Alec Russell

Alec Vidler

Alec Wilkinson

Aled Jones

Aleesha Nandhra

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) was one of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century, as well as a classically trained pianist and musicologist. His best-known novels are The Lost Steps, Explosion in a Cathedral, and The Kingdom of This World. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and raised in Havana, Cuba, Carpentier lived for many years in France and Venezuela before returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. A few years later he returned to France, where he lived until his death.

Alejo Carpentier

Dr Aleks Krotoski is an award-winning international broadcaster, author and academic. She has topped the ratings for the BBC and Channel 4, winning Emmy, BAFTA, Radio Academy and Royal Society awards, and has written and presented landmark technology and social science series for both radio (with BBC Radio 4’s The Artificial Human and The Digital Human) and international television (with BBC World’s The Virtual Revolution). Krotoski has held fellowships at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and received an honorary doctorate from the Open University. She currently teaches at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Aleks Krotoski

Aleksandar Ciric

Aleksandar Sotirovski

Aleksandar Zolotic

Aleksandr Orlov

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in 1918 and grew up in Rostov-on-Don. He graduated in Physics and Mathematics from Rostov University and studied Literature by correspondence course at Moscow University. In World War II he fought as an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. In 1945, however, after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter, he was arrested and summarily sentenced to eight years in forced labour camps, followed by internal exile. In 1957 he formally rehabilitated, and settled down to teaching and writing, in Ryazan and Moscow. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in Novy Mir in 1962 was followed by publication, in the West, of his novels Cancer Ward and The First Circle. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 1974 his citizenship was revoked and he was expelled from the Soviet Union. He settled in Vermont and worked on his great historical cycle The Red Wheel. In 1990, with the fall of Soviet Communism, his citizenship was restored and four years later he returned to settle in Russia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died in August 2008.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksei Bitskoff

Aleksei Evdokimo

Aleksi Hoffman

Alena Tkach is an award-winning Ukrainian freelance illustrator who studied Graphic Arts at Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts. She works mostly as children’s book illustrator and 2D artist. Alena loves llamas because they are cute and sweet, and when they jump it's really funny. Follow Alena on Instagram @alena.tkach.

Alena Tkach

Alessandra Peters

Alessandro Manzoni

Alex Bellos is a journalist, broadcaster and puzzle master. He read Mathematics and Philosophy at Oxford University before becoming a journalist and writer. Alex was born in Oxford and grew up in Edinburgh and Southampton and lived in Brazil for five years as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian before returning to the UK He is the author of 8 books about puzzles and mathematics and currently writes weekly puzzle column for the Guardian.

Alex Bellos

Alex Berenson

Alex Boardman

Alex Brummer

Alex Bulmer

Alex Butterworth

Alex Caine

Alex Carter

Alex Chance

Alex Cliff

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Emile Zola

Set in the taverns of Paris, this is perhaps the first classical tragedy of working-class people living in the slums of a city. The Drinking Den (1877) is part of the Rougon-Macquart series, a naturalistic history of two branches of a family traced through several generations. Zola's work was influenced by contemporary theories of heredity and experimental science, and the behaviour of the two families is shown to be conditioned by environment and inherited characteristics, chiefly drunkenness and mental instability.

The Drinking Den

Born to drunken parents in the slums of Paris, Nana lives in squalor until she is discovered at the Théâtre des Variétés. She soon rises from the streets to set the city alight as the most famous high-class prostitute of her day. Rich men, Comtes and Marquises fall at her feet, great ladies try to emulate her appearance, lovers even kill themselves for her. Nana's hedonistic appetite for luxury and decadent pleasures knows no bounds - until, eventually, it consumes her. Nana provoked outrage on its publication in 1880, with its heroine damned as 'the most crude and bestial sort of whore', yes the language of the novel makes Nana almost a mythical figure: a destructive force preying on a corrupt society.

Nana

Gustave Flaubert

Sentimental Education begins with the hero - Frederic Moreau - leaving Paris and returning to the provinces and his mother.  Part love story, part historical novel and satire it tells of how Moreau is driven by passion for an unattainable older woman. His 'sentimental education' turns out to be more of an anxious quest than a happy one, echoing Flaubert's own life experience of unrequited love. Packed with vivid detail and characterised by its historical authenticity, the book was described by Flaubert as 'the moral history of the men of my generation'.

Sentimental Education

Considered by André Gide to be one of the ten greatest novels in the French language, Germinal is a brutal depiction of the poverty and wretchedness of a mining community in northern France under the second empire.  At the centre of the novel is Etienne Lantier, a handsome 21 year-old mechanic, intelligent but with little education and a dangerous predisposition to murderous, alcoholic rage.  Germinal tells the parallel story of Etienne's refusal to accept what he appears destined to become, and of the miners' difficult decision to strike in order to fight for a better standard of life.

Germinal

Penguin Classics

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Visiting an idyllic German village, Werther, a sensitive young man, falls in love with sweet-natured Lotte. Though he realizes that Lotte is to marry Albert, he is unable to subdue his passion and his infatuation torments him to the point of despair. The first great 'confessional' novel, it draws both on Goethe's own unrequited love for Charlotte Buff and on the death of a close friend. 
The book was an immediate success and a cult rapidly grew up around it, resulting in numerous copycat deaths as well as violent criticism and suppression for its apparent support of suicide. Goethe's exploration of the mind of an artist at odds with society and ill-equipped to cope with life remains as poignant as when it was first written.

The Sorrows of Young Werther

Marcel Proust

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Since the original prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is one of the greatest,most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is the Penguin Proust that makes Proust accessible to a new generation. 
Each volume is translated by a different, superb translator working under the general editorship of Professor Christopher Prendergast, University of Cambridge.

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1

The Way by Swann's

Since the original, prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is the Penguin Proust that makes Proust accessible to a new generation. 
Each book is translated by a different, superb translator working under the general editorship of Professor Christopher Prendergast, University of Cambridge.

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 2

In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 3

The Guermantes Way

Since the original, prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is one of the greatest, most enjoyable reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is the Penguin Proust that makes Proust accessible to a new generation. 
Each book is translated by a different, superb translator working under the general editorship of Professor Christopher Prendergast.

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 4

Sodom and Gomorrah

Since the original, prewar translation there has been no completely new rendering of the French original into English. This translation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic and lucid Proust. IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is one of the greatest, most entertaining reading experiences in any language. As the great story unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastating end, it is the Penguin Proust that makes Proust accessible to a new generation. 
Each book is translated by a different, superb translator working under the general editorship of Professor Christopher Prendergast, University of Cambridge.

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 5

The Prisoner and the Fugitive

In Search of Lost Time: Volume 6

Finding Time Again

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert's erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its publication in 1857. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi'.

Madame Bovary

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated &quot;Library of Babel&quot;.

Labyrinths

'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

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

The Aleph

Ivan Turgenev

Turgenev is an author who no longer belongs to Russia only. During the last fifteen years of his life he won for himself the reading public, first in France, then in Germany and America, and finally in England. In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: 'The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stand more than any other man as the incarnation of the whole race,' because 'a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth.' Rudin is the first of Turgenev's social novels, and is a sort of artistic introduction to those that follow, because it refers to the epoch anterior to that when the present social and political movements began. This epoch is being fast forgotten, and without his novel it would be difficult for us to fully realise it, but it is well worth studying, because we find in it the germ of future growths.

Rudin

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

Various

What does Brazilian literature mean to you? Football and favelas, carnival and caipirinhas? Or perhaps, past these cliches, a multifarious literary landscape comes into view? 
 
Spanning 150 years of Brazilian history, these stories are a thrilling cross-section of a diverse short story culture. Ranging from luscious avant-garde writing by Clarice Lispector to realist wit by Machado de Assis, The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories takes in wild humour, heart-breaking drama, the legacy of slavery, the influence of waves of immigration, and a surprising preponderance of ants. Ethnicity, family and loyalty collide in Chico Buarque’s ‘The Cousins from Campos’; and a man who absolutely does not know Javanese builds a career as a translator in Lima Barreto’s ‘The Man Who Knew Javanese’. 
 
Stories also comes with a note from the translator, illuminating the creative process of translation, and the anthology is supported by exploratory apparatus from editors Daniel Hahn and Padma Viswanathan. Rich, thought-provoking and playful, The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories is a landmark text.

The Penguin Book of Brazilian Short Stories

Arkady Strugatsky

Boris Strugatsky

The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn

Georges Simenon

Sin and green shutters: both entailed lots of unexpected consequences that weren’t easy to see at first glance . . . 
 
In the twilight of his career, ‘The Great’ Emile Maugin, a once-celebrated actor, receives devastating news: he does not have long left to live. Hounded by rage, alcoholism and the memories of his fractured childhood, he sleepwalks through the sodden marshes of the Vendée and the stage doors and dimly-lit bars of postwar Paris. Yet, faintly visible on the horizon of his mind, stands a white house with green shutters and manicured lawns, whose inhabitants lead the ‘normal life’ that lies just beyond Maugin’s reach. 
 
First published in 1950, The Green Shutters cuts to the heart of a desperate man, showcasing Simenon’s unparalleled ability to delve into the depths of the human soul and asking: what is left to us when time runs out?

The Green Shutters

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

Anders Bodelsen

Flemming Borck is the ideal bank teller: quiet, meticulous, perhaps a little dull. He even stays late to tidy up, which is how he finds the note: THE THING IN MY POCKET IS A REVOLVER. HAND OVER THE CASH YOU'VE GOT IMMEDIATELY. 
 
This draft of a stick-up, discarded at the counter, is Borck's warning that the Father Christmas outside the shopping centre is not all that he seems. So Borck hatches a plan. But he soon finds out that being quiet and meticulous won't save him from the messy and dangerous situation he's got himself into...

Think of a Number

Thomas Mann

‘This man is mad. Of that there can no longer be any doubt, and it is pitiable that no one representing psychiatric science is part of our circle.’ 
 
Germany, May 1943: a middle-aged scholar retires to his study to reflect on the life and untimely death of his friend, a once-brilliant composer. How his friend, consumed by over-reaching ambition, entered into a pact with the Devil. How he enjoyed twenty-four years of musical genius and extraordinary creative achievement. And how, inevitably and tragically, the Devil returned to demand satisfaction. 
 
A reworking of the classic Faust legend, Doctor Faustus is one of the great novels of the twentieth century: a powerful allegory of the rise of the Nazism in Germany and a meditation on madness, ambition and the dangerous attractions of nihilism.

Doctor Faustus

It is summertime in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, an ‘ordinary young man’, has arrived at an exclusive sanitorium for a brief visit to his convalescent cousin. Once there, time will lose its familiar contours, as Hans himself falls ill and loses himself in a landscape of dreams, beauty and eternal snow. 
 
The Magic Mountain is Thomas Mann’s masterwork: a Bildungsroman that is also an allegory of Europe before the devastations of the First World War and a profound meditation on time, art, sickness and death. John E. Woods’ virtuoso translations of Thomas Mann’s novels are widely recognized as the best versions available in English.

The Magic Mountain

Giorgio Scerbanenco

One balmy spring evening on the outskirts of Milan, a Fiat with two passengers plunges into a canal. At first, their deaths are registered as an accident. But the suave Duca Lamberti, a doctor-turned-detective, suspects there’s more to it than that. Because that same canal has been the scene of other deaths, and all the incidents have one man in a lawyer with a murky past stretching all the way back to World War II—a man who, in fact, once shared a prison cell with Lamberti. Winner of the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1968, Traitors to All lays bare the connections between Milan’s troubled history during the war and its swinging sixties affluence, as well as an utterly absorbing tale of betrayal and revenge.

Traitors to All

Green Ideas

Green Puffin Classics

Greg the Sausage Roll

Grumpy Monkey

Guillermo Downes Thriller

Guru Guru Pon Chan

Hairy Maclary and Friends

Meet Nathan Byrn. 
 
He's half White Witch, half Black Witch 
His mother was a healer, his father is a killer 
He's been kept in a cage since he was fourteen. 
 
If White Witches are good 
And Black Witches are evil... 
What happens if you are both?

Half Bad

Hammarby Thrillers

Intellectually brilliant, cultured and sophisticated, with refined tastes in art, music and cuisine. And a pure sociopath. This is the series that launched the world’s number one villain – Hannibal Lecter.

Hannibal Lecter

Happy Families

Harlem Renaissance Series

Harold Fry

Harry Hole

Harry and the Dinosaurs

Hatchimals

Hattie B, Magical Vet

Hawk series

Hawthorne

He Who Fights With Monsters

Heart Hassle

Heartbreaking romances from Rebecca Yarros

Heartland Trilogy

Heaven Official's Blessing

Heavenly Bodies

Henry Pratt is the epitomy of the great British underdog. Nothing is ever simple in his world, just when it seems things are going right, life throws him another unwanted curve-ball. Join Pratt as he traverses the highs and lows of everyday life in this comic masterpiece.

Henry Pratt

Her Hidden Fire

To some a brilliant warrior, to others a devil in human form; Hereward is as adept in the art of slaughter as the enemies that gather to claim England's throne. With King Edward heirless and ailing, Hereward has been declared an outlaw. What is he willing to risk in order to save the land he loves? 
 
Hereward's tales are of heroism, treachery, rebellion and bloody battles, with William the Bastard never too far away.

Hereward

Heroes of Olympus

Heroes of Olympus Graphic Novels

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