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

Chinua Achebe

Beautifully written yet highly controversial, An Image of Africa asserts Achebe's belief in Joseph Conrad as a 'bloody racist' and his conviction that Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness only serves to perpetuate damaging stereotypes of black people. Also included is The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe's searing outpouring of his frustrations with his country. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

An Image of Africa

John Healy

<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>

John Healy, the son of poor Irish immigrants in London, grows up hardened by violence and soon finds himself overwhelmed by alcoholism. He ends up in the grass arena: the parks and streets of the inner city, where beggars, thieves, prostitutes and killers fight for survival and each day brings the question of where to find the next drink. In his searing autobiography Healy describes with unflinching honesty his experiences of addiction, his escape through learning to play chess in prison, and his ongoing search for peace of mind.

The Grass Arena

An Autobiography

Brian Copenhaver

'. . . as when iron is drawn to a magnet, camphor is sucked into hot air, crystal lights up in the Sun, sulfur and a volatile liquid are kindled by flame, an empty eggshell filled with dew is raised towards the Sun . . .' 
 
An odd feature of the Bible is that it is full of stories featuring forms of magic and possession - from Joseph battling with Pharaoh's wizards to the supernatural actions of Jesus and his disciples. As, over the following centuries, the Christian church attempted to stamp out 'deviant' practices, there was a persistent interest in magic that drew strength from this Biblical validation. A strange blend of mumbo-jumbo, fraud and deeply serious study, magic was central to the European Renaissance, fascinating many of its greatest figures. 
 
Brian Copenhaver's wonderful anthology will be welcomed by everyone from those with the most casual interest in the magical tradition to anyone drawn to the Renaissance and the tangled, arcane roots of the scientific tradition.

The Book of Magic

From Antiquity to the Enlightenment

First written down in the eighth century AD, these early Irish stories depict a far older world - part myth, part legend and part history. Rich with magic and achingly beautiful, they speak of a land of heroic battles, intense love and warrior ideals, in which the otherworld is explored and men mingle freely with the gods. From the vivid adventures of the great Celtic hero Cu Chulaind, to the stunning 'Exile of the Sons of Uisliu' - a tale of treachery, honour and romance - these are masterpieces of passion and vitality, and form the foundation for the Irish literary tradition: a mythic legacy that was a powerful influence on the work of Yeats, Synge and Joyce.

Early Irish Myths and Sagas

James Baldwin

Raoul Peck

The New York Times bestseller based on the Oscar nominated documentary film 
 
In June 1979, the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin embarked on a project to tell the story of America through the lives of three of his murdered friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. He died before it could be completed. In his documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck imagines the book Baldwin never wrote, using his original words to create a radical, powerful and poetic work on race in the United States - then, and today. 
 
'Thrilling . . . A portrait of one man's confrontation with a country that, murder by murder, as he once put it, "devastated my universe"' The New York Times 
 
'Baldwin's voice speaks even more powerfully today . . . the prose-poet of our injustice and inhumanity . . . The times have caught up with his scalding eloquence' Variety 
 
 'A cinematic séance . . . One of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made' Guardian 
 
 'I Am Not Your Negro turns James Baldwin into a prophet' Rolling Stone

I Am Not Your Negro

The Tain Bo Cualinge, centrepiece of the eighth-century Ulster cycle of heroic tales, is Ireland's great epic. It tells the story of a great cattle-raid, the invasion of Ulster by the armies of Medb and Ailill, Queen and King of Connacht, and their allies, seeking to carry off the great Brown Bull of Cualige. The hero of the tale is Cuchulainn, the Hound of Ulster, who resists the invaders single-handed while Ulster's warriors lie sick.

The Tain

Various

The word “cult” conjures images of people in thrall to a charismatic leader who extracts obedience through lies and threats, and of apocalyptic prophecies, sexual perversion, and mass suicide. From the Celtic druids, whose ritual sacrifices inspired the folk horror film The Wicker Man, all the way up to the Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate, The Penguin Book of Cults charts the history of our fear of the religious other. 
 
Bringing to light little-known sources such as a “death tape” of Jonestown’s final hour, when Jim Jones led more than 900 of his followers to drink poison, and a minute-by-minute log of the FBI’s final assault on the Branch Davidian headquarters, and including accounts of drinking the blood of sacrificed cats, theories that we are living inside a hollow earth, and reports that space brothers from Venus are coming to redeem us from the threat of nuclear war, this volume opens a fascinating window into cults and why some of them have ended in spectacular violence.

The Penguin Book of Cults

Including works from Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Cornish, Breton and Manx, this Celtic Miscellany offers a rich blend of poetry and prose from the eighth to the nineteenth century, and provides a unique insight into the minds and literature of the Celtic people. It is a literature dominated by a deep sense of wonder, wild inventiveness and a profound sense of the uncanny, in which the natural world and the power of the individual spirit are celebrated with astonishing imaginative force. Skifully arranged by theme, from the hero-tales of Cú Chulainn, Bardic poetry and elegies, to the sensitive and intimate writings of early Celtic Christianity, this anthology provides a fascinating insight into a deeply creative literary tradition. 
 
Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson was born in 1909. He began his career as a lecturer in Celtic at Cambridge, before becoming the first chair of the Department of Celtic Language and Literature at Harvard. He undertook war service with the Uncommon Languages section of British censorship and subsequently held professorships at Harvard and Edinburgh. Professor Jackson died in 1991.

A Celtic Miscellany

Selected and Translated by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson

Drawing on myth, folklore and history, the stories of the Mabinogion passed from generations of storytellers before they were written down in the thirteenth century in the form we know. 
 
Set in dual realms of the forests and valleys of Wales and the shadowy otherworld, the tales are permeated by a dreamlike atmosphere. In 'Math Son of Mathonwy' two brothers plot to carry off the virginal Goewin, while in 'Manawydan Son of Ll^yr' a chieftain roams throughout Britain after a spell is cast over his land. And King Arthur's court provides the backdrop to tales such as 'How Culhwch Won Olwen', in which a young man must complete many tasks before he can marry a giant's daughter.

The Mabinogion

Friedrich Engels

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), was a provocative and profoundly influential critique of the Victorian nuclear family. Engels argued that the traditional monogamous household was in fact a recent construct, closely bound up with capitalist societies. Under this patriarchal system, women were servants and, effectively, prostitutes. Only Communism would herald the dawn of communal living and a new sexual freedom and, in turn, the role of the state would become superfluous.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

C L R James

In 1791, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, the slaves of San Domingo rose in revolt. Despite invasion by a series of British, Spanish and Napoleonic armies, their twelve-year struggle led to the creation of Haiti, the first independent black republic outside Africa. Only three years later, the British and Americans ended the Atlantic slave trade. 
 
In this outstanding example of vivid, committed and empathetic historical analysis, C. L. R. James illuminates these epoch-making events. He explores the appalling economic realities of the Caribbean economy, the roots of the world's only successful slave revolt and the utterly extraordinary former slave - Toussaint L'Ouverture - who led them. Explicitly written as part of the fight to end colonialism in Africa, The Black Jacobins put the slaves themselves centre stage, boldly forging their own destiny against nearly impossible odds. It remains one of the essential texts for understanding the Caribbean - and the region's inextricable links with Europe, Africa and the Americas.

The Black Jacobins

Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

William Yeats

This collection brings together all of W. B. Yeats&rsquo;s published prose writings on Irish folklore, legend and myth, with pieces on subjects including ghosts, kidnappers, fairies, ancient tribes, precious stones and Gaelic love songs. Through his researches on Irish folklore, Yeats attempted to create a movement in literature that was enriched by and rooted in a vital native tradition. In this volume Yeats&rsquo;s essays, introductions and sketches are presented chronologically, giving a clear picture of how his analysis developed, increasing in its depth and complexity in his quest to create an Ireland of the imagination.

Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth

'The story of the negro in America is the story of America ... it is not a very pretty story' 
 
James Baldwin's breakthrough essay collection made him the voice of his generation. Ranging over Harlem in the 1940s, movies, novels, his preacher father and his experiences of Paris, they capture the complexity of black life at the dawn of the civil rights movement with effervescent wit and prophetic wisdom. 
 
'A classic ... In a divided America, James Baldwin's fiery critiques reverberate anew' Washington Post 
 
'Edgy and provocative, entertainingly satirical' Robert McCrum, Guardian 
 
'Cemented his reputation as a cultural seer ... Notes of a Native Son endures as his defining work, and his greatest' Time

Notes of a Native Son

A chilling, truly authoritative anthology of real-life accounts of witches, from medieval Europe through colonial America 
 
From a manual for witch hunters written by King James himself in 1597, to court documents from the Salem witch trials of 1692, to newspaper coverage of a woman stoned to death on the streets of Philadelphia while the Continental Congress met, The Penguin Book of Witches is a treasury of historical accounts of accused witches that sheds light on the reality behind the legends. Bringing to life stories like that of Eunice Cole, tried for attacking a teenage girl with a rock and buried with a stake through her heart; Jane Jacobs, a Bostonian so often accused of witchcraft that she took her tormentors to court on charges of slander; and Increase Mather, an exorcism-performing minister famed for his knowledge of witches, this volume provides a unique tour through the darkest history of English and North American witchcraft.

The Penguin Book of Witches

Compiled by an unknown scribe in Iceland around 1270, and based on sources dating back centuries earlier, these mythological and heroic poems tell of gods and mortals from an ancient era: the giant-slaying Thor, the doomed Völsung family, the Hel-ride of Brynhild and the cruelty of Atli the Hun. Eclectic, incomplete and fragmented, these verses nevertheless retain their stark beauty and their power to enthrall, opening a window on to the thoughts, beliefs and hopes of the Vikings and their world.

The Elder Edda

A Book of Viking Lore

'These essays ... live and grow in the mind' James Campbell, Independent 
 
Being a writer, says James Baldwin in this searing collection of essays, requires 'every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are'. His seminal 1961 follow-up to Notes on a Native Son shows him responding to his times and exploring his role as an artist with biting precision and emotional power: from polemical pieces on racial segregation and a journey to 'the Old Country' of the Southern states, to reflections on figures such as Ingmar Bergman and André Gide, and on the first great conference of African writers and artists in Paris. 
 
'Brilliant...accomplished...strong...vivid...honest...masterly' The New York Times 
 
'A bright and alive book, full of grief, love and anger' Chicago Tribune

Nobody Knows My Name

More Notes Of A Native Son

Harry Crews

1935, Bacon County, Georgia. The bite of the Great Depression was beginning to be felt in the rest of America, but its teeth had been in Bacon County for years. Here one of America's most original storytellers, Harry Crews, was born in a sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road. A Childhood is his memoir of that time - his first years of life - and that place: the poor soil and the sickness, the blood feuds and the faith healers, the ghosts and the shopping catalogues. 
 
A profound vision of the rural South that resounds with the violence of poverty and the tenderness of kinship, A Childhood is a true American classic.

A Childhood

The Biography of a Place

William James

The writings of William James represent one of America's most original contributions to the history of ideas.  Ranging from philosophy and psychology to religion and politics, James composed the most engaging formulation of American pragmatism.  'Pragmatism' grew out of a set of lectures and the full text is included here along with 'The Meaning of Truth', 'Psychology', 'The Will to Believe', and 'Talks to Teachers on Psychology'.

Pragmatism and Other Writings

William Morris

Poet, pattern-designer, environmentalist and maker of fine books, William Morris (1834-96) was also a committed socialist and visionary writer, obsessively concerned with the struggle to achieve a perfect society on earth. News From Nowhere, one of the most significant English works on the theme of utopia, is the tale of William Guest, a Victorian who wakes one morning to find himself in the year 2102 and discovers a society that has changed beyond recognition into a pastoral paradise, in which all people live in blissful equality and contentment. A socialist masterpiece, News From Nowhere is a vision of a future free from capitalism, isolation and industrialisation. This volume also contains a wide selection of Morris's writings, lectures, journalism and letters, which expand upon the key themes of News From Nowhere.

News from Nowhere and Other Writings

George Orwell

The vivid, impassioned writings collected together in this powerful volume chronicle Orwell's first-hand experiences of life among the underclass of the 'two nations' of rich and poor. 
 
Down and Out in Paris and London is the young Orwell's memoir of his time as a struggling, often penniless writer, living among the destitute and dispossessed. Here he exposes a world unimaginable to most of his readers, one of vile doss-houses, hunger, squalor, and desperate poverty -- of 'going to the dogs'. There are also articles and letters on sleeping rough in Trafalgar Square, being arrested for drunkenness, on the poverty Orwell witnessed in Morocco and India, and his shocking essay, 'How the Poor Die'.

Orwell and the Dispossessed

Virginia M. Axline

In 1964, renowned psychotherapist Virginia M. Axline visited a New York school. There she encountered a little boy apart from teachers and children. Dibs sat alone, or gently traced the edge of the room, defying approach and every attempt at interaction. Every day was like this, and every day his teachers feared further that their support was not enough. As a last resort, Axline was asked to meet with Dibs for a series of weekly play therapy sessions. There, through the guise of time spent will toys and paint, Dibs' extraordinary character -- and the circumstance of his pain -- is slowly revealed... 
 
Based on the transcripts of their sessions together, Dibs in Search of Self is a seminal testament to the power of psychotherapy, and a classic of twentieth century nonfiction -- an incredible true story of personal transformation.

Dibs in Search of Self

Personality Development in Play Therapy

Harriet Jacobs

A haunting, evocative recounting of her life as a slave in North Carolina, and her final escape and emancipation, Jacobs' narrative, written between 1853 and 1858 and published in 1861, is one of the most important books ever written documenting the traumas and horrors of slavery in the antebellum South.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Written by Herself

James Frazer

Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) caught the popular imagination with his vast and enterprising comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind, which in its third edition numbered 12 volumes. Reissued here is Frazer's own single-volume abridgement of 1922.

The Golden Bough

Mary Kingsley

Until 1893, Mary Kingsley lived the typical life of a single Victorian woman, tending to sick relatives and keeping house for her brother. However, on the death of her parents, she made an extraordinary decision: with no prior knowledge of the region, she set out on a solo trip to West Africa. Her subsequent book, published in 1897, describes dangerous treks and deadly animals with enormous humour and verve, and has stood the test of time as a classic travel narrative by a woman whose sense of adventure and fascination with Africa transformed her whole life.

Travels in West Africa

Alfred de Vigny

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a generation of French soldiers found themselves haunted by defeat and disappointment. One of these soldiers was Alfred de Vigny, an aristocratic poet who also served as a garrison officer. The Warrior's Life consists of his enigmatic reflections, autobiographical anecdotes and philosophical meditations on the nature of war and the strange life of the soldier, vividly conveying the deprivation and discipline of military service, but also its comradeship, stoicism and stern code of duty. Looking back to a lost age of military valour, haunted by dreams of former glory, this is one of the great works of early nineteenth-century Romanticism. 
 
Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) came from an ancient military family that was impoverished by the French Revolution. In 1814 he joined the royal bodyguard, in which he served for thirteen years, but he never saw serious action.The feeling of stasis and regret this engendered, of having been just too young to have been involved in the drama and high adventure of the Napoleonic Wars is the great theme of his most famous work, The Military Life (Servitude et grandeur militaires). Even before he had resigned from the army he was already famous as a key French writer of the Romantic movement, through such works as his Poèmes antiques et modernes (1826). Much of the remainder of his life was spent withdrawn from Parisian society, dogged by financial worries and caring for his mother and his invalid wife. His remaining major works were published posthumously: most notably Journal d'un poète and the poems Les Destinées. 
 
Roger Gard, who died in 2000, was educated at Abbotsholme School, Derbyshire, in the Royal Artillery and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.He was Emeritus Reader in English in the University of London. He was the author of books on Henry James, Jane Austen and the teaching of fiction in schools. He also edited Henry James's A Landscape Painter and Other Tales, The Jolly Corner and Other Tales and a selection of his literary criticism, The Critical Muse, for Penguin Classics.

The Warrior's Life

Silvia Federici

A cult classic since its publication in the early years of this century, Caliban and the Witch is Silvia Federici's history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it gives a panoramic account of the often horrific violence with which the unruly human material of pre-capitalist societies was transformed into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms. It is a study of indigenous traditions crushed, of the enclosure of women's reproductive powers within the nuclear family, and of how our modern world was forged in blood.

Caliban and the Witch

Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

John Reed

Ten Days That Shook the World is John Reed&rsquo;s eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. A contemporary journalist writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, he gives a gripping record of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. Containing verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and the chance comments of bystanders, set against an idealized backcloth of the proletariat, soldiers, sailors, and peasants uniting to throw off oppression, Reed&rsquo;s account is the product of passionate involvement and remains an unsurpassed classic of reporting.

Ten Days That Shook the World

Thomas of Monmouth

The Life and Passion of William of Norwich gives a remarkable insight into life in a medieval cathedral city, brilliantly capturing the everyday concerns of ordinary people and focussing on the miraculous cures carried out at a shrine. But this was no ordinary shrine; fervent worshippers gathered around the burial-place where they believed that a boy was buried, a boy murdered by the Jews of Norwich. 
 
A chilling, highly significant document, The Life and Passion of William of Norwich is, as far as we know, the earliest version of what was to become the 'blood libel' which has haunted Europe ever since. Miri Rubin both superbly translates the book and in her introduction interprets the sequence of events that led to the monk Thomas of Monmouth's appalling narrative. The consequences of his fantasies have been incalculable.

The Life and Passion of William of Norwich

The Lion and the Unicorn was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as 'one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character' and is as relevant now as it ever has been.

The Lion and the Unicorn

Socialism and the English Genius

Maria Tatar

Perhaps no fairy tale is as widely known as 'Beauty and the Beast' - and perhaps no fairy tale exists in as many variations. Nearly every culture tells the story in one fashion or another - such cultural phenomena as The Fault in Our Stars and Me Before You are recent examples - and it is impossible to find one version that laid the foundation for the rest. From Cupid and Psyche, India's Snake Bride to South Africa's 'Story of Five Heads', the partnering of beast and beauties has beguiled us for thousands of years. 
 
In this fascinating volume preeminent fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar brings together tales from ancient times to the present and from a wide variety of cultures.

Beauty and the Beast

Classic Tales About Animal Brides and Grooms from Around the World

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

Hunt the Villain

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

The Mortons

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