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

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Judith Flanders

The Macdonald sisters -- Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the 19th century.

A Circle of Sisters

Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin

Colm Tóibín

'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses 
 
In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know Colm Tóibín takes three of Ireland's greatest writers - Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and James Joyce - and examines their earliest influences: their fathers. With his inimitable wit and sensitivity, Tóibín introduces us to Wilde Senior, the philandering doctor whose libel case prefigured that of his son; the elder Yeats, an impoverished artist who never finished a painting; and to John Stanislaus Joyce, the hard-drinking, storytelling father of James, who couldn't feed his own family. This is an illuminating study of how each of these men cast a long shadow not only over the lives of their famous sons, but over the works for which they are celebrated and cherished.

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce

In his essay on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, Colm Tóibín reveals an artist 'alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish' and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father or Thomas Mann and his children or J.M. Synge and his mother, Toibin examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Tóibín makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. 'Educating an unintellectual woman,' Cheever remarked, 'is like letting a rattlesnake into the house.' 
 
In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulates, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Writers and Their Families

James Walton

Which Haruki Murakami novel shares its title with a Beatles song? In Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, what is Charlie's surname? What is heavy-drinking Rachel Watson known as in the title of a 21st-century bestseller? And what do you get if you add the number of Bennet sisters in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to the number of Karamazov brothers in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov? 
 
With four hundred questions covering books from literary classics to modern bestsellers, through iconic children's books and books you say that you've read but really you haven't, The Penguin Book Quiz is as appropriate for making you look well-read at a party as it is for a book-loving family to tuck into after Christmas dinner: it's as enjoyable to read as it is to play. 
 
Featuring the work of everyone from Antony Beevor to Zadie Smith, books from The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Ulysses, and with movie, music, television, theatre and literary references abounding, this entertaining quiz tickles the fancy (and the brains) of light and heavy readers alike. 
 
Answers: 
- Norwegian Wood 
- Bucket 
- The Girl on the Train 
- Eight (five sisters, three brothers)

The Penguin Book Quiz

From The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Ulysses

John Stubbs

John Donne's life story is inextricably tied up with the fabric of a society in the throes of religious persecution. His family had long been subject to the terror inflicted upon Catholics under the reign of Elizabeth I, and while his brother languished in prison, and his mother and uncles fled to exile in Europe, Donne was consumed by the question of his own faith and by trying to figure out what it is that connects human beings - and keeps them apart. 
 
In his biography of Donne, John Stubbs chronicles not only a long and bitter sectarian conflict, but also the love story of a young couple who broke the rules of their society, and paid the ultimate price. 
 
From the raucous streets of late sixteenth-century London to the personal and political intrigues of Donne's family and public life, from the horrors of the Reformation to the delight of Donne's poetry, John Stubbs' book is a vivid, dazzling biography of an extraordinary man, as well as a compelling portrait of England at a time of bewildering transformation..

John Donne

The Reformed Soul

David Lodge

In 2004 three major novels featuring Henry James as a character were published - one of them went on to win the Booker Prize. It was not David Lodge's AUTHOR AUTHOR. In this fascinating new book, a kind of postscript to his novel, Lodge traces the conception, writing and publication of his book, and reveals with extraordinary candour and revealingly comic moments the poignancy and indeed anguish of discovering too late that others were working on the same subject, and the odd feelings of rivalry and jealousy that this engendered. The result is a wonderfully comic work with serious psychological and literary insights which suggestsnothing less than a short story by the Great Master, James, himself.

The Year of Henry James

The Story of a Novel

Claire Harman

Raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors, watching five beloved siblings sicken and die, haunted by unrequited love: Charlotte Brontë's life has all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. 
 
Charlotte was a literary visionary, a feminist trailblazer and the driving force behind the whole Brontë family. She pushed Emily to publish Wuthering Heights and took charge of their precarious finances when her feckless brother turned to opium. In Jane Eyre she introduced the world to a brand new kind of heroine, modelled on herself: quiet but fiercely intelligent, burning with passion and potential. 
 
This is a truly gripping and illuminating account of one of our best-loved novelists.

Charlotte Brontë

A Life

Daniel Swift

One night in June 1943 James Swift, along with the Lancaster bomber he piloted, vanished. In Bomber County, his grandson Daniel seeks to discover what happened. At the same time he tries to understand the men who took part in these dangerous raids, as well as their devastating impact on the civilians below. In examining the life of one pilot, Daniel Swift also investigates why it is we have tried to forget what was then a new, shocking form of warfare, and why literature and poetry exploring these terrible losses have not found the recognition they deserve.

Bomber County

Kevin Birmingham

In the summer of 1865, the former exile Dostoevsky found himself trapped in a cheap hotel in Wiesbaden, unable to leave until he'd paid the bill. Having lost the last of his money at the roulette table, his debts hung heavy over his head, his epileptic seizures were worsening, and his wife and beloved brother were dead. Desperate, a story came to him, a way to write himself out of his predicament: the murderer Raskolnikov, the hot, disorienting swirl of St Petersburg, the axe, the terrible crime, and the murderer's paranoia. The book was Crime and Punishment, and from the moment it was published it was a sensation. But how did this haunting tale of guilt come to be, and why does it still hold such a sway over us all these years later? 
 
The Sinner and the Saint gives us the story of the creation of a work of literature that has bewitched readers for over a century, and of the two men so central to it: Dostoevsky himself, and Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer and glamorous egoist who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s and whose sensational story provided the germ of the novel. As reports of his trial tore through Europe, readers asked themselves: could the instincts of nihilism, the philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries, also drive a man to murder? Showing how both men's lives were directed by the intoxicating new ideas swirling around Europe in the nineteenth century, The Sinner and the Saint also reveals why they still appal and entice us today. Thrilling and definitive, this is the story of a masterpiece.

The Sinner and the Saint

Dostoevsky, a Crime and Its Punishment

From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction. 
 
The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.

A Guest at the Feast

Robert Crawford

From Treasure Island to Trainspotting, Scotland&rsquo;s rich literary tradition has influenced writing across centuries and cultures far beyond its borders. Here, for the first time, is a single volume presenting the glories of fifteen centuries of Scottish literature. 
 
In Scotland&rsquo;s Books poet Robert Crawford tells the story of Scottish writing and its relationship to the country&rsquo;s history. Stretching from the medieval masterpiece of St Columba&rsquo;s Iona - the earliest surviving Scottish work - to the imaginative, thriving world of twenty-first-century writing with authors such as Ali Smith and James Kelman, this outstanding collection traces the development of literature in Scotland and explores the cultural, linguistic and literary heritage of the nation. It includes extracts from the writing discussed to give a flavour of the original work, full quotations in their own language, previously unpublished works by authors and plenty of new research. Informative and readable, this is the definitive guide to the marvellous legacy of Scottish literature.

Scotland's Books

The Penguin History of Scottish Literature

Thomas Malory

He was born to be King. But he would die for his people ... 
 
From the moment he draws the sword Excalibur from a magic stone, King Arthur is hailed as the saviour of England. With his loyal band of brothers, the Knights of the Round Table, he reigns over a golden age of chivalry and enchantment. 
 
But dark forces are stirring in the land. Sir Launcelot's fatal attraction to Arthur's beautiful wife Guenever threatens to divide the realm. And when the scheming Mordred tries to usurp the King, one last epic battle must be fought on English soil ...

King Arthur's Last Battle

Elizabeth Boyle

Every day a beloved father dies. Every day a lover departs. Every day a woman turns forty. All three happening together brings a moment of reckoning. 
 
Medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle made sense of these events the best way she knew how - by immersing herself in the literature that has been her first love and life's work for over two decades. 
 
Fierce Appetites is the exhilarating and deeply humane result. Not only does Elizabeth Boyle write dazzling accounts of ancient stories, familiar and obscure, from Ireland and further afield, but she uses her historical learning to grapple with the raw and urgent questions she faces, questions that have bedevilled people in every age. She writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put) with unflinching honesty, deep compassion and occasional dark humour. 
 
Fierce Appetites is captivating and original - as an insight into the mind and heart of a groundbreaking scholar, and as a wise and reassuring account of what it is to be human.

Fierce Appetites

Lessons from my year of untamed thinking

Loving, losing and living to excess in my present and in the writings of the past

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

Matthew Jockers

Jodie Archer

'If you're someone who dreams of penning a bestseller, read this book' The Week 
 
'What if the success of E.L.James and Dan Brown was not so random? What if there were an algorithm that could pick out the bestseller DNA concealed within these books before they're published? This is the audacious claim made by Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers ... Smart, savvy and full of ideas' Fiona Wilson, The Times 
 
Girl on the Train. Fifty Shades. The Goldfinch. Why do some books capture the whole world's attention? In The Bestseller Code, Archer and Jockers boldly claim that not only can mega-hits be explained and identified - but they've built the algorithm to prove it. Using cutting-edge text mining techniques, they have developed a model that analyses theme, plot, style and character to explain why some books resonate more than others with readers. Provocative, entertaining, and ground-breaking, The Bestseller Code explores the hidden patterns at work in the biggest hits and, more importantly, the real reasons we love to read. 
 
'Non-formulaic, eye-opening, deeply-researched - and really worth your time' GQ 
 
 'When a story captures the imagination of millions, that's magic. Can you qualify magic? Archer and Jockers just may have done so' Sylvia Day, no.1 bestselling author 
 
'The claims are eye-grabbing . . . and also highly plausible' Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Spectator 
 
'Thought-provoking and interesting ... Here is a book worth reading' David Bond, Financial Times

The Bestseller Code

James Patterson

To be a bookseller or librarian . . . 
 
You have to play detective. 
 
Be a treasure hunter. A matchmaker. A brilliant listener. 
 
A person who creates a kind of magic by pulling a book from a shelf, handing it to someone and saying, 'You've got to read this. You're going to love it'. 
 
In this love letter to the heroes of literacy, James Patterson uncovers true stories from booksellers and librarians. Prepare to enter a world where you can feed your curiosities, discover new voices, and find whatever you need. 
 
Meet the smart and talented people who live between the shelves - and who can't wait to help you find your next great read. 
 
_________________________________ 
 
PRAISE FOR JAMES PATTERSON 
 
'No one gets this big without amazing natural storytelling talent - which is what Jim has, in spades.' LEE CHILD 
 
'James Patterson is The Boss. End of.' IAN RANKIN 
 
'The master storyteller of our times' HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON 
 
'One of the greatest storytellers of all time' PATRICIA CORNWELL 
 
'Patterson is in a class by himself' GUARDIAN

The Secret Lives of Booksellers & Librarians

True stories of the magic of reading

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

Heloise

Peter Abelard

The illicit relationship between Peter Abelard, a medieval philosopher, and his young pupil Heloise is one of history&rsquo;s most legendary and tragic love affairs. From reckless ecstasy to public scandal and cruel separation, their eloquent and intimate letters tell the story of their passionate, doomed romance. 
 
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;.

Forbidden Fruit

From the Letters of Abelard and Heloise

Claire Tomalin

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twenieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband but a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats. In the hands of Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come intensely alive.

Thomas Hardy

The Time-torn Man

Jenny Williams

Hans Fallada was a drug addict, womanizer, alcoholic, jailbird and thief. Yet he was also one of the most extraordinary storytellers of the twentieth century, whose novels, including Alone in Berlin, portrayed ordinary people in terrible times with a powerful humanity. 
 
This acclaimed biography, newly revised and completely updated, tells the remarkable story of Hans Fallada, whose real name was Rudolf Ditzen. Jenny Williams chronicles his turbulent life as a writer, husband and father, shadowed by mental torment and long periods in psychiatric care. She shows how Ditzen's decision to remain in Nazi Germany in 1939 led to his self-destruction, but also made him a unique witness to his country's turmoil. 
 
More Lives Than One unpicks the contradictory, flawed and fascinating life of a writer who saw the worst of humanity, yet maintained his belief in the decency of the 'little man'.

More Lives than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada

Ronald Carter

John McRae

This second edition of The Penguin Guide to Literature in English: Britain and Ireland provides an illustrated introduction to the work of the most important writers and their historical background from the year 600 to the end of the twentieth century. It covers the works of novelists, dramatists and poets from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Austen to Dickens, James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, right through to modern-day authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh.

The Penguin Guide to Literature in English

Britain And Ireland

"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

Dick Francis

Dick Francis was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys. The winner of over 350 races, he was champion jockey in 1953/1954 and rode for HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, most famously on Devon Loch in the 1956 Grand National. On his retirement from the saddle, he published his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, before going on to write forty-three bestselling novels, a volume of short stories (Field of 13), and the biography of Lester Piggott. 
 
During his lifetime Dick Francis received many awards, amongst them the prestigious Crime Writers' Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to the genre, and three 'best novel' Edgar Allan Poe awards from The Mystery Writers of America. In 1996 he was named by them as Grand Master for a lifetime's achievement. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List of 2000. 
 
Dick Francis died in February 2010, at the age of eighty-nine, but he remains one of the greatest thriller writers of all time.

The Sport of Queens

An Autobiography

Penelope Lively

The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents' country house Golsoncott. Years later, as the house was sold out of the family, she began to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before. 
 
In a needlework sampler, she sees her grandmother and the wartime children that she sheltered under her roof in 1940. Potted meat jars remind her of the ritual of doing the flowers for church. The smell of the harness room brings her Aunt Rachel - avant-garde artist, fervent horserider - vividly back to life. 
 
In A House Unlocked, Penelope Lively delves into the domestic past of her former home, and tells of her own youth and the contrasts between life today and the way they lived then.

A House Unlocked

David Foster Wallace

Beloved for his brilliantly discerning eye, his verbal elasticity and his uniquely generous imagination, David Foster Wallace was heralded by critics and fans as the voice of a generation. Collected here are fifteen essays published for the first time in book form, including writing never published before in the UK. 
 
From 'Federer Both Flesh and Not', considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; to 'The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2,' which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; to 'Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young', an examination of television's effect on a new generation of writers, the writing collected here swoops from erudite literary discussion to open-hearted engagement with the most familiar of our twentieth-century cultural references. 
 
A celebration of Wallace's great loves - for language, for precision, for meaning - and a feast of enjoyment for his fans, Both Flesh and Not is a fitting tribute to this writer who was never concerned with anything less important than what it means to be alive.

Both Flesh And Not

Albert Camus

Stuart Gilbert

<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>

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

James Fenton

James Fenton's An Introduction to English Poetry offers a master class for both the reader and writer of poetry. Simply and elegantly written and discussing the work of poets as wide ranging as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Tennyson, Kipling, Milton and Blake, it covers all varieties of poetic practice in English. 
 
'It is hard to imagine a beginner who could not learn from [this book]. If you know a young poet, give them this' The Times Literary Supplement

An Introduction to English Poetry

Neil MacGregor

The Elizabethan age was a tumultuous time, when long-cherished certainties were crumbling and life was exhilaratingly uncertain. Shakespeare's Restless World uncovers the extraordinary stories behind twenty objects from the period to re-create an age at once distant and yet surprisingly familiar. From knife crime to belief in witches, religious battles to the horizons of the New World, Neil MacGregor brings the past to life in a fresh, unexpected portrait of a dangerous and dynamic era.

Shakespeare's Restless World

An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects

Jonathan Swift's world-famous works - from Gulliver's Travels to A Modest Proposal - are unparalleled in their piercing critique of modern society. But Jonathan Swift was a man of great contradictions: a man who satirized the powerful but aspired to political greatness, who mocked men's vanity but held himself in high esteem, a religious moralizer famed for his malice - a man sharply aware of humanity's flaws, but no less susceptible to them. 
 
As with his massively acclaimed biography of John Donne, John Stubbs paints a vivid portrait of an extraordinary man and a turbulent period of English and Irish history.

Jonathan Swift

The Reluctant Rebel

biblio.categories.code

biblio.publicationStatus

biblio.brand

biblio.workEditions.format

biblio.ageRange

biblio.series.seriesName

biblio.imprint.description

biblio.type

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Best-Jane-Austen-quotes_Online-Desktop_Penguin

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

The Fall of the West

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Fight or Flight (Book 21)

The Mortons

Little Black Classics Box Set

Watch a trailer for The Spook's Blood

A photograph of Ben Barnes in character for Shadow and Bone Netflix series.

Interviews

Shadow and Bone’s Ben Barnes on tear-jerking books and what he’s reading

An image showing a selection of adventure stories for 9-12 year olds on a bright yellow background with orange doodles that include a hashtag, flag, danger sign and speech bubble

Children's reading lists

16 books for 9 to 12-year-olds that love adventures

An image of a selection of books for 9-12s on a blue background with a large splodge and striped print

24 must-read books for 9-12-year-olds

A picture of several different children's books on a pink to blue ombre background; each book has a bright yellow shadow

Showing results for: ‘joseph delaney’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter