Anita Desai

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

W.G. Sebald

‘Nothing like Vertigo is likely to be encountered in the course of one's regular reading. One emerges from it shaken, seduced, and deeply impressed’ Anita Brookner, Spectator 
 
What could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, the Great Fire of London, a story by Kafka and a closed-down pizzeria in Verona? Part fiction, part travelogue, the narrator of Sebald’s compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary, eccentric course from England to Italy and beyond, succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself. 
 
‘As a reader, you find his prose wrapping itself, wraith-like, round your imagination, casting a baffling and indefinable spell… [Sebald] entertains, provokes, stimulates and inspires’ Robert McCrum, Observer

Vertigo

Saadat Hasan Manto

A rebellious yet human portrait of India's bustling Bombay, as told by one of the greatest Urdu writers of the last century: Saadat Hasan Manto. 
 
'The undisputed master of the modern Indian short story' Salman Rushdie, Observer 
 
In the 1930s and 40s, Bombay was the cosmopolitan capital of the subcontinent - an exhilarating hub of license and liberty, bursting with both creative energy and helpless degradation. It was also muse to the celebrated short story writer of India and Pakistan, Saadat Hasan Manto. 
 
Manto's hard-edged, moving stories remain, a hundred years after his birth, startling and provocative. In searching out those forgotten by humanity - prostitutes, conmen and crooks - Manto wrote about what it means to be human.

Bombay Stories

Yukio Mishima

Mishima&rsquo;s literary powers are on full display in his penultimate novel, a meditation on reincarnation and Buddhist philosophy. 
 
Honda, a brilliant lawyer and man of reason, is called to Bangkok on legal business. He is granted an audience with a young Thai princess known as 'Moonlight', an encounter that radically alters the course of his life. Convinced she is a reincarnated spirit, he undertakes a long, arduous pilgrimage to the holy places of India. There he encounters her again. But the princess has become one more embodiment of all that Honda cannot possess. 
 
'An elegy to the loss of pureness in the Japanese national spirit' Japan Times

The Temple of Dawn

Ingmar Bergman

The final novel in world renowned film-maker, Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy of novels plotting the fractious marriage of his parents 
 
Twelve years of marriage, three children, a husband, Henrik, with whom she no longer finds anything in common: Anna is at the end of her tether. Besides, she’s in love – with Henrik’s friend Tomas, a student-priest, who is everything her husband is not. 
 
Based upon film-maker, Ingmar Bergman’s own family life, Personal Confessions is the final part in Bergman’s loose trilogy of books that started with The Best Intentions and Sunday’s Children.

Private Confessions

Simone de Beauvoir

A captivating novella about long-term relationships, getting older and how to live a good life, by the great Simone de Beauvoir. 
 
Nicole and André, a retired French couple, take a summer holiday to Russia. It is the 1960s and Russia is a beautiful, complicated place. Their guide is Macha, André's daughter from a previous relationship - a woman they both love. Adventure, inspiration, good food and good vodka are promised. 
 
Once thrilled by their romance, Nicole and André have now become too used to each other. Both harbour a growing feeling of not being fully understood - of being alone. Father and daughter engage in the grand debates of East-West relations, nationalism and socialism. But getting older, long-term relationships and how to enjoy life turn out to be the more pressing issues.

Misunderstanding in Moscow

Vasily Grossman

The great Russian 20th-century novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. 
 
Life and Fate is an epic tale of a country told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs. As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war. 
 
Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece. 
 
"Compelling... Grossman's portrait is timelessly relevant... Life and Fate is worth all the audience it can find" The Times

Life and Fate

Life and Fate is an epic tale of twentieth-century Russia told through the fate of a single family, the Shaposhnikovs, from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Stalingrad. 
 
As the battle of Stalingrad looms, Grossman's characters must work out their destinies in a world torn by ideological tyranny and war. 
 
Completed in 1960 and then confiscated by the KGB, this sweeping panorama of Soviet Society remained unpublished until it was smuggled into the West in 1980, where it was hailed as a masterpiece. 
 
'One of the finest Russian novels of the 20th century' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Compelling... Grossman's portrait is timelessly relevant... Life and Fate is worth all the audience it can find' The Times 
 
VINTAGE CLASSICS RUSSIAN SERIES - sumptuous editions of the greatest books to come out of Russia during the most tumultuous period in its history.

Life and Fate (Vintage Classic Russians Series)

Laurence is a woman who appears to live an ideal life. 
 
Weekends in the country, weekdays in Paris – her life features all the trappings of 1960s French bourgeoisie. She has money, a handsome husband, two daughters and a lover. She also has a successful career as an advertising copywriter, though her mind unbidden writes copy while she’s at home, and dreams of domesticity in the office. 
 
But Laurence is a woman whose experience of life has always been overwritten by the expectation of perfection. It is only when her 10-year-old daughter, Catherine, starts to vocalise her despair about the unfairness of the world that Laurence begins to act, finally grappling with a life that prizes image over truth. 
 
TRANSLATED BY LAUREN ELKIN

The Image of Her

Colette

Set in pre-war Paris, Julie de Carneilhan tells of the complex relationship between proud but impoverished Julie and her former husband, the Comte d'Espivant, who has remarried a wealth widow. Julie de Carneilhan was the last full-length novel Colette was to write as was 'as close a reckoning with the elements of her second marriage as she ever allowed herself.'In Chance Acquaintances Colette visits a health resort accompanied only by her cat. While there, she befriends the handsome Gerard Haume and his invalid wife Antoinette, and is unwittingly caught up in the mysterious and disturbing events which befall them.Varying widely in mood and treatment, these two short novels demonstrate the versatility and sensitivity of Colette's writing

Chance Acquaintances and Julie De Carneilhan

Junichiro Tanizaki

A husband and wife each write in their diary, never knowing if it is being read by the other. 
 
Ikuko and her husband are deeply in love but have grown physically apart, each unsure of the other’s desires. When Ikuko finds the key to her husband’s diary she ignores it, but she does begin to keep a diary of her own. Both parties start to set down in writing the evolution of their sex life and their deepest, most private desires. Who is reading whose diary? Who knows what? So begins an extended erotic game of lust, jealousy and manipulation. 
 
‘A story about sex and marriage that is as explicit as any novel on the theme since Lady Chatterley's Lover’ The Times 
 
'Sensational and serious' New York Times

The Key

Honoré de Balzac

'This brilliant but devastatingly sad novel moved me so much, I began it again the moment I got to the end' Rose Tremain 
 
 Monsieur Grandet is a very rich man whose chief care is his gold. He runs his household with exacting miserly attention and his wife and daughter suffer a Spartan existence. On the evening of his daughter Eugénie's twenty third birthday his foppish nephew Charles suddenly arrives from Paris. 
 
Eugénie has never known passion. Now, in an instant, she falls in love and her life is changed forever. Monsieur Grandet will not countenance his daughter's marriage to her penniless cousin and Eugénie's determination to follow her heart leads her into direct conflict with her father.

Eugenie Grandet

Kaname’s marriage is disintegrating. 
 
It is the 1920s in Tokyo and he and his wife, Misako, are trapped in a parody of a progressive Western marriage. He escapes into the arms of a lover, whilst closing his eyes to the likelihood that his wife will do the same. But this unhappy arrangement can’t last. Misako’s father steps in, believing that their relationship has been damaged by the influence of a new and alien culture, attempting to heal the breach by educating his son-in-law in the Japanese traditions of aesthetic and sensual pleasure. Meanwhile a fixation with his father-in-law’s mistress is fermenting within Kaname. 
 
‘Chilling…Tanizaki is a master of ambiguity’ The Times 
 
‘Tanazaki pulls aside the shoji that screens Japanese home life to eavesdrop on what people are really saying and thinking behind their polite facades’ New York Times

Some Prefer Nettles

For years Kazu has run her fashionable restaurant with a combination of charm and shrewdness - then she falls in love. 
 
The man is one of her clients, an aristocratic retired politician, and she renounces her business in order to become his wife. But it is not so easy to renounce her independent spirit. Eventually Kazu must choose between her marriage and the demands of her irrepressible vitality. After the Banquet is a magnificent portrait of political and domestic warfare and love in later life. 
 
'An exquisitely paced high comedy at once characterized by humor and restraint...features a magnificently ebullient heroine as she embarks upon one more adventure in love' Kirkus 
 
&lsquo;[Mishima's] most novelistic work, with a degree of earthiness and warmth rare in his fiction&rsquo; New York Times

After the Banquet

In a remote fishing village in Japan, two very different young people fall in love. 
 
Shinji is a hard-working fisherman, Hatsue is the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. She is also a diver for pearls and seaweed with the other women of the community. Shinji is entranced at the sight of Hatsue in the twilight on the beach and a relationship develops via secret notes and meetings. But when the villagers&rsquo; gossip threatens to divide them permanently, Shinji must risk his life to prove his worth. 
 
&lsquo;A work of art...altogether a joyous and lovely thing&rsquo; New York Times 
 
&lsquo;A sunny masterpiece&rsquo; Los Angeles Times

The Sound of Waves

This is Colette's famous love story about the romance between an older woman and a younger man. 
 
Léa de Lonval is a magnificent and aging courtesan facing the end of her career. She has devoted the last six years to the amorous education of the exquisitely handsome and spoilt Chéri - a playboy half her age. When an advantageous marriage is arranged for Chéri, Léa reluctantly decides their relationship must end. But neither lover can foresee how deeply they are connected, or how much they will have to give up. 
 
First published in 1920, it was instantly greeted by Marcel Proust and André Gide as a masterpiece. 
 
VINTAGE FRENCH CLASSICS - six masterpieces of French fiction in gorgeous new gift editions. 
 
'This most French of all French writers tells us how love sometimes binds and keeps a woman from breathing freely or how it may shape and support her and help her to be beautiful . . . One thinks of her as the female voice of Paris . . .' New York Times

Cheri

Vintage Classics French Series

Jean Giono

Harry Brockway

'And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns' 
 
While hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a solitary shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness. 
 
Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again. A young forest is slowly spreading over the valley - Elzéard has continued his work. Year after year the narrator returns to see the miracle being created: a verdant, green landscape that is testament to one man's creative instinct. miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man's creative instinct. 
 
'I love the humanity of this story and how one man's efforts can change the future for so many' Michael Morpurgo, Independent 
 
VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment. These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.

The Man Who Planted Trees

A novel from the Vintage Earth collection

A seductive psychological thriller about obsession, jealousy and deceit - and a Japanese queer classic. Sonoko must tell her story. Listen and decide for yourself. 
 
Sonoko Kakiuchi is a cultured Osaka lady in an uninspiring marriage. When she decides to take an art class in town she meets the extraordinary Mitsuko, a woman as beautiful and charismatic as she is cunning. They begin a passionate affair but as Sonoko’s infatuation with Mitsuko deepens, she finds herself sinking ever-further into a quicksand of sex, humiliation and deceit. 
 
‘A riveting tale of malevolent corruption fatally masked by a terrible and deceptive beauty’ Kirkus Reviews 
 
‘Classic Tanizaki…exuberant storytelling within a multi-layered narrative of sexual obsession’ Japan Times 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY KRISTEN ROUPENIAN

Quicksand

Haruki Murakami

Enter the surreal and enchanting world of Haruki Murakami 
 
Toru Okada's cat has disappeared. 
 
His wife is growing more distant every day. 
 
Then there are the increasingly explicit telephone calls he has recently been receiving. 
 
As this compelling story unfolds, the tidy suburban realities of Okada's vague and blameless life, spent cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table, are turned inside out. He embarks on a bizarre journey, guided by a succession of characters, each with a tale to tell. 
 
'Mesmerising, surreal, this really is the work of a true original' The Times 
 
VINTAGE JAPANESE CLASSICS series - five masterpieces of Japanese fiction in gorgeous new gift editions.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)

Ismail Kadare

Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched to Albania to recover his country's dead. 
 
Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission, and their conversations brings out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task. As they descend from the callous trivialities of their gruesome business, past and present, to suffering self-disgust, the author gives us glimpses of the lives of the people whose graves they are unearthing. 
 
‘He has been compared to Gogol, Kafka and Orwell. But Kadare's is an original voice, universal yet deeply rooted in his own soil’ Independent on Sunday

General Of The Dead Army

José Saramago

Watching a rented video, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is shocked to notice that one of the actors is identical to him in every physical detail. He embarks on a secret quest to find his double and sets in motion a train of events that he cannot control. Saramago's novel explores the nature of individuality and examines the fear and insecurity that arise when our singularity comes under threat, when even a wife cannot tell the original from the imposter...

The Double

(Enemy)

Fumiko Enchi

Published for the first time in the UK, one of Japan's greatest modern female writers 
 
In the late nineteenth century, Tomo, the faithful wife of a government official, is sent to Tokyo, where a heartbreaking task is awaiting her. From among hundreds of geishas and daughters offered up for sale by their families she must select a respectable young girl to become her husband’s new lover. Externally calm, but torn apart inside, Tomo dutifully begins the search for an official mistress. 
 
The Waiting Years was awarded Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Noma Prize.

The Waiting Years

Roberto Bolaño

War-games champion Udo Berger is finally on holiday. 
 
Travelling to the Costa Brava with his long-ignored girlfriend, Ingeborg, there they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, and a band of shady locals. They have fun, see the sights, relax. Then, late one night, Charly disappears without a trace. 
 
Desperate to solve the mystery, Udo refuses to leave, even after Ingeborg returns home. Increasingly frightened, the situation slips beyond his grasp and Udo suddenly realizes that the consequences of this &lsquo;game&rsquo; are much more serious than he ever imagined. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Capering, weird, rascally and short... The Third Reich is giddily funny, but it is also prickly and bizarre enough to count among Bolaño&rsquo;s first-rate efforts&rsquo; The Economist 
 
&lsquo;A mesmerizing tale: sleek, linear, easily digested, beautifully translated&hellip; Classic Bolaño&rsquo; Washington Post

The Third Reich

When Oscar Amalfitano begins an affair with one of his students, he has no idea where it will lead. 
 
More than his turbulent revolutionary past, or the death of his beautiful wife, the scandalous exposure of this relationship will change him for ever. Forced to flee Barcelona with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Amalfitano finds himself in Santa Teresa, a sprawling, mythical town on the Mexico-US border, populated by mysterious characters and haunted by dark tales of murdered women. 
 
Returning to the the world and characters of 2666, Bolaño's masterpiece, Woes of the True Policeman explores the the power of art, memory and desire - and marks a kaleidoscopic, lyrical and darkly humorous last act in one of the great oeuvres of world literature. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;Hallucinatory, manic, fearful, comic... Bolaño must be read by anyone who loves the novel&rsquo; Herald 
 
&lsquo;We savour all he has written as every offering is a portal into the elaborate terrain of his genius&rsquo; Patti Smith

Woes of the True Policeman

Carmen Laforet

Eighteen-year old orphan Andrea moves to battle-scarred Barcelona to take up a scholarship at the university. But staying with relatives in their crumbling apartment, her dreams of independence are dashed among the eccentric collection of misfits who surround her, not least her uncle Roman. As Andrea's university friend, the affluent, elegant Ena, enters into a strange relationship with Roman, Andrea can't help but wonder what future lies ahead for her in such a bizarre and disturbing world. 
 
Translated by Edith Grossman 
 
'One of the great classics of contemporary European literature' Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Nada

Georges Perec

Things: A Story of the Sixties is the story of a young couple who want to enjoy life, but the only way they know how to do so is through ownership of 'things'. Perec's first novel won the Prix Renaudot and became the cult book for a generation. 
 
In A Man Asleep, a young student embarks upon a disturbing and exhaustive pursuit of indifference, following his experience in non-existence with relentless logic.

Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep

Etsuko is a trapped woman who lays traps for others... 
 
After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law's house, where she numbly submits to the old man's advances. Meanwhile she develops feelings for the handsome eighteen-year-old servant Saburo. Tormented by his indifference, yet invigorated by her desire, she makes one last, catastrophic bid for his attention. 
 
'A sensuous, absorbing study of overriding obsession' Kirkus 
 
'One of the outstanding writers of the world' New York Times

Thirst for Love

Lisbon, late-1940s. The inhabitants of an old apartment block are struggling to make ends meet. There’s the elderly shoemaker and his wife who take in a solitary young lodger; the woman who sells herself for money and jewellery; the cultivated family come down in the world; and the beautiful typist whose boss can’t keep his eyes off her. 
 
Poisonous relationships, happy marriages, jealousy, gossip and love – Skylight brings together the joys and grief of ordinary people. One of his earliest novels, it provides an entry into Saramago’s universe but was lost for decades and published, as per his wishes, after his death.

Skylight

Jacqueline Harpman

From the author of I Who Have Never Known Men comes a startling new collection of three never-before-translated stories, each plumbing the depths of that most necessary human instinct: defiance. 
 
Wandering the forest in the wake of some unfathomable war, a woman and her fellow survivors are forbidden from leaving its boundaries or pausing in their march through its strange depths. 
 
As part of her rigid shcooling, a teenage girl is barred from questioning the dogma she is taught to believe – her punishment for doing so will be as disturbing as it is disproportiante. 
 
Locked in a loveless marriage, a young woman satisfies her husband’s desires, twice-weekly, as directed. She has not yet thought to pursue her own. 
 
In varying ways, and across varying worlds, each of these women are trapped. Do they have the will to escape? 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days

We Were Forbidden

Dag Solstad

Nothing in Elias' measured life, in his whole career as a teacher of literature, in his marriage to the 'indescribably beautiful' Eva, foreshadowed the events of that apparently ordinary day. He makes sure he has his headache pills and leaves for work as he has done every morning for the past twenty-five years. 
 
He is only too familiar with his pupils' hostile attitude both to his lectures and to himself, but today he feels their impatience, their oafishness, more painfully than ever before and, after their ritually dismissive and bored response to his passionate lecture on Ibsen's The Wild Duck, he reaches a point of crisis. 
 
Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

Shyness and Dignity

Marlen Haushofer

Claustrophobic and shattering, this is the story of one ordinary woman unable to save a teenager in her care. It is the story of Stella... 
 
Stella is a friend's nineteen-year-old daughter who has come to live with Anna and her family. Unloved and neglected, Stella's presence disturbs the already tense and tumultuous household. She lodges uncomfortably in their lives, whilst Anna struggles to bring warmth and welcome to the home. Her son continues to be gloomy and her daughter oblivious. Meanwhile Richard, Anna's adulterous husband, pretends not to notice Stella at all… 
 
Marlen Haushofer, author of The Wall, is the undisputed mistress of sustained dread and this gripping short novel deserves to be rediscovered. 
 
TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE 
 
'This potent 1958 novella from Austrian writer Haushofer takes the form of a mother’s agitated confession... This one hits hard' Publisher's Weekly 
 
'Chillingly unillusioned... A fable about the habitual moral inertia of educated people' London Review of Books 
 
‘Haushofer is a rather terrifying writer… Killing Stella limns a world of guilty secrets and repressions’ New Yorker

Killing Stella

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

Little Black Classics Box Set

Penguin Modern Box Set

Doctor Who: Circuit-Breaker

Frankenstein

Here, from Anita Desai to Salman Rushdie, are five books about families, India, marriage and the rest, to keep you going as the series moves on.

Showing results for: ‘Anita Desai’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter