Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Nadezhda Mandelstam

A harrowing yet uplifting account of Stalin's persecution of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and of one man - Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), whose poetry, in spite of the unfolding tragedy of his life, preserved its unique creative gaiety. Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam married in 1922. Nadezhda's memoir covers their last four years together. She begins in Moscow in May 1934 with the knock on the door at one o'clock in the morning, and her husband's arrest by the secret police for composing a satire of Stalin. She tells of his imprisonment, interrogation and exile to the Urals, where she accompanied him, and where he wrote his last great poems; his release and return to Moscow, only to be entrapped, rearrested and sentenced to hard labour in Siberia; of her own efforts to secure his release and to save his manuscripts (and to memorize all his poems in case she could not); of her discovery of the truth about his death in a transit camp near Vladivostock. For all its grim subject matter, it is a story of courage in adversity, and even humour finds a place. 
 Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian, and Hope against Hope is one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. It is also a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. After years of circulating secretly in the Soviet Union it was published in the West in 1970, and has since achieved the status of a classic.

Hope Against Hope

P.G. Wodehouse

P G Wodehouse is widely recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. 
 
His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. The first ever collected edition (Wodehouse had many publishers in his lifetime), the Everyman Wodehouse, will contain all the novels and stories, newly edited and reset from the first British edition. 
 
Printed on cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, each Everyman volume is already recognized as the finest edition of the master ever published.

Three American sisters leave their chicken farm on Long Island for a holiday in Europe. In France they encounter the charming but penniless Marquis de Maufringneuse, his writer son Jeff, and the marquis’s tough American ex-wife. When they all find themselves together at the exclusive resort of St. Rocque - one of the sisters in search of a husband, the marquis in search of a fortune, the writer in search of love -  Wodehousian complications ensue.

French Leave

Typical. Just when Bertie thinks that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, things start to go wrong again... 
There's young Bingo Little, who's in love for the umpteenth time and needs Bertie to put in a good word for him with his uncle; Aunt Agatha, who forces Bertie to get engaged to the formidable Honoria Glossop; and the troublesome twins, Claude and Eustace, whose antics when let loose in London know no bounds. 
Add to that some friction in the Wooster home over a red cummerbund, purple socks and some snazzy old Etonian spats, and poor Bertie's really in the soup... 
Only one man can save the day - the inimitable Jeeves. 
 
Characters Bertie Wooster - Narrator who went to school with Bingo. Won a prize at his first school for the best collection of wild flowers. 
Jeeves - Bertie's valet who has an aunt who loves the romantic novels of Rosie M. Banks 
Bingo Little - Mortimer's nephew who loves Mabel. Tells his uncle that Bertie is really Rosie M. Banks. 
Mabel - Waitress in a tea shop 
Mortimer Little - Retired fat businessman who owned Little's Liniment - "It Limbers Up the Legs." He is a gourmet. 
Jane Watson - Mortimer's cook engaged to Jeeves, but not for long

The Inimitable Jeeves

Virginia Woolf

The beautiful Everyman gift edition in hardback. 
 
The Lord Orlando's country seat has 365 rooms. An exquisitely beautiful youth, he is a favourite of the ageing Queen Elizabeth and enjoys all that Court and tavern have to offer. He falls passionately in love with the intriguing Sasha, an androgynous Russian princess, who jilts him. Stricken, he takes up Literature, penning huge quantities of poems and plays, 'all romantic, and all long'. A few decades later a still youthful Orlando is appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. Here he wakes up one day and finds he has the body of a woman. "Different sex, same person", she observes, unphased. 
In London, it is the eighteenth century, and she can hobnob with "men of genius" Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell. She has affairs with both women and men, but before long it is the nineteenth century, oppressively gloomy and moral and probably time to find a husband. Fortunately, in a Brontësque moment on a moor, the gender- nonconforming Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, newly back from Cape Horn, gallops past and scoops her up into bliss. 
 
Woolf's most unusual and joyous novel was inspired by her affair with the dashing author and aristocrat, Vita Sackville West.

Orlando

With the Duke of Dunstable trying to steal his pig to sell to Lord Tilbury, mischievous Church Lads camping in his park, his sister Constance bossing him unmercifully, and Lavender Briggs, his secretary, making life miserable, Lord Emsworth has little time to concentrate on the invasion of Blandings Castle by yet another impostor. But Bill Bailey, a.k.a. Cuthbert Meriwether, has inveigled himself into the castle to be with his beloved, Myra Schoonmaker, who is staying there under the eagle eye of Lady Constance, and Lady Constance is determined to thwart him. In the end virtue conquers vice: the lovers are united, Dunstable defeated and Tilbury trounced, but only through the brilliant plotting of Frederick, Earl of Ickenham whose greatest triumph is to marry off Lady Constance to an old admirer, Myra's father. In the end everyone is happy who deserves to be, none more so than Lord Emsworth who at one fell swoop frees himself from the tyranny of a duke, a secretary and a sister

Service With a Smile

While pursuing the love of his life, American heiress Pauline Stoker, Lord 'Chuffy' Chuffnell borrows the services of Jeeves, the perfect gentleman's gentleman. But when Chuffy finds out that Jeeves's employer, Bertie Wooster, was once engaged to Pauline himself – until the engagement was broken by her tough-egg father, abetted by loony-doctor Sir Roderick Glossop – such fearsome complications ensue that even Jeeves has difficulty securing a happy ending.

Thank You, Jeeves

Henry James

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Isabel Archer is a young, intelligent, and spirited American girl, determined to relish her first experience of Europe. She rejects two eligible suitors in her fervent commitment to liberty and independence, declaring that she will never marry. Thanks to the generosity of her devoted cousin Ralph, she is free to make her own choice about her destiny. Yet in the intoxicating worlds of Paris, Florence, and Rome, her fond illusions of self-reliance are twisted by the machinations of her friends and apparent allies. What had seemed to be a vista of infinite promise steadily closes around her and becomes instead a 'house of suffocation'.

The Portrait Of A Lady

Marcel Proust

In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.” 
 
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).

In Search Of Lost Time Volume 2

Blandings Castle lacks its usual balm for the Earl of Emsworth, as his stern sister Lady Constance Keeble is once more in residence. The Duke of Dunstable is also infesting the place again, along with the standard quota of American millionaires, romantic youths, con artists, imposters and so on. With a painting of reclining nude at the centre of numerous intrigues, Gally's genius is once again required to sort things out.

A Pelican at Blandings

Generally agreed to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century – and possibly any other – Proust’s masterpiece is here presented in the latest revision to the classic Scott Moncrieff translation. On the surface a traditional Bildungsroman describing the narrator’s journey of self-discovery, this huge and complex book is also a panoramic and richly comic portrait of France in the author’s lifetime, and a profound meditation on the nature of art, love, time, memory and death. But for most readers it is the characters of the novel who loom the largest: Swann and Odette, Monsieur de Charlus, Morel, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Françoise, Saint-Loup and so many others – Giants, as the author calls them, immersed in Time.

In Search Of Lost Time Boxed Set (4 Volumes)

When Jill Mariner is arrested for fighting over a parrot and then loses all her money on the same day, she is abandoned by her pompous fiancé and goes to stay with her rich relations on Long Island. Uncle Elmer is delighted to see her – until he finds out that Jill is penniless. Heading for New York, she ends up in the chorus of a musical comedy on Broadway where she eventually finds the man of her dreams. A light romantic comedy in Wodehouse’s most charming manner.

Jill The Reckless

Always to be found in the bar-parlour of the Angler's Rest where he is a favourite with the accomplished barmaid, Miss Postlethwaite, Mr Mulliner, the narrator of Meet Mr Mulliner, returns for another series of stories about his extraordinary relations, including Lancelot, Adrian, Cyril, Sacheverell, Eustace, Egbert and Augustine Mulliner. In a text teeming with tipsy bishops, angry baronets, lady novelists and haughty dowagers, the Mulliner boys always manage to come out on top.

Mulliner Nights

It all starts with an umbrella, the best to be found in the Drones Club. From such an innocent beginning Wodehouse weaves a comic tale of suspense and romance involving one of his most distinctive early heroes, Ronald Eustace Psmith, monocled wit and devil-may-care boulevardier. Unusually for Wodehouse, this is not only a light comedy but also an adventure story in which crime and even gun-play drive the plot.

Leave It To Psmith

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s. 
Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby is the bright star of the Jazz Age, but as writer Nick Carraway is drawn into the decadent orbit of his Long Island mansion, where the party never seems to end, he finds himself faced by the mystery of Gatsby's origins and desires.

The Great Gatsby

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, jealousy, and the complicated bonds of those who have spent their lives together. 
An array of writers evoke a variety of moods, from the raw, erotic passion of Lawrence and Colette to the wickedlycynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl; from the agonizing madness of jealousy in Nabokov's 'That in Aleppo Once ...' to romantic illusions in Scott Fitzgerald's 'Winter Dreams'. Objects of passion range from a glamorous silent-movie star in Elizabeth Bowen's haunting 'Dead Mabelle' to a faithful ghost in Kawabata's 'Immortality' and a successful heart surgeon and serial husband in Margaret Atwood's 'Bluebeard's Egg'. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the depths of a couple sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a husband and wife brought together by it. 
Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Maupassant, Calvino and T. C. Boyle convey the elemental force of love in extremely different ways. 
Together these nineteen stories make an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life. Perfect for Valentine's Day.

Love Stories

D H Lawrence

Sons and Lovers is a 1913 novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence. It traces emotional conflicts through the protagonist, Paul Morel, and his suffocating relationships with a demanding mother and two very different lovers, which exert complex influences on the development of his manhood.

Sons And Lovers

Graham Greene

Graham Greene's classic study in the banality of evil is set in the unforgettably evoked underworld of pre-war Brighton where Pinkie, a small-time ganster, meets his nemesis at the hands of Ida, the girl he betrays, Published in 1938, Greene's most celebrated novel signalled the beginning of the long series of masterpieces produced between then and his death in 1991

Brighton Rock

Raymond Chandler

Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. His last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savour the unique and compelling fictional world that made his works modern classics. 
 
The Lady in the Lake moves Marlowe out of his usual habitat of city streets and into the mountains outside Los Angeles in his strange search for a missing woman. 
 
The Little Sister takes Marlowe to Hollywood, where he tries to find a sweet young thing’s missing brother, uncovering on the way a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more than enough murder. 
 
In The Long Goodbye, a case involving a war-scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife has Marlowe constantly on the move: a psychotic gangster’s on his trail, he’s in trouble with the cops, and more and more corpses keep turning up. 
 
Playback features a well-endowed redhead who leads Marlowe to the California coast to solve a tale of big money and, of course, murder. 
 
Throughout these masterpieces, Marlowe’s wry humour and existential sense of his job prove yet again why he has become one of the most recognized and imitated characters in fiction.

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback

Volume 2

Ben Okri

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story.

The Famished Road

"Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation.” 
 
Clarence Chugwater is not a Boy Scout for nothing. It is summer 1909 and everyone is too interested in the Test Match to notice that England has been invaded by the Germans. And the Russians. And the Chinese. Not to mention a ‘boisterous band of the Young Turks’, a mad Mullah, and a brace of North African pirates. The government has recently abolished the army so there is nothing to be done about it anyway, except give a masterly display of polite indifference. But this would be to reckon without patriotic Clarence, ‘Boy of Destiny’, who alone is prepared to stand up to the foe, and who devises a highly unorthodox plan to restore his country to freedom… 
 
The Swoop! Or, How Clarence Saved England reprints the 33 black and white drawings by C. Harrison that accompanied the first edition. It is supplemented by The Military Invasion of America, in which Clarence’s story is humorously transplanted across the Atlantic.

The Swoop! & The Military Invasion of America

The Adventures of Sally is a transatlantic comedy set in worlds Wodehouse knew well: American theatres, English country houses, and the theatrical boarding-houses where young men and women dream of finding fame and fortune. Coming into an inheritance, one of these young women, Sally, is able to leave her boarding-house at last, and looks forward to a quiet life in a small apartment. Instead, she finds herself swept up in a series of adventures with her ambitious brother, an accident-prone, dog-loving Englishman she meets on a French beach, and his supercilious cousin who pursue her across the Atlantic. While losing her inheritance backing a play, and then retrieving it, she sheds an unsatisfactory fiancé, falls in love with the accident-prone, dog-loving Englishman, rejects the supercilious cousin, and finds happiness in a kennel on Long Island.

The Adventures of Sally

Thomas Hardy

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D&rsquo;Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her &lsquo;cousin&rsquo; Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future

Tess Of The D'urbervilles

Take a pig, a fat-headed earl, a country house, several pairs of frustrated lovers, some scheming outsiders, and all sorts of people who aren’t who they say they are. Mix thoroughly and apply the Wodehouse magic. The result is the lightest of literary soufflées, another instalment in the long-running saga of the Threepwood family, including the head of the clan, Lord Emsworth, his virago sister, Lady Constance, and his debonair brother, the Honourable Galahad Threepwood, ex-boulevardier and solver of romantic problems.

Blandings Castle

Isabel Allende

We begin - at the turn of the century, in an unnamed South American country - in the childhood home of the woman who will be the mother and grandmother of the clan, Clara del Valle. A warm-hearted, hypersensitive girl, Clara has distinguished herself from an early age with her telepathic abilities - she can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future. Following the mysterious death of her sister, the fabled Rosa the Beautiful, Clara has been mute for nine years, resisting all attempts to make her speak. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon. 
Her husband-to-be is Esteban Trueba, a stern, willful man, given to fits of rage and haunted by a profound loneliness. At the age of thirty-five, he has returned to the capital from his country estate to visit his dying mother and to find a wife. (He was Rosa's fiancé, and her death has marked him as deeply as it has Clara.) This is the man Clara has foreseen - has summoned - to be her husband; Esteban, in turn, will conceive a passion for Clara that will last the rest of his long and rancorous life. 
We go with this couple as they move into the extravagant house he builds for her, a structure that everyone calls "the big house on the corner," which is soon populated with Clara's spiritualist friends, the artists she sponsors, the charity cases she takes an interest in, with Esteban's political cronies, and, above all, with the Trueba children: Blanca, a practical, self-effacing girl who will, to the fury of her father, form a lifelong liaison with the son of his foreman, and the twins, Jaime and Nicolás, the former a solitary, taciturn boy who becomes a doctor to the poor and unfortunate; the latter a playboy, a dabbler in Eastern religions and mystical disciplines and, in the third generation, the child Alba, Blanca's daughter (the family does not recognize the real father for years, so great is Esteban's anger), a child who is fondled and indulged and instructed by them all. 
For all their good fortune, their natural (and supernatural) talents, and their powerful attachments to one another, the inhabitants of "the big house on the corner" are not immune to the larger forces of the world. And, as the twentieth century beats on, as Esteban becomes more strident in his opposition to Communism, as Jaime becomes the friend and confidant of the Socialist leader known as the Candidate, as Alba falls in love with a student radical, the Truebas become actors - and victims - in a tragic series of events that gives The House of the Spirits a deeper resonance and meaning.

The House Of The Spirits

Nancy Mitford

Nancy Mitford modelled the characters in her best-known novels on her own unconventional (and at the time of writing, notorious) family. We are introduced to the Radletts through the eyes of their cousin, Fanny ('the Bolter's girl'), on one of her frequent visits to their country estate: Uncle Matthew the blustering patriarch, owner of that bloodied entrenching tool above the fireplace, who hunts his children with bloodhounds; vague Aunt Sadie, and six children recklessly eager to grow up. 
 The Pursuit of Love is the story of Linda, the most beautiful and wayward of the Radlett daughters, who falls first for a stuffy Tory politician, then an ardent Communist (whom she follows to the Spanish Civil War), and finally a very wicked and irresistibly charming French duke. 
 Love in a Cold Climate, again related by Fanny, focuses on Polly Hampton, long groomed for the perfect marriage by her fearsome mother, Lady Montdore, but secretly determined to pursue her own course.

Love in a Cold Climate & The Pursuit of Love

It wasn't Archie's fault, really. It's true he went to America and fell in love with Lucille, the daughter of a millionaire hotel proprietor . . . and if he did marry her -- well, what else was there to do? From his point of view, the whole thing was a thoroughly good egg; but Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law, thought differently, Archie had neither money nor occupation, which was distasteful in the eyes of the industrious Mr. Brewster; but the real bar was the fact that he had once adversely criticized one of his hotels. Archie did his best to heal the breach; but, being something of an ass, genus priceless, he found it almost beyond his powers to placate the "man-eating fish" whom Providence had given him as a father-in-law. . . .

Indiscretions of Archie

Freddie Widgeon wants the money to buy shares in a coffee plantation in Kenya so that he can marry Sally Foster. Soapy and Dolly Molloy want to get their hands on a cache of stolen jewels hidden in the house of Freddie's neighbour in the suburb of Valley Fields. When their paths cross, the ensuing misunderstandings lead to vintage Wodehouse comedy.

Ice in the Bedroom

Anna Akhmatova

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. 
 
Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.

Anna Akhmatova: Poems

When Bill Bannister meets Dr Sally Smith, love blossoms immediately. Unfortunately there is just the small problem of Lottie Higginbotham, former actress, serial bride and human fireball, with whom Bill is already involved.The well-meaning interference of Bill's old friend, Squiffy Tidmouth, once married to Lottie, only complicates matters further, until everything is straightened out in a series of comic encounters at Bill's ancestral home and everyone lives happily ever after.

Doctor Sally

Charlotte Brontë

Struggling manufacturer Robert Moore has introduced labour saving machinery to his Yorkshire mill, arousing a ferment of unemployment and discontent among his workers. Robert considers marriage to the wealthy and independent Shirley Keeldar to solve his financial woes, yet his heart lies with his cousin Caroline, who, bored and desperate, lives as a dependent in her uncle's home with no prospect of a career. Shirley, meanwhile, is in love with Robert's brother, an impoverished tutor - a match opposed by her family. As industrial unrest builds to a potentially fatal pitch, can the four be reconciled? Set during the Napoleonic wars at a time of national economic struggles, "Shirley" (1849) is an unsentimental, yet passionate depiction of conflict between classes, sexes and generations.

Shirley, The Professor

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

Wings

Classic Football Shirts

Frankenstein

Features

NaNoWriMo: How do I start writing my novel?

Why fairy-tale characters can be good role models

Illustration of someone writing on their laptop with long reel of paper coming out like a printer

Showing results for: ‘Abie Longstaff’

Filters

Category

Age

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter