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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

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Gun-Britt Sundström

<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>

‘I want to have him, I really do. I just don’t want him to have me.’ 
 
Martina and Gustav, students in 1970s Stockholm, meet and fall immediately into coupledom. But what is coupledom? A route to marriage? A declaration of co-dependency? A new dimension of commitment and responsibility? A sexual confrontation? Or is it a habit that an intelligent person must consider breaking? Martina and Gustav discuss their relationship endlessly, between themselves and with others, as they try to make it work. 
 
Engagement, set during a time of social change and political upheaval, sees Martina trying to engage with the world on her own terms. Unwilling to marry, she finds herself in a state of permanent engagement while her friends settle down to marriage and children; uncertain of the world’s future, she engages with demos, sit-ins and philosophy seminars in her quest for a new blueprint for joy. First published in 1976, when it was heralded as an instant classic, Engagement remains as relevant, hilarious and heartbreaking today.

Engagement

Georges Simenon

My dear Judge, I would like one man, just one, to understand me. And I really hope that man can be you. 
 
In a small town in western France, Dr Charles Alavoine seems to lead the perfect life: his own medical practice, two beautiful children, a new wife and a doting mother. Yet as each quiet day of bourgeois conformity passes, Alavoine begins to feel a sharp sense of futility and solitude. Then, one rainy day in December, he meets a mysterious young woman on a station platform. Fascinated by her innocence and the scars of her past, Alavoine’s passion soon gives way to obsession, as he is drawn deeper into a web of desire and deceit, ending in a terrible act that will forever change the course of his life. 
 
First published in 1947, Letter to My Judge is a masterful exploration of the darkest corners of the human soul, and a harrowing exorcism of Simenon’s phantoms.

Letter to My Judge

Czeslaw Milosz

'Thomas was born in the village of Gine at that time of year when a ripe apple thumps to the ground during an afternoon lull.' So a boy's life begins in a winding river valley on the Polish-Russian border where time is measured by seasonal rhythms and ancient songs. For Thomas, the ghosts in the forest are as real as the magical water-snakes that live in the Issa; in the village he is entranced by the women with their cinched waists and the men in their long boots. But when he is shown a map, he discovers a kingdom all his own and starts to dream of leaving the valley behind.

The Issa Valley

Seicho Matsumoto

Musashino, 1959. A young Japanese flight attendant is found strangled on the icy banks of the river. The police suspect foul play – but the deeper they dig, the more they collide with a wall of silence.At the centre of it all stands a foreign priest and the Guglielmo Church, a charitable Christian mission. The dead woman’s connection to the church is undeniable. But what begins as a routine investigation quickly turns into something far more treacherous, entangling together narcotics, post-war relief schemes and the delicate web of international diplomacy.As the story moves from back alleys to diplomatic sanctuaries, following the twists and turns of Detective Fujisawa's investigation, Seicho Matsumoto masterfully constructs a slow-burning procedural where truth is clear but justice is not permitted. 
 
Translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood.

Twilight in Musashino

Homer

With his Odyssey, best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has created a momentous new work, hailed by classicists and poets alike – a translation to stand with those of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles.Setting aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance – and in so doing restores to Homer’s master work its archaic grandeur. His expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. 
 
The result is the richest, most precise, and most musical Odyssey in English, one that fully conveys its oral poetics while bringing to vivid life the gripping adventure, profound human insight and powerful themes that make Homer’s work resonate some twenty-eight centuries after its composition. Supported by an extensive introduction and the fullest notes and commentary currently available, Mendelsohn’s Odyssey is poised to become the authoritative English-language version of this magnificent, endlessly enjoyable masterpiece.

The Odyssey

A New Translation by Daniel Mendelsohn

Anne Serre

A Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet. A masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. 
 
A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the Narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell. 
 
Translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.

A Leopard-Skin Hat

Elsa Morante

Elisa – orphaned as a child, raised by a ‘fallen woman’, fed by fairy tales – has lived in an outlandish imaginary world for years. When her guardian dies, she feels compelled to confront her family’s tortured and dramatic past, weaving the tale of her mother and grandmother through a history of intrigue, treachery, deception and desire. But as her saga of three generations of Sicilian women proceeds, it becomes something else entirely, taking in a whole legacy of oppression and injustice. By turns flamboyant and intense, raging and funny, Lies and Sorcery is a celebration of the female imagination, and the power of storytelling itself. 
 
First published in 1948, Elsa Morante’s debut novel won the Viareggio Prize and earned her the lasting admiration of generations of writers from Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg to Elena Ferrante. 
 
Translated by Jenny McPhee

Lies and Sorcery

Anatoly Marienhof

'A love that cannot be throttled by the rubber tube of an enema bulb is immortal.' 
 
Bookish and idealistic Vladimir is tormented with love for Olga; he brings her flowers when other men bring her flour and millet. Olga eventually agrees to marry him, as her building’s central heating will be out of service all winter and at least with two in the bed they’ll be warmer. When she decides she’d like to serve the revolution, he introduces her to his brother Sergei, a Bolshevik who manages the waterways. Thus begins an excruciating love triangle, measured in ration coupons and black market goods. 
 
Described by the poet Joseph Brodsky as 'one of the most innovative novels in Russian literature', Marienhof’s Cynics is a pitch-black comedy set during the wild and savage years of War Communism and the New Economic Policy. Cinematic in its style and collagist in its aesthetic, it establishes Marienhof as a true formal radical. It is a bawdy, savage, lavishly emotional portrayal of working for the revolution (and trying to ignore it).

Cynics

Yuko Tsushima

Mitch and Yonko haven’t spoken in a year. As children, they were inseparable, raised together in an orphanage outside Tokyo—but ever since the sudden death of Mitch’s brother, they’ve been mourning in their private ways, worlds apart. In the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, they choose to reunite, finding each other in a city undone by disaster. 
 
Mitch and Yonko have drifted apart, but they will always be bound together. Because long ago they witnessed an unspeakable tragedy, a tragedy that they’ve kept secret for their entire lives. They never speak of it, but it’s all around them. Like history, it repeats itself. 
 
Yuko Tsushima’s sweeping and consuming novel is a metaphysical saga of postwar Japan. Wildcat Dome is a hugely ambitious exploration of denial, of the ways in which countries and their citizens avoid telling the truth—a tale of guilt, loss, and inevitable reckoning. 
 
'Tsushima evades any label, her fiction transcends gender to focus on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity.' Japan Times

Wildcat Dome

Various

The prose short story arrived in Bengal in the wake of British colonizers, and Bengali writers quickly made the form their own. By the twentieth century a profusion of literary magazines and journals meant they were being avidly read by millions. 
 
Writers responded to this hunger for words with a ferocious energy which reflected the turmoil of their times: these stories covered land wars, famine, the caste system, religious conflict, patriarchy, Partition and the liberation war that saw the emergence of the independent country of Bangladesh. Across these shifting geographical borders, writers also looked inward, evolving new literary styles and stretching the possibilities of social realism, political fiction and intimate domestic tales. 
 
A first in English, this anthology gathers together a century's worth of extraordinary stories. From a woman who eats fish in secret to the woes of an ageing local footballer, from the anxieties of a middle-class union rep to a lawyer who stumbles upon a philosopher's stone, this is a collection that celebrates making art of life, in all its difficulty and joy.

The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories

Jean-Noël Orengo

An electrifying novel about the Nazi who reinvented himself, Albert Speer 
 
‘Which is the most seductive, truth or fiction?’ 
 
This is the story of Albert Speer: The protégé. The ‘good Nazi’. The star. The mythmaker. 
 
In 1969 Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production, publishes his memoirs. Rewriting his own past, claiming to have known nothing about the Final Solution, he declares himself ‘collectively responsible, but not individually guilty’. 
 
It is one of the greatest lies in history. 
 
Jean-Noël Orengo’s electrifying novel is the story of a man who saved his skin through the countless fictions he created about himself. A man with a talent for survival, who dazzled those around him with his monuments to power and then, escaping death, reinvented himself as a bestselling author. A man once described as the Führer's unrequited love. 
 
It is a story of power and ambition, self-interest and self-deceit – and what happens in a war over the truth.

You Are the Führer's Unrequited Love

The thirty-nine superb stories of The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories run the length of the literal and imaginative creation of Poland, from 1918 (when Poland regained its independence after 123 years of colonization by neighbouring empires) to the present. 
 
The stories include ‘Miss Winczewska’, by the acclaimed twentieth-century writer Maria Dabrowska, based on her experience of helping to establish a library for soldiers at the Citadel military base in Warsaw in the interwar period; and 'In the Shadow of Brooklyn' by Stanislaw Dygat (1914—1978), the comical tale of a young man's envy of what he imagines to be his father's success with women. At the contemporary end, it includes a story by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk (1962), 'The Green Children', a historical story set in 1656, narrated by a Scottish doctor who, as the Polish king's physician, travels about the wilds of Poland and encounters two feral children. Curated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, with an introduction by Olga Tokarczuk, this anthology is a refreshing and sparkling collection of the best in Polish literature.

The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories

Shahrnush Parsipur

This internationally acclaimed masterpiece by one of Iran’s most important and influential writers traces the interwoven destinies of five women – including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher – as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran.Drawing on recent Iranian history and transcendent elements of Islamic mysticism, Parsipur’s unforgettable novel sees women escaping strict confines of family and society. It is still as pertinent and discerning today as it was when travelling secretly from hand to hand upon its first publication in 1989.

Women Without Men

Onizuka Kumako is a fierce woman: tall, beautiful, and not afraid to speak her mind. In Tokyo bars, she seduces customers and commits petty crime, using her connections to the local yakuza to get by. When she meets Shirakawa Fukutaro, a rich widower desperate for companionship and unaware of her shady past, the two hit it off and are soon married. But their newly-wed bliss is suddenly cut short: one rainy July evening, their car veers off course, plunges into the harbour and Fukutaro is pulled beneath the waves. 
 
Suspected of murder and labelled a femme fatale, Kumako is hounded by the press, but stays firm, repeatedly proclaiming her own innocence. As pressure from dogged journalists mounts, the tide of public opinion is rising against her. But when a scrupulous defence lawyer takes on her case, doubt begins to creep in . . . 
 
In this intricate, psychological noir, masterfully translated into English for the first time, Seicho Matsumoto draws out the hidden demons that guide our convictions, our biases and our deepest desires.

Suspicion

Pirkko Saisio

Teenaged Pirkko can’t decide which she hates most: God, her communist father, or her growing breasts. Grandpa has moved into the room long promised to her, and Mother, overworked and distant, tries to keep the peace between her headstrong daughter and husband. It's 1960s Finland and Pirkko has fun getting into trouble. That is, until her teacher suggests she might have what it takes to be a real writer. Then the historic summer of 1968 arrives, which Pirkko spends working at a Swiss orphanage where no one understands her and, as much as her family drive her mad, she’s homesick for the first time.As the world shifts and swirls around her, Pirkko must make sense of it all – including her own sexual identity. A funny, unique coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a life lived in language, Backlight is the second volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogy.Translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg.

Backlight

Yukio Mishima

A writer is seized by apocalyptic visions, a trio of beatniks dance to modern jazz in the ruins of an abandoned church, and a séance brings forth the reproachful spirits of the military dead. 
 
In Voices of the Fallen Heroes, stark autobiography contrasts with pure horror, and the tenderness of first love cedes to obsession, heartbreak and deathly beauty. In one tale, Mishima recounts the true story of the time a deranged fan broke into his home at dawn. Elsewhere, a beautiful youth achieves eternal life through violent murder, and an ill-matched couple seal their fate with a pack of cards, tangled in the web of time and unfulfilled desire. 
 
Available in English for the first time, and carefully selected by expert translators, these captivating stories are the perfect introduction to Mishima's work, on the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Voices of the Fallen Heroes

And Other Stories

Inger Christensen

This is the story of a young woman who is spirited away to St. Petersburg from Copenhagen by a lovestruck admirer. When she dies after the Russian Revolution, her ashes are carried back to Denmark, igniting a chain reaction of further stories, told and retold by the women in her family against a shifting ground of meaning. We meet murderers and fable-like characters, such as the hilarious and unsettling Viktor Blanke, who manages to seduce not one but three generations of mothers and daughters. Natalja, we discover, cannot be held in one place. Rather than giving in to the tragedy that befalls her, she wills herself to become someone else, reinventing her family’s narrative one irresistible tale at a time.Tantalizing and full of wit, this remarkable, shape-shifting novel is available in English for the first time.

Natalja's Stories

Mircea Cartarescu

'Visionary... almost as if David Lynch had dramatised the prophetic books of William Blake' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times 
 
'This is writing of overwhelming accomplishment' Chris Power, Observer 
 
 An enthralling, hallucinatory masterwork by one of Central Europe’s most celebrated novelists 
 
‘We exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings’ 
 
Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu’s childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards. 
 
Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu’s Blinding is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.

Blinding: The Left Wing

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Vienna, 1939. Count Wallmoden, an officer and veteran of the First World War, is preparing to take part in a mysterious ‘military exercise’. One evening, while off duty, he meets the austere and beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors, whose secretive nature and elusive circle of acquaintances suggest that things – including the ‘military exercise’ – are not quite what they seem. Forced to leave the Baroness, Wallmoden promises to return for a tryst once his tour of duty is over, only to discover his unit has been mobilised for war. He finds himself over the border, marching across Europe – and, more seductively, stumbling to and fro over the border that separates the living from the dead. One constant remains: in this world or the next, he must keep his tryst with Baroness Pistohlkors. 
 
Simultaneously a ghost story drawing on the phantasms of the unconscious mind, a thriller where the erotic and the supernatural converge, and a shockingly realist account of the German Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, the novel Mars in Aries was refused a publishing permit by the Nazis, hinting as it did at the existence of an Austrian resistance. The book’s entire print run was put into storage and subsequently destroyed by an Allied air raid. Reprinted from the author’s proofs after the war, Mars in Aries is one of Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s finest and most celebrated novels.

Mars in Aries

Brigitte Reimann

Kathrin – five years into a disenchanting marriage – struggles to work the farm with her sister-in-law while her husband Heinrich is away fighting for the Third Reich. To help them with the harvest, Heinrich arranges for Alexei, a Russian prisoner of war, to labour in the fields. Though initially suspicious of this watchful stranger, Kathrin is soon drawn to Alexei, with ruinous consequences. 
 
First published in 1956, Woman in the Pillory is a formative novella by one of East Germany’s most significant writers, showcasing Brigitte Reimann’s vivid ideological engagement with the legacy of Nazi Germany and the Communist drive to create ‘a new kind of person’ following the devastation of the war.

Woman in the Pillory

Natsume Soseki

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'Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don't ever surrender yourself - not to Japan, not to anything' 
 
Soseki's work of gentle humour and doomed innocence depicts twenty-three-year-old Sanshiro, a recent graduate from a provincial college, as he begins university life in the big city of Tokyo. Baffled and excited by the traffic, the academics and - most of all - the women, Sanshiro must find his way amongst the sophisticates that fill his new life. An incisive social and cultural commentary, Sanshiro is also a subtle study of first love, tradition and modernization, and the idealism of youth against the cynicism of middle age. 
 
This is a Clothbound Classics edition of Soseki's beloved novel, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. These delectable and collectible Penguin editions are bound in high-quality, colourful and tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Masterfully translated by Jay Rubin, this edition also includes an introduction by Haruki Murakami.

Sanshiro

In the oppressive silence of the sitting room, the woman finally smoothed out the paper and, without putting on her glasses, read the two words her husband had written: 
 
The cat. 
 
Amidst the din of their Parisian neighbourhood, Émile and Marguerite live in total silence. After a hasty marriage in their sixties, their uneasy peace was shattered when Émile’s beloved cat mysteriously disappeared and was later found dead. Branding his wife the culprit, Émile’s retaliation against Marguerite’s cherished parrot sparked a silent battle of wills. Now they live parallel lives, communicating only through spiteful notes, mocking glances and mute accusations. As their suspicion and resentment mount, this bitter game of psychological warfare becomes a twisted necessity, binding them together in a relentless cycle of torment from which there can only be one escape. 
 
First published in 1967, The Cat is a masterful exploration of marital discord, loneliness and the absurdity of human relationships, painting a vivid portrait of two souls trapped in quiet desperation.

The Cat

Amidst the fury of a relentless snowstorm, the loyalties of two friends are put to the ultimate test, with fatal consequences. 
 
In the shadows of 1960s Paris, a woman on the brink of despair is offered a chance at redemption. But as the haunting truth of her past begins to emerge, it threatens to consume her. 
 
In a secluded hotel, an adulterous affair spirals into a terrible nightmare that will transform the couple’s lives forever. 
 
This new edition brings together Georges Simenon’s most gripping psychological novels from the 1960s, capturing the raw essence of human frailty and resilience during a time of profound social upheaval, and revealing the chilling brilliance of Simenon’s romans durs.

The Hand

And Other Novels

Hans Christian Andersen

Step into the enchanting world of Hans Christian Andersen with this collection of timeless Christmas tales, capturing both the magic and melancholy of the season. This selection brings together Andersen’s most beloved works, from the magical journey of ‘The Snow Queen’ to the heart-breaking ‘The Little Match Girl’, and the tender reflections on the passage of time in ‘The Fir Tree’. Together these stories show how Andersen transformed the traditional fairy tale with his unique ability to blend exuberant whimsy and profound insight.

The Snow Queen

Bhisham Sahni

Tamas, Bhisham Sahni’s 1973 novel, is a product of the Partition’s devastation. It drew immediate and universal critical acclaim for its poignant and striking retelling of Partition and its bloody aftermath. Tamas is a story about how simmering communal tensions snowball into full-fledged riots that grip villages across the subcontinent. In a city in undivided Punjab, Nathu, a tanner, is bribed to kill a pig. When the animal’s carcass is discovered on the steps of the local mosque the next morning, brewing tensions explode into riots and massacre. A seemingly well planned and executed job by the British plants seeds of mistrust and hatred among those who, until the day before, had been close friends and neighbours. Tamas is a chilling reminder of the consequences of religious intolerance and communal prejudice.

Tamas

Khadija Mastur

Set in the turbulent decade of the 1940s, The Women's Courtyard provides an inverted perspective on the Partition. Mastur’s novel gives expression to the preoccupations of the women in the courtyard, fighting different battles with loud voices. The novel follows a Muslim girl, Aliya, and her family, about and around the climax of the Independence struggle. While the national struggle rages on the street, Aliya, Aunty and the residents of the courtyard are tethered hopelessly to their own problems of life and death. The Women’s Courtyard is an experience in suffocation. Within the strict religious and social framework of a rigid Muslim family, there is a purdah between Aliya and the rest of the world.

The Women's Courtyard

Wu Cheng’en

One of China's Four Great Classical Novels, Monkey King was written anonymously during the Ming dynasty and is most commonly attributed to Wu Cheng'en, the son of a silk-shop clerk from east China. It recounts a Tang-dynasty monk's quest for Buddhist scriptures, accompanied by an omni-talented kung-fu Monkey King called Sun Wukong; a rice-loving divine pig; and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster. 
 
Comparable to The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment.

Monkey King

Journey to the West

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Inspired by an image of Christ's suffering, Dostoyevsky set out to create a protagonist with 'a truly beautiful soul' and to trace the fate of such an individual as he comes into contact with the brutal reality of contemporary society. The novel begins when the innocent epileptic Prince Myshkin - the 'idiot' - arrives in St Petersburg and finds himself drawn into a web of violent and passionate relationships that leads to blackmail, betrayal and eventually murder. 
 
This is a stunning new Clothbound Classics edition of Dostoyevsky's great novel, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith and translated by David McDuff. These delectable and collectible Penguin editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.

The Idiot

Akiyuki Nosaka

In the dying days of the War, Seita and Setsuko must fend for themselves. Firebombs have obliterated their home in Kobe, leaving them searching for shelter and scrambling to survive in the depths of the countryside. But, as their suffering becomes a constant companion, so do the lights of the fireflies – shining from the bomber planes, and the insects glowing by the lake at night. 
 This unforgettable semi-autobiographical tale by Akiyuki Nosaka won him the Naoki Prize, cementing his place in the Japanese cultural canon. Published here for the first time as a standalone story, Grave of the Fireflies illuminates the untold sorrows of normal people who live in the shadow of war.

Grave of the Fireflies

Tove Ditlevsen

I want to write a book about Vilhelm’s room and the events which took place in it, or arose from it; those that led to Lise’s death, which I have survived only so that I might write down the story of her and Vilhelm... 
 
The ripples from a breakup radiate outwards from the room where a married couple once loved each other, and a bizarre Lonely Hearts advert sets off a train of tragicomic events that lead to an inevitable conclusion. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel – published a year before her suicide in 1976 – is a masterful conclusion to a great work of writing: a blackly funny and devastating tour-de-force that pulses with life even as it journeys towards death.

Vilhelm's Room

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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