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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

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

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Terry Pratchett

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Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is in hot pursuit of a serial killer. The trouble is, a well-timed lightning strike has thrown both policeman and pursued into the city’s past. Now Vimes must relive the history that made him: a cruel regime, a bloody revolution, a corrupt police force, and, most unnerving of all, a keen young recruit named Sam Vimes… Night Watch, which draws on inspirations as far ranging as Victor Hugo and M*A*S*H, is a keen satire about the true nature of political power, and the sacrifices made in the name of the greater good; but also a profoundly empathetic novel about community, connection and the tenacity of the human spirit. 
 
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are among the most successful and influential fantasy titles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This edition of Night Watch – written at the height of Pratchett’s imaginative powers – includes a new foreword by Rob Wilkins and an introduction and annotations by Dr David Lloyd and Dr Darryl Jones, contextualising the novel and Pratchett’s far-reaching legacy for new readers and current fans alike. 
 
'A master storyteller' - A.S. Byatt

Night Watch

Mikhail Bulgakov

What would happen if a doctor implanted the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into the body of a stray dog? In Mikhail Bulgakov’s topsy-turvy world, the dog starts to walk on two legs, drink, smoke, thieve, chase women and recite every swear word in Russian. The perfect candidate for a government official, in other words. This rude, riotous send-up of the Soviet Union, banned immediately on publication, is satire red in tooth and claw.

A Dog's Heart

Margaret Cavendish

‘I had rather die in the adventure of noble achievements, than live in obscure and sluggish security’ 
 
In 1666, Margaret Cavendish had a vision: there was a crack in reality at the North Pole leading to a utopian parallel universe, where gender roles, scientific orthodoxy and political norms had been razed to the ground. She slipped through the portal and returned with the first science fiction novel in English – an explosive account of the Blazing World.

The Blazing World

Stanislaw Lem

Journey into space with Polish scifi master Stanislaw Lem. The whimsical time-loops of Ijon Tichy’s cosmic adventure ‘The Seventh Voyage’ are reminiscent of Douglas Adams, while the spectral whispers haunting Pirx the Pilot as he navigates his spaceship to Mars in ‘Terminus’, echo the author’s masterpiece Solaris. Then ‘The Mask’ introduces a perfect robot assassin and asks, can AI fall in love or refuse its programming? What if the target of its affections is also its prey?

The Seventh Voyage

H. P. Lovecraft

‘Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before’ 
 
After five years of 'strange amnesia', Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee remains haunted by madness and memories that cannot be real. Desperate for answers he travels to Western Australia, joining an archaeological excavation into Earth’s deep past. 
 
Journey with Peaslee to discover his fate in the story described by author Lin Carter as ‘Lovecraft’s single greatest achievement in fiction’.

The Shadow out of Time

H G Wells

The Time Machine is the great, gleeful anarchist novel of the 1890s. It is both a thrilling adventure story and a satire on religion, evolution and human hopes. With this book, Wells invented an entirely new genre and did it better than any of his imitators. 
 
An immediate bestseller, it has delighted and unnerved generations of readers, and will no doubt keep on doing so until some of the events predicted in the book make readers extinct.

The Time Machine

Mary Shelley

Written while Mary Shelley was in a self-imposed lockdown after the loss of her husband and children, and in the wake of intersecting crises including the climate-changing Mount Tambora eruption and a raging cholera outbreak, The Last Man (1826) is an early work of climate fiction and a prophetic depiction of environmental change. 
 
Set in the late twenty-first century, a deadly pandemic leaves a lone survivor, and follows his journey through a post-apocalyptic world, devoid of humanity and reclaimed by nature. Rather than 
give in to despair, Shelley imagines a new world where freshly-formed communities and alternative ways of being stand in for self-important politicians serving corrupt institutions, and where nature reigns mightily over humanity. 
 
Brimming with political intrigue, The Last Man broaches partisan dysfunction, imperial warfare, refugee crises, and economic collapse&mdash;and brings the legacy of her radically progressive parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, to bear on present-day questions about making a better world less centred around &ldquo;man&quot;.

The Last Man

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'We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.' 
 
Like his much-loved novels, E. M. Forster's short stories are rich in irony and alive with sharp observations on the surprises life holds. Telling tales of violent events, discomforting coincidences, and other disruptive happenings, his sharp and vivid prose has the ability to throw the characters', and readers', perceptions and beliefs off balance. 
 
Selected to appeal to a new generation of readers around the world, this new selection of short stories in the Penguin English Library series celebrates E. M. Forster's unparalleled skill for storytelling, beginning with his masterful work of science fiction, The Machine Stops.

The Machine Stops and Other Stories

Kobo Abe

Introducing Penguin Japanese Classics: a collection of some of Japan's most celebrated and ground-breaking 20th century writers, with covers inspired by Japanese art and design. Taking us from a sun-drenched affair in a seaside town to an underground 'ark' full of shadows and eccentrics, with stops at mountains of skulls, lonely apartments and boarding school dormitories, this series is perfect for new and long-time readers of Japanese literature. 
 
A recluse known as 'Mole' retreats to a vast underground bunker, only to find that strange guests, booby traps and a giant toilet may prove even greater obstacles than nuclear disaster. A science-fiction classic from acclaimed Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura's Kafkaesque embrace of nuclear disaster and ecological catastrophe is at turns both hilarious and desperate. 
 
'One of Japan's most venerated writers' David Mitchell 
 
Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

The Ark Sakura

George S. Schuyler

Black Empire tells the electrifying tale of Dr Henry Belsidus, a Black scientific genius desperate to free his people from the crushing tyranny of racism. To do so, he concocts a plot to enlist a crew of Black intellectuals to help him take over the world, cultivating a global network to reclaim Africa from imperial powers and punish Europe and America for white supremacy and their crimes against the planet's Black population. 
 
At once a daring, high-stakes science fiction adventure and a strikingly innovative Afrofuturist classic, this controversial and fearlessly political work lays bare the ethical quandaries of exactly how far one should go in the name of justice.

Black Empire

Yukio Mishima

The Osugi family have come to a realization. Each of them hails from a different planet. Father from Mars, mother from Jupiter, son from Mercury and daughter from Venus. Already seen as oddballs in their small Japanese town in the 1960s, this extra-terrestrial knowledge brings them closer together; they climb mountains to wait for UFOs, study at home together and regard their human neighbours with a kindly benevolence. 
 
But Father, Juichiro, is worried about the bomb. He writes letters to Khrushchev, trying to warn everyone he can of the terrible threat. After all, humans may be terribly flawed, but aren't they worth saving? He sends out a coded message in the newspaper to find other aliens. But there are other extra-terrestrials out there, ones who do not look so kindly on the flaws and foibles of humans. And a charming young man, who claims to be from Venus too, tempts daughter Akiko away from the family . . .

Beautiful Star

Karin Boye

A pioneering work of dystopian fiction from one of Sweden's most acclaimed writers 
 
Written midway between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the terrible events of the Second World War were unfolding, Kallocain depicts a totalitarian 'World State' which seeks to crush the individual entirely. In this desolate, paranoid landscape of 'police eyes' and 'police ears', the obedient citizen and middle-ranking scientist Leo Kall discovers a drug that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. But can private thought really be obliterated? Karin Boye's chilling novel of creeping alienation shows the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance, no matter how futile. 
 
Translated with an introduction by David McDuff

Kallocain

Penguin Classics

Italo Calvino

Twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe from the giant of Italian literature, Italo Calvino. His characters - whether human, dinosaur or mollusc - disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life.

Cosmicomics

David Lindsay

After journeying across the stars, a man from Earth finds himself lost among the scarlet deserts, black cliffs and semi-sentient oceans of Tormance, a world lit by the star Arcturus. Pulled northward by the sound of drums, and undergoing strange physical transformations, the Earthman's adventures with the planet's inhabitants begin to shine with arcane significance - ending finally in startling and unforgettable revelations. 
 
At once an extraordinary odyssey across a bizarre alien world, a visceral exploration of human thought and behaviour, and a unique metaphysical examination of the cosmos, David Lindsay's masterpiece is a pioneering work of science fiction that has influenced generations of writers, including C.S Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Philip Pullman.

A Voyage to Arcturus

It's New Years Day in 1933 in New York City and Max Disher, a young black man, has just heard the news: a mysterious doctor has discovered a strange process that can turn black skin white - a new way to 'solve the American race problem'. Max, who is tired of being rejected and abused because of his dark skin, leaps at the opportunity. After receiving the 'Black-No-More' procedure, he becomes Matthew Fisher, a white man who is able to attain everything he has ever wanted: money, power and a beautiful wife. But it soon becomes apparent that America, whiter than ever, is becoming more and more dangerous . . . 
 
An extraordinary, cutting satire, Black No More is an utterly unique work of science fiction, and one of the first works of Black speculative fiction.

Black No More

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany is widely considered to be one of the greatest science fiction writers of the twentieth century, and a pioneer of Black and Queer genre fiction. 
 
Driftglass, the definitive collection of Delany's science fiction stories, displays the extraordinary depth of his writing: strange men and women labouring beneath the seas, the struggle of those attempting to break free from their galaxies, the intrigue of violent underworlds, as well as children with psychic powers and an ice cream parlour on a moon of Neptune. Radical, inventive, and brilliantly original, Driftglass contains the Hugo and Nebula award-winning stories 'Aye, and Gomorrah. . .' and 'Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones'.

Driftglass

Harry Harrison

The planet's population has exploded. The 35 million inhabitants of New York City run their TVs off pedal power, riot for water, trample for lentil 'steaks', and sweat beneath a sweltering sun. Amid it all, a city cop tries to catch a gangster's killer and vie for the affection of a dangerous woman... 
 
Offering a disturbing vision of the future and a groundbreaking exploration of the dangers of overpopulation, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! is a keystone work of science fiction -- and the basis of the cult film Soylent Green.

Make Room! Make Room!

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg

Is BER-66 a human or a machine? As he navigates the corridors and locked rooms of a strange bunker, he must solve the mysteries of murderous doppelgangers, a slow-motion city on the verge of destruction, and ultimately, the all-powerful Mechanism itself... 
 
Considered to be one of the most important and original Polish science fiction novels of all time but never before translated into English, Adam Wisniewski-Snerg's debut novel is a haunting and mind-bending masterpiece of philosophical enquiry that penetrates deep into the heart of what it means to be human.

Robot

Robert Sheckley

Often considered to be Robert Sheckley's best short story collection, Untouched By Human Hands displays all of the author's signature surreal humour and eye for the unreal. Featuring human space exploration from the perspective of appalled aliens, darkly comic dystopias and wry fables of technological disaster, this slim collection is rich in wit, invention and provocative insight, and includes the classic stories 'The Monsters', Specialist' and 'Seventh Victim'.

Untouched By Human Hands

James Tiptree Jr.

Daring, energetic, and struck through with linguistic inventiveness, Warm Worlds and Otherwise is one of the most influential short story collections in all of science fiction, and one of the principle achievements of James Tiptree Jr - the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon. 
 
Demonstrating Tiptree's eye for unnerving future dystopias and her unparalleled depiction of strange worlds and mysterious creatures, Warm Worlds and Otherwise also traces a movement toward ground-breaking explorations of sexuality, gender and race. Included in this collection are the Hugo and Nebula award-winning 'The Girl Who was Plugged In' and 'Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death', as well as the extraordinary 'The Women Men Can't See'.

Warm Worlds and Otherwise

Len Deighton

Texan billionaire General Midwinter will stop at nothing to bring down the USSR - even if it puts the whole world at risk. The fourth and final novel featuring the cynical, insolent narrator of The IPCRESS File sees him sent from his shabby Soho office to bone-freezing Helsinki in order to penetrate Midwinter's vast anti-Communist network - and stop a deadly virus from wiping out the planet.

Billion-Dollar Brain

Penguin Modern Classics

Russell Hoban

Fourth Galaxy, 4 November 2052: in the blackness of space a figure in blue overalls tumbles over and over as it drifts towards the planet Badr-al-Budur. No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. He can't be alive, can he? But he is. 
 
First Navigator Fremder Gorn is the only survivor when the Corporation tanker Clever Daughter disappears. Nobody knows how he did it, and everybody, including Fremder himself, wants to know. Dr Caroline Lovecraft, Head of the Physio/Psycho unit, finds that intimacy doesn't lead to answers and Fremder's own memories are resolutely obscure. Fremder's name means stranger, and his story is otherworldly and yet ultimately life-affirming.

Fremder

'O what we ben! And what we come to...' Wandering a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape, speaking a broken-down English lost after the end of civilization, Riddley Walker sets out to find out what brought humanity here. This is his story.

Riddley Walker

George Orwell

Fido Nesti

Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker, Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Graphic Novel

On an ordinary day in a strangely unfamiliar London, Kleinzeit is fired from his advertising job and told he must go to hospital with a skewed hypotenuse. There on Ward A4, he falls in love with the divine, rosy-cheeked Sister and is sent spinning into a quest involving, among other things, a glockenspiel, sheets of yellow paper, Orpheus, the Underground and that dirty chimpanzee, Death.

Kleinzeit

'I have gone to look for a lion.' In a world where lions have become extinct, the map-maker Jachin-Boaz nevertheless abandons his wife and son to find one, leaving just this note. But his decision has unexpected consequences. He will be pursued by his son, Boaz-Jachin, and by something else: a tawny-skinned, amber-eyed beast from another place and time, a bringer of life and death.

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz

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The Annotated Edition

Kurt Vonnegut

Dr Felix Hoenikker - a father of the atomic bomb - has another creation. Far more dangerous than that which levelled Hiroshima is ice-nine, a chemical that could freeze the world's oceans solid. The search for Hoenikker leads first to his three children, each in possession of the chemical, and then to the Republic of San Lorenzo, a mysterious island in thrall to a bizarre religion. 
First published a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cat's Cradle is shot through with a nauseous anxiety about the nuclear apocalypse. Yet Vonnegut's darkly hilarious dissection of apathy and selfishness on the edge of the abyss speaks clearly to our own environmental angst and to the fragility of civilization.

Cat's Cradle

Announced in a thunderclap out of another day's tedium, Tom Carmody - a hapless New Yorker - learns that he is the winner of the Intergalactic Sweepstake. Accepting with a shrug, he is whipped across the universe to collect his prize. The catch? There's no way home. Enlisting the help of galactic bureaucrats, planetary engineers and a couple of gods, Carmody embarks on a desperate search for Earth, all the while being pursued by a perplexing predatory creature . . . 
 
Often compared to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dimension of Miracles is a masterwork of electric humour that offers an oblique examination of human nature amid the vastness of the cosmos.

Dimension of Miracles

Edwin Abbott

A work that still poses provocative questions about perception and reality, Flatland is a brilliant parody of Victorian society where all existence is limited to length and breadth - its inhabitants unable even to imagine a third dimension. The amiable narrator, A. Square, provides an overview of this fantastic world - its physics and metaphysics, its history, customs and religious beliefs. But when a strange visitor mysteriously appears and transports the incredulous Flatlander to the Land of Three Dimensions, his worldview is forever shattered. 
 
Written more than a century ago, Flatland offers an extraordinary animation of dimension, geometry and physical space that continues to resonate in contemporary science.

Flatland

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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