Dashiell Hammett was credited with inventing the hardboiled crime novel, and this story of murder and mayhem in Manhattan, with its breakneck plot, snappy dialogue - and the hard-drinking, wisecracking couple Nick and Nora - is one of his most thrillingly enjoyable mysteries.

The Thin Man

Raymond Chandler

'I pushed her back into the house without saying anything, shut the door. We stood looking at each other inside. She dropped her hand slowly and tried to smile. Then all expression went out of her white face and it looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box...I lit my cigarette, puffed it slowly for a moment and then asked: "What are you doing here?" 
 
Before creating Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler perfected the hardboiled private detective story in the pages of Blask Mask magazine - tough, spare tales of gumshoes and murder, laced with a weary lyricism and deadpan, laconic wit. 'Killer in the Rain' is vintage Chandler, the groundwork for his classic first novel The Big Sleep.

Killer in the Rain

H. P. Lovecraft

'It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh (...)' 
 
H.P. Lovecraft was perhaps the greatest twentieth century practitioner of the horror story, introducing to the genre a new evil, monstrous, pervasive and unconquerable. At the heart of these three stories are terrors unthinkable and strange: a crash-landing meteorite, the wretched inhabitant of an ancient castle and a grave-robber's curse. 
 
This book includes The Colour Out Of Space, The Outsider and The Hound.

The Colour Out of Space

Sherwood King

Laurence is a young ex-sailor who can't resist the lure of the good life, and when he finds a job as chauffeur to the wealthy Mr and Mrs Bannister, his occasional work leaves him free to indulge. Bannister himself is bitter - his twisted leg keeps him on the sidelines while his ravishingly beautiful wife endures his moods with saintly patience. Or does she? It's the Bannisters' closest friend, Grisby, who starts stirring, getting Laurence to agree to a crazy plot. It will net him thousands, no strings attached. But is it all too easy?

If I Die Before I Wake

Jack Kerouac

William S. Burroughs

In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer. Carr had come to each of them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were arrested. Months later, the two writers - unpublished at the time - collaborated on And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalized account of the summer of the killing.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world--and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit.

Atlas Shrugged

An omnibus comprising Raymond Chandler's three Philip Marlowe novels, THE LADY IN THE LAKE, THE HIGH WINDOW and THE LITTLE SISTER.

The Lady in the Lake and Other Novels

Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures - is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The detective's iconic image burns just as brightly in Farewell My Lovely, on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner. And the inimitable Marlowe is able to prove that trouble really is his business in Raymond Chandler's brilliant epitaph, The Long Goodbye.

The Big Sleep and Other Novels

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

Aidan Waits

Air Ministry Survival Guide

Alan Partridge on the BBC

Aldrin Adams Adventure

Alec Devlin

Alex Craft

Alex Cross

Alex Delaware

Alex vs Axel

Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar

Alfie

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