Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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James Joyce

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It is only James Joyce's towering genius as a novelist that has led to the comparative neglect of his poetry and sole surviving play. And yet, argues Mays in his stimulating and informative introduction, several of these works not only occupy a pivotal position in Joyce's career; they are also magnificently assured achievements in their own right. Chamber Music is 'an extraordinary d&eacute;but', fusing the styles of the nineties and the Irish Revival with irony and characteristic verbal exuberance. Pomes Penyeach and Exiles (highly acclaimed in Harold Pinter's 1970 staging) were written when Joyce had published Dubliners and was completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Both confront painfully personal issues of adultery, jealousy and betrayal and so pave the way for the more detached and fully realized treatment in Ulysses. Joyce's occasional verse includes 'Ecce Puer' for his new-born grandson, juvenilia, satires, translations, limericks and a parody of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. All are brought together in this scholarly, fully annotated yet accessible new edition.

Poems and Exiles

Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison published his first pamphlet of poems in 1964 and for over fifty years has been a prominent force in modern poetry. 
 
His poetic range is truly far-reaching, from the intimate tenderness of family life and personal love, to war poems from Bosnia and savage public outcries against politicians. The Collected Poems draws deeply both on classical tradition and on the vernacular of the street. Combining the private and the public in a way Harrison has made distinctly his own, and drawing on his working-class upbringing, these are powerful poems for modern times.

Collected Poems

Majella Kelly

In 2017, the presence of a mass grave was confirmed in a disused sewage system in Tuam, County Galway. In it were the bodies of infants - wards of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, where from 1925 to 1961 the children of unmarried women were sent to live their lives in the care of nuns. Their deaths were the result of a culture which, under the influence of the Church, took a prurient interest in women's private lives and bodies. 
 
In The Speculations of Country People, her hauntingly lyrical debut collection, Majella Kelly reckons with that legacy. She traces the journeys of women in our own day, from controlling relationships to sexual reawakening and new happiness. The speculations of the title are in part those of gossip, the chatter of small communities everywhere; but they are also those of a local, very Irish mythos, in which pagan and Christian - and truth and legend - blend and blur. 
 
Here, then, are hares and selkies, a seductive 'master otter' of 'fabulous elegance' who might carry a woman away in the night; here is the last man on Omey Island; here a retired stuntman, dragging his bed of rusty nails along the beach. And here - quiet, against the beauty and loneliness of the Connemara landscape - are the little bones that wash up on shores or stick from the earth to speak of what has been.

The Speculations of Country People

A beautiful collection of Renaissance poetry, assembled by one of the world's finest historical novelists. 
 
Dorothy Dunnett died in November 2001. She left behind this anthology, chosen by her from the hundreds of poems which she used in her world-famous series of novels known as THE LYMOND CHRONICLES. 
 
It is a fascinating set of choices, featuring Thomas Wyatt, King James I, extracts from the Psalms, and even an anonymous poem called 'Monologue of a Drunkard' - as Dorothy herself writes, here in one volume is 'the poetry of love, of folk-humour and ballad, the songs of Persian poets and of the troubadours, translated where need be into English.'

The Lymond Poetry

Yomi Sode

In poems exploring family, survival, generational trauma and the complexities of belonging, Manorism is an examination of the lives of Black British men and boys. At the heart of the book is the ongoing pressure of code-switching - changing one's behaviour and language to suit radically different cultural contexts and environments. The violence of artists such as Caravaggio in seventeenth-century Rome and modern-day commentary by the likes of David Starkey and Piers Morgan provide a lens for considering differences of impunity afforded to white and Black people. Snippets of Yoruba interweave with English, and a moving final sequence - adapted for the Almeida stage in June 2021 to glowing reviews from the Guardian, Time Out and others - charts the dramatic reconciliations surrounding a death in the family. The result is a thrillingly original book that charts the vulnerabilities and rich nuances of Black masculinity in Britain.

Manorism

W. G. Sebald

Across the Land and the Water brings together poems from throughout W. G. Sebald's life as well as additional works found after his death. Arranged chronologically, from his student days in the 1960s to the longer narratives he worked on in the 1980s, these poems are suffused by the themes which dominated Sebald's books. Here you will find subtle vignettes on nature and history, death and memory, journeys and landscapes, each short piece filled with insight, sensitivity and brilliance.

Across the Land and the Water

Selected Poems 1964-2001

CA Conrad

A visceral, surrealist tale of becoming, from the shamanic cult hero of contemporary queer poetry 
 
Beguiling, outrageous, playfully morbid and frequently stunning in its surreal flights of imagination, The Book of Frank follows the eponymous figure as he grows from his troubled childhood into an adult travesty of the ostensibly straight family man in a male-dominated world. Along the way, he navigates a series of darkly comic situations, commits acts of grotesque violence, loses his soul in the post and debates boundary lines with a pig. Frank is one of the great literary creations: a man who can declare that 'however we seek another's weakness is our tyranny', as often touchingly innocent as he is monstrously cruel. 
 
 Called 'a contemporary masterpiece' by Thurston Moore, a 'desert island book' by Anne Boyer and 'this generation's Dream Songs' by Maggie Nelson, The Book of Frank is one of the crucial poetic works of this century so far. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the first Frank poems' appearance, it is published in the UK for the first time.

The Book of Frank

Malika Booker

Sharon Olds

Warsan Shire

Inspired by Penguin's enormously successful '60s series of the same name, the Penguin Modern Poets are succinct, collectible, lovingly-assembled guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry, from the UK, America and beyond. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the seasoned poetry fan and the curious reader alike to encounter our most exciting new voices. 
 
Volume 3, Your Family, Your Body, features the work of Malika Booker, the Guyanese-British writer and performer behind London- and Chicago-based collective Malika's Kitchen; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sharon Olds, one of America's most brilliant, beloved and candid voices; and Warsan Shire, the poet who lent her words to Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade.

Penguin Modern Poets 3

Your Family, Your Body

Robert Burns

The farmer&rsquo;s boy from Ayrshire who went on to be the most acclaimed of all Scottish poets, celebrated around the world, Robert Burns is a greater and more varied artist than those that know him only through annual Burns&rsquo; Suppers and choruses of his &lsquo;Auld Lang Syne&rsquo; at New Year could imagine. 
 
 This new selection by Ian Rankin of verses and lyrics from Scotland&rsquo;s national poet, the &lsquo;Heaven-taught ploughman&rsquo;, reveals a writer capable of evoking tremendous sympathetic power from his readers and with an easy, astonishing command of the sounds and rhythms of both standard English and the evocative Scots tongue. It also reveals an artist of incredible range. His &lsquo;Tam O&rsquo; Shanter&rsquo;, with its midnight pursuit of witches from a grisly graveyard dance, is gripping, fantastical and funny in equal measure, &lsquo;Is there for honest poverty&rsquo; beautifully expresses the egalitarian spirit by which Burns became a political hero for so many, and sentiments both romantic (&lsquo;Ae Fond Kiss&rsquo;) and bawdy (&lsquo;The Fornicator&rsquo;) co-exist in this canny selection of the best of the Scottish Bard.

Poems of Robert Burns Selected by Ian Rankin

Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh&rsquo;s 1970s classic play &lsquo;Abigail&rsquo;s Party&rsquo; focuses on an evening of domestic hell in the guise of a suburban drinks soir&eacute;e. While teenager Abigail parties a few doors away, the pretentious Beverly and her estate agent husband, Laurence, entertain their neighbours &ndash; Abigail&rsquo;s mother, Susan, ex-footballer, Tony, and his wife, Angela. But as the alcohol flows, tensions in the hosts&rsquo; barely functional marriage emerge and their obsessions, prejudices and petty competitiveness are ruthlessly, and hilariously, exposed. 
 
&lsquo;Goose-Pimples&rsquo;, meanwhile, is easily as sharp and uncompromising. This time, the action focuses on ambitious casino croupier, Jackie, and Saudi businessman, Muhammad, who meet &ndash; and misunderstand &ndash; one another spectacularly.

Abigail's Party & Goose-Pimples

Theresa Lola

In Yoruba culture, newborn babies are welcomed into the world, and ushered into the social fabric, through naming ceremonies filled with songs of praise. The names bestowed are communicative both of where the baby has come from – the circumstances of its birth, the atmosphere in the home – and of where its future will take it. Both are forms of destiny. 
 
Far-reaching and musical, Theresa Lola’s second collection explores the act of naming and its role in shaping our identities, our aspirations, what we carry and how we belong. Lola conjures and questions the realities of her dual Nigerian-British identity; traces the lineages of names; asks why some deserve to be named while others are treated as though invisible; and explores the ways our journey through life might require us to cast off old expectations – both others’ and our own – just as at other times it can bring us back, strangely and unexpectedly, to where we first began. 
 
In lyrical, joyful and moving poems, Lola breaks down the complexities of the diasporic experience and the way it is woven through family life, history and memory. Ceremony for the Nameless is an exquisite collection from a thrilling contemporary voice, described as among “the ranks of an exciting new wave of young female bards who are widening the appeal of poetry for a new generation” (Sunday Times Style Magazine).

Ceremony for the Nameless

Niall MacMonagle

The Easter Rising of 1916 was a foundational moment of the independent Irish state; but while that insurrection continues to divide opinion, there is no disagreement as to the majesty of Yeats's 'Easter 1916', or about the excellence of the Irish poetic tradition over the past century. 
 
Windharp is an anthology that follows the twists and turns of Irish history, culture and society through the work of its remarkable standing army of poets. Edited by Niall MacMonagle, Ireland's most trusted poetry commentator, Windharpis an accessible and inspiring journey through a century of Irish life.

Windharp

Poems of Ireland since 1916

Henrik Ibsen

The four plays in this volume, written late in Ibsen's career as a dramatist, move away from his earlier preoccupation with people at odds with society to instead explore the inward struggle with their own thoughts, feelings and dreams. The Master Builder (1892) depicts a powerful man whose illusions collapse in the face of a young woman's courageous common sense. In Rosmersholm (1886), an idealist is forced to question his beliefs and confront terrible truths about the past, while Little Eyolf (1894) portrays a man's self-deception, which brings both tragic repercussions for his family and new hope for their future. And in John Gabriel Borkman (1896), a dying woman returns to reclaim the affections and loyalty of her nephew, resulting in a bitter struggle with her sister.

The Master Builder and Other Plays

Tony Harrison's Selected Poems was first published in 1984 and has been continuously in print in Penguin, through two editions, ever since. This is the first major new edition for many years. The long early sequence 'Palladas' has been dropped but everything else has been retained including the exquisite sonnets about his parents, the notorious 'V', the beautiful 'A Kumquat for John Keats' and many others that are among the best-loved poems of the later twentieth century. 
In addition powerful and important work from the last twenty or so years has been added, in particular the Gulf and Bosnian war poems commissioned by the Guardian newspaper, which won him the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry in 2007 - the most powerful war poems of our time. Yet another side of Harrison is represented in the delightfully witty 'Fruitility' - a long poem on the future effects of global warming on the north of England. 
This is altogether the perfect introduction to the work of one of our best poets.

Selected Poems

Don Paterson

Nick Laird

Kathleen Jamie

Other Ways to Leave the Room features the work of three of the most beloved and lauded poets currently at large. Between them, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and Nick Laird write lyrical, luminous and often darkly witty poems about the rugged wildness of the Scottish landscape; about fatherhood; about whisky-drinking, alcohol abuse and tenement life; about sex, love and the pursuit of the spiritual; about childhood in the Ireland of the Troubles, and about the strange possibilities of the technological future. What all three have in common is an ability to combine observations of gritty real life with a sense of the mythical proportions always lurking just under the surface of the everyday. 
 
The Penguin Modern Poets are succinct guides to the richness and diversity of contemporary poetry. Every volume brings together representative selections from the work of three poets now writing, allowing the curious reader and the seasoned lover of poetry to encounter the most exciting voices of our moment.

Penguin Modern Poets 4

Other Ways to Leave the Room

John Updike

John Updike was always as much a poet as a storyteller and the poems in this, his final collection, celebrate the everyday, even as they address his own imminent mortality. It is in the connected series of poems, Endpoint, written on his last few birthdays and culminating with the illness that killed him, that Updike's work is at its most touching and poignant.

Endpoint and Other Poems

Kathryn Maris

But back to the summer day the spike 
grazed my brother's scalp: I slept beside him 
in his racing car bed and my father woke me 
and slapped my face, thinking, I assume, of sex, 
whereas I was already thinking about death. 
 
Urban, suburban, observant, obsessive and wickedly witty, the poems in Kathryn Maris's third book range over such subjects as parenthood, marriage, adultery, the politics of children's sports contests, female incarceration and psychoanalysis. The House with Only an Attic and a Basement is that rare thing: a darkly funny collection of poems that courses with keen intelligence, yet carries its sophistication lightly so that it is a pleasure to stride along with every poem.

The House with Only an Attic and a Basement

Geoffrey Chaucer

'Those husbands that I had, 
Three of them were good and two were bad. 
The three that I call "good" were rich and old...'

The Wife of Bath

Ovid

In a world of gods and monsters, nothing is as it seems. 
 
When a deadly serpent's teeth are sown in the ground, warriors spring from the bloody soil. Only a great man can tame them and fulfil his destiny. Far away, Medusa, snakes writhing in her hair, meets her nemesis; the princess Andromeda is chained to a rock; people are transformed into owls, frogs, even mountains; a boy falls tragically in love with his own reflection. 
 
Enter a universe where love is cruel, men are destroyed by the gods and treachery is paid for in blood ...

The Serpent's Teeth

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy wrote some of the most moving and personal poems in his era and this collection brings together the best of his verse on life and love. 
 
Hardy's poems are by turn haunting, intense, songlike humerous and tender. From snatched lovers' meetings to the wreck of the Titanic from the death of a Dorest drummer boy in the Boer War to memories of his dead wife Emma, from ghosts, loss and longing to pleasure in landscape and weather, they tell the story of one of our best-loved writers, and the people and places that inspired him.

Poems of Thomas Hardy

Alan Lerner

Frederick Loewe

Sparkling with wit, wisdom and wonderful songs including, &lsquo;I Could Have Danced All Night&rsquo;, &lsquo;Wouldn&rsquo;t It Be Loverly&rsquo; and &lsquo;Get Me To The Church On Time&rsquo;, the musical play based on Bernard Shaw&rsquo;s &lsquo;Pygmalion&rsquo; has been delighting audiences since it was first performed in the 1950s. 
 
When overbearing Professor Higgins stumbles on flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, in Covent Garden he recognizes that her hideous vowels and forgotten consonants are all that separate her from the upper classes. Higgins wagers that he can pass her off as a Duchess in a matter of weeks. But what will become of Eliza when the bet is over? 
 
This edition of &lsquo;My Fair Lady&rsquo; includes the complete script and a selection of black and white stills from the Oscar-winning film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.

My Fair Lady

"A deeply intelligent book, but also a marvellously warm and intelligent one" Andrew Motion 
 
Three men walk the pages of W. G. Sebald's first literary work -- the painter Mathias Grünewald, the botanist G. W. Steller and W. G. Sebald himself. Written as a long poem in three parts, AFTER NATURE delves into each of these lives in turn, teasing out the haunting uncertainties of the past and revealing the terrible burden that history places on all of our shoulders.

After Nature

Dan Laurence

George Bernard Shaw

&lsquo;A tearing, flaring, revivalist drama&rsquo; was how Desmond MacCarthy described The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet. Set in America&rsquo;s Wild West and aptly subtitled &lsquo;A Sermon in Crude Melodrama&rsquo;, this single-act play concerns the conversion of a horse thief desperate to &lsquo;keep the devil&rsquo; in him and die game. Published in 1909, it brought Shaw into conflict with the Lord Chamberlain of England, who banned it on the grounds of alleged blasphemy, and it was twelve years before the play was performed in a London theatre. In an interview Shaw commented, &lsquo;I am sorry that Fanny&rsquo;s First Play has destroyed the cherished legend that I am an unpopular playwright &hellip; for the first time I have allowed a play of mine to run itself to death &hellip; And the worst of it is it will not die.&rsquo; First performed in 1911, the play is a delightful farce in which Shaw debates some of his favourite subjects: middle-class morality, marriage, parents and children and women&rsquo;s rights. And, deliberately concealing his authorship, Shaw took the opportunity to satirize contemporary drama critics who, he claimed, &lsquo;do not know dramatic chalk from dramatic cheese when it is no longer labelled for them.&rsquo;

The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and Fanny's First Play

Stephen Sexton

history is what we call / what might have happened differently / and didn't 
 
It is the decade of centuries, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive, playful, dream-like poems, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present, while Cheryl translates from the future, showing us how we exist in all three at once. 
 
Reckoning with both public and private tragedies, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One, the poems range across old Europe: 'Edelweiss' and Titanic setting sail, to a transatlantic, cross-century symposium in Part Two, where two giants perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through, it's practically always the anniversary of something terrible, but there's always Cheryl in the moonlight and her deck of tarot cards. 
 
A thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear, Cheryl's Destinies is the enchanting follow-up to the Forward Prize-winning If All the World and Love Were Young, by one of the most exciting young poets writing today.

Cheryl's Destinies

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 past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

Austerlitz

Aphra Behn

'We are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues . . .' 
 
Spy, traveller and pioneering female writer Aphra Benn's story of an African prince sold into slavery is considered one of the earliest English novels

Oroonoko

Albert Camus

Stuart Gilbert

Caligula reveals some aspects of the existential notion of 'the absurd' by portraying an emperor so mighty and so desperate in his search for freedom that he inevitably destroys gods, men and himself. The dramatic impetus of Cross Purpose, however, comes from the tension between consent to and refusal of man's absurdity; it is the tragedy of a man who returns home to his mother and sister without revealing his identity to them. By the time of The Just and The Possessed, refusal and rebellion have taken over, and in these overtly political plays (the latter based on Dostoyevsky's The Devils) Camus dramatizes action and revolt in the name of liberty. 
 
Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His play, Caligula, appeared in 1939. His first two important books, L'Etranger (The Outsider) and the long essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), were published when he returned to Paris. After the war he devoted himself to writing and established an international reputation with such books as La Peste (The Plague 1947), Les Justes (The Just 1949) and La Chute (The Fall; 1956). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was killed in a road accident in 1960.

Caligula and Other Plays

Maria Ferguson

In the consultation room I stared 
at the purple flowers in their purple 
vase and imagined my insides: 
an ocean, a cave, a storm. 
 
Maria Ferguson’s second poetry collection is a raw and powerful documentation of one woman’s experience of becoming a mother. Against a backdrop of the sounds and sensations of daily life, she longs for her own mother's embrace, observes as her body changes and charts a course through loss and wilting house plants towards recovery, empowerment and renewal. 
 
Tender, direct and winningly witty, Swell distils the poet's complex feelings surrounding family and domesticity, exploring the contending weight and levity felt as she contemplates a thrillingly unfamiliar new chapter. Ferguson is a poet as alert to the absurd as to the shattering, and these are large-hearted poems, full of life and thought. Together, they invite the reader to join them in a search for self-acceptance, for freedom from shame and for a path to stability in increasingly uncertain times.

Swell

Roger McGough

In this evocative and personal collection of poems Roger McGough comes to terms with painful memories as well as confronting fears that are universal. Here he remembers his father in &lsquo;Squaring Up&rsquo; and &lsquo;Alphabet Soup&rsquo;; observes the eccentricities of contemporary life in &lsquo;The City of London Tour&rsquo;; gives insights into human feeling with the surreal &lsquo;Your Favourite Hat&rsquo; and the moving elegy &lsquo;Defying Gravity&rsquo;; and muses on writing itself with &lsquo;Word Trap&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Darling Buds of Maybe&rsquo;. There are even witty poems dedicated to the chemical elements. Blending the everyday and the magical, his verses sparkle with verbal dexterity, irreverent humour, irony and heartfelt compassion.

Defying Gravity

Virgil

From the fall of Troy to the deadly Harpies, Aeneas&rsquo; epic voyage is filled with tragedy, destruction and omens of danger. As he recounts his adventures to Dido, who gives him sanctuary, they fall in love. But the Gods intervene and Aeneas realizes their relationship cannot last. 
 
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love&rsquo;s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love&hellip;

Doomed Love

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