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Dale Shaw

A collection of haikus that each sum up the complex, confusing and frequently confounding character of the British. 
 
In a time of political turbulence and societal rancour, the idea of Britishness and national identity is being widely discussed. What does it mean to be British? 
 
Very British Haikus, makes light of what it means to be British in a refreshing and funny way using the classical, elegant five, seven, five syllable poetic structure to celebrate everything idiosyncratic that defines what it means to be British. All of the minutiae of British life is portrayed in Haiku form: parking, queuing, tea, chips, violently repressed emotion, pets, gardening and anger. 
 
Divided into categories concerning work, leisure, travel, family, food, pets and relationships - the entire British psyche will be devilishly skewed. 
 
With a nod to the hilarious Very British Problems and the bestselling What I Lick Before Your Face and Other Haikus By Dogs, Very British Haikus attempts to get under the skin of those citizens of Blighty and reveals what makes them tick.

Painfully British Haikus

Alistair Coleman

The great British public are masters of the art of grumbling and no complaint is too trivial for the pages of our local newspapers. They are full of people pointing wanly at a bin, a mouldy pie, or even the empty space where their stolen bicycle isn't. This book will open up the APILN archives to find the all-time best stories from this much-loved blog, exploring popular subjects for fury, hilarious photos, weird news, angry poetry, furious letters and more.

Angry People in Local Newspapers

Adam Phillips

Throughout his brilliant career, Adam Phillips has lent a new and incisive dimension to the art of creative non-fiction, and in so doing revived the form for audiences of the new millennium. Collected here are nineteen pieces that have best defined his thinking - including 'On Tickling', 'On Being Bored' and 'Clutter: A Case History' - along with a selection of new writings and an introduction by Booker prize-winner John Banville. One Way and Another is an affirmation of Phillips's position as one of the most important, imaginative and accessible literary essayists today.

One Way and Another

New and Selected Essays

Oliver Shah

DISCOVER THE SHOCKING TRUTH BEHIND THE BUSINESS AND LIFESTYLE OF SIR PHILIP GREEN 
 
In this jaw-dropping expose, Oliver Shah uncovers the truth behind one of Britain's biggest business scandals, following Sir Philip Green's journey to the big time, the wild excesses of his heyday and his dramatic demise. 
 
Stunning praise for the book: 
 
'A detailed and entertaining dismantling of the 'king of the high street'' Guardian 
 
'Superb' Evening Standard 
 
'From the glitzy parties to the threatening phone calls, the larger-than-life characters to the speedy downfall, this real-life tale of hubris has all the elements of a Greek tragedy' City AM 
 
'Entertaining stuff, pacily written. Filled with colourful characters - and expletives' The Times 
 
'Shah has written a hard-hitting, often funny, ultimately sobering tale of how fortunes were made and lost in late 20th and early 21st century Britain' Financial Times 
 
Sunday Times Bestseller, June 2018

Damaged Goods

The Rise and Fall of Sir Philip Green  - The Sunday Times Bestseller

Tom Chivers

'A lyrical meditation on landscapes and cities, vivid reportage and a memoir. And also a beautifully realised and moving read.' Financial Times 
 
'A beguiling mix of history, geology, folklore and memoir that captivated me from the first page.' Lara Maiklem, author of Mudlarking 
 
'Tom Chivers brings a poet's sensibility to this book about the hidden parts of the capital, mixing the past with the present, the known with the unknown and his personal story with social history and geology.' Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other 
 
What secrets lie beneath a city? 
 
Tom Chivers follows hidden pathways, explores lost islands and uncovers the geological mysteries that burst up through the pavement and bubble to the surface of our streets. From Roman ruins to a submerged playhouse, from an abandoned Tube station to underground rivers, Chivers leads us on a journey into the depths of the city he loves. 
 
A lyrical interrogation of a capital city, a landscape and our connection to place, London Clay celebrates urban edgelands: in-between spaces where the natural world and the metropolis collide. Through a combination of historical research, vivid reportage and personal memoir, it will transform how you see London, and cities everywhere. 
 
'Tom Chivers, with the forensic eye of an investigator, the soul of a poet, is an engaging presence; a guide we would do well to follow.' Iain Sinclair, author of The Last London

London Clay

Journeys in the Deep City

William Dampier

Dampier's (1651-1715) adventures and writing inspired both Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, but in his own right he was a remarkable, observant and enjoyable writer - whether on a woefully mishandled pirate raid in Spanish America or on a desperate journey to Sumatra in an open boat or on the habits of manatees or bats. He also left the first description in English of the Aborigines of Australia - thus initiating a painful, now three centuries' long encounter between peoples on opposite sides of the world. 
 
Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries &ndash; but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Piracy, Turtles and Flying Foxes

Hugo Young

Hugo Young was one of Britain&rsquo;s leading journalists for over thirty years, first on the Sunday Times, where he was political editor and deputy editor, and then as the Guardian&rsquo;s senior political commentator. On his death in 2003 he was called &lsquo;the Pope of the liberal left&rsquo;, but for the last decade or more of his life there was really no more admired and respected journalist in any position on the political spectrum. 
 
One of the secrets of Young&rsquo;s success as a journalist was that he was exceptionally well informed. Politicians from every major party, senior civil servants, judges and public figures of all kinds talked to him off the record, discussions which then informed the judgements he made when he wrote. Most of his interlocutors were unaware that straight after their telephone conversation, meal or meeting with Young had finished, he meticulously wrote down exactly what had been said, together with his own immediate impressions of whoever he was talking to. 
 
By 2003, Young&rsquo;s records from such conversations amounted to a million and a half words. From this extraordinary archive Ion Trewin, who knew Young since they were colleagues in the 1960s, has made a selection which presents a unique record of what many of the leading figures in British political and public life were thinking, frankly and without the distortions of hindsight, for more than three decades. The result is one of the most gripping and informative books about British politics published for many years. Young&rsquo;s first interviewee, Douglas Hurd, later Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary, and one of his regulars for the whole of the period of this book, judged him thus: &lsquo;His success was partly achieved by creating a conversation between two people roughly equal in status and knowledge. His own preconception sometimes appeared, as is natural in a conversation between equals, but never in a way which interrupted the even flow of discourse. He did not distort what he heard.&rsquo; 
 
The Hugo Young Papers shows Young&rsquo;s central place in the nexus between politics and journalism in Britain and provides a historical document of the first rank.

The Hugo Young Papers

Thirty Years of British Politics - off the record

Iain Sinclair

In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce &ndash; a woman three years dead &hellip; 
 
In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare&rsquo;s walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore &ndash; as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic &ndash; Sinclair&rsquo;s quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet&rsquo;s muse.

Edge of the Orison

In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey Out of Essex'

William Morris

Visionary English Socialist and pioneer of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris argued that all work should be a source of pride and satisfaction, and that everyone should be entitled to beautiful surroundings &ndash; no matter what their class. 
 
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves &ndash; and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives &ndash; 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.

Useful Work v. Useless Toil

Read stories inspired by the four Underground lines that run North and South through city - part of a series of twelve books tied to the twelve lines of the London Underground, as Tfl celebrates 150 years of the Tube with Penguin. 
 
Comedy and capitalism join in four tales: 
 
The Northern Line: William Leith, author of The Hungry Years and Bits of Me Are Falling Apart, tells, in A Northern Line Minute, the darkly humorous tales of his escapades on the Tube. 
 
The Bakerloo Line: Paul Morley, author, journalist and cultural commentator, tells the story in Earthbound of post-punk, music and changing times. 
 
The Victoria Line: Kids Company, a leading London charity supported by Prince Charles, Helen Mirren and Stephen Fry, presents the voices of some of London's children, in partnership with the charity's founder Camila Batmanghelidjh. 
 
The Jubilee Line: John O'Farrell, author of The Man Who Forgot His Wife and An Utterly Impartial History of Britain turns his comedic genius to the problem of capitalism, encapsulated in a Tube train full of passengers stuck underground.

North-South: Penguin Underground Lines

Northern, Bakerloo, Victoria and Jubilee

Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy Clarkson gets really riled in Round the Bend. 
 
What's it like to drive a car that's actively trying to kill you? 
 
This and many other burning questions trouble Jeremy Clarkson as he sets out to explore the world from the safety of four wheels. Avoiding the legions of power-crazed traffic wombles attempting to block highway and byway, he he: 
 
* Shows how the world of performance cars may be likened to Battersea Dogs Home 
 
* Reveals why St Moritz may be the most bonkers town in all of the world 
 
* Reminds us that Switzerland is so afraid of snow that any flakes falling on the road are immediately arrested 
 
* Argues that washing a car is a waste of time 
 
Funny, globe-trotting, irreverent and sometimes downright rude, Round the Bend is packed with curious and fascinating but otherwise hopelessly useless stories and facts about everything under the sun (and just occasionally cars). It's Jeremy Clarkson at his brilliant best. 
 
 
Praise for Jeremy Clarkson 
'Brilliant . . . laugh-out-loud' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Outrageously funny . . . will have you in stitches' Time Out 
 
'Very funny . . . I cracked up laughing on the tube' Evening Standard

Round the Bend

Gerard Manley Hopkins

'O let them be left, wildness and wet' 
 
As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins' incomparably brilliant poetry, ranging from the ecstasy of 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty' to the heart-wrenching despair of the 'sonnets of desolation'. 
 
 Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Hopkins' Poems and Prose is available in Penguin Classics.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Dan Hodges

10 PM, on the 7 May. The exit poll predicting the result of the 2015 General Election is announced. 
 
In that instant three lives are changed for ever. 
 
David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg were three very different men, from very different backgrounds. But they shared one ambition. To lead their country. 
 
In pursuit of their dream they were forced to make sacrifices. Of their principles. Of those they loved. Of themselves. 
 
And right up until the final moment the exit poll was released each man clung to the hope those sacrifices had not been in vain. Then the clock struck ten. 
 
In One Minute to Ten, Dan Hodges brings to life the most dramatic general election campaign in living memory, and tells the untold story of the three men who contested it. And in doing so reveals the price paid by those who risk everything in their quest for the ultimate political prize...

One Minute To Ten

Cameron, Miliband and Clegg. Three Men, One Ambition and the Price of Power

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

There is the guard who delivers blows with no visible traces. The fraudster stitched up by the police for murder. The man who refuses to lie for a packet of cigarettes. The abandoned teenager, the down-and-out, the grass... He describes a hidden world of brutality and corruption, yet one where moments of humanity still manage to shine through. 
 
One in ten Russian men pass through prison at some point in their lives. This book is a denunciation of an entire system of bureaucratic criminality, and a passionate call to recognise a human tragedy.

My Fellow Prisoners

Maureen N. McLane

At times loose-limbed, freewheeling and conversational, at times musically taut, and often miraculously both at once, Maureen N. McLane's poetry has been described as having 'a tonal register somewhere between teenage fangirl and Wordsworth professor' (London Review of Books). What I'm Looking For gathers selections from her first five books of poetry, from the mixture of love poems and breezy skewerings of Great Literature that characterize her debut, Same Life, to the later collections' shadowing of a mind roaming wittily through nature, philosophy, music and sex, and the bravura life-story-in-episodes of Mz N: the serial. 
 
Brainy, funny, passionate, uncool and always utterly charming, these 'sexy, cerebral and romantic' poems (The New York Times Book Review) will make you 'laugh, cry and think in quick succession, or all at once' (Sarah Howe).

What I'm Looking For

Selected Poems 2005–2017

Mike Leigh

Forty years on from its first performance at the Hampstead Theatre and original screening on BBC1 soon after, Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party - telling of two marriages spectacularly unravelling at an awkward neighbourhood drinks party - remains a pinnacle of British theatre. Here is the original script, complete with a new introduction by Mike Leigh describing the play's unlikely genesis, how it came to be made and where he believes it fits within his oeuvre as one of the country's leading writers and directors.

Abigail's Party

Ahmed Alnaouq

Pam Bailey

THE NUMBER 5 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
THE IRISH BESTSELLER 
 
'Meaningful and impactful ... A vital [read] ... Tell all your friends' BRITISH VOGUE 
'A powerful collection' SERVICE95 
'This book is a jailbreak and a miracle' NAOMI KLEIN 
'Essential ... A project that insists on liberation' TA-NEHISI COATES 
'Impossible to put down or forget' RIZ AHMED 
'We Are Not Numbers is not just a book - it's my life, their life, and our shared story ... This is Gaza as it truly is, written by those who live it every day' MOTAZ AZAIZA 
'A brilliant collection of voices that lays bare the struggles and suffering of ordinary young Palestinians' MONICA ALI 
 
A teenage girl stares at her roof, hoping it won’t collapse over her head. A young student searches the Internet for photos of libraries around the world, hoping he’ll be able to visit them one day. Another walks around the city, taking notes of all the buildings she dreams of repairing. 
 
These are the stories of young people from Gaza, born under Israeli occupation and blockade. They are people who have endured unspeakable struggles and losses, who keep fighting to be recognised not as numbers, but as human beings with hopes, dreams and lives worth living. 
 
We Are Not Numbers was founded in 2014 to give voice to the youth of Gaza. In this collection, vital, urgent and full of heart, spanning over ten years to the present moment, we gain an unparalleled insight into the past, as well as the current and next generation of Palestinian leaders, artists, scientists and scholars and imagine where we might go from here.

We Are Not Numbers

The Voices of Gaza’s Youth

Simon Armitage

Birds are the most obvious wild things we have around us. They are much watched and much loved. A remarkable number of poets have noticed birds and British bird poetry is as old as British poetry. Some of the best known, and most loved, poems in English are bird poems. Here poet Simon Armitage and amateur ornithologist Tim Dee gather the best of the past and the most promising of the present, as well as some overlooked gems. Poems are organised according to ornithological classification, and there are detailed ornithological notes which illuminate the poems and provide fascinating information on the birds.  Altogether this is a truly original anthology.

The Poetry of Birds

edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee

Aphra Behn

'We are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues . . .' 
 
Spy, traveller and pioneering female writer Aphra Benn's story of an African prince sold into slavery is considered one of the earliest English novels

Oroonoko

André Naffis-Sahely

Flitting from the mud-soaked floors of Venice to the glittering, towering constructions of the Abu Dhabi of his childhood and early adulthood, from the 'disposable cities' composed of shanty towns and rough encampments which spring up wherever new resources are discovered to present-day London and North America, André Naffis-Sahely's bracingly plain-spoken first collection gathers portraits of promised lands and those who go in search of them: travellers, labourers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed. This is poetry as reportage, as much an act of memory as of sinuous, clear-eyed vision. As this arresting new poet has remarked elsewhere: 'I don't like poems that invent memories; I have enough of my own.'

The Promised Land

Poems from Itinerant Life

Anglo-Saxon poetry was produced between 700 and 1000 AD for an audience that delighted in technical accomplishment, and the durable works of Old English verse spring from the source of the English language. 
 
Michael Alexander has translated the best of the Old English poetry into modern English and into a verse form that retains the qualities of Anglo-Saxon metre and alliteration. Included in this selection are the &lsquo;heroic poems&rsquo; such as Widsith, Deor, Brunanburh and Maldon, and passages from Beowulf; some of the famous &lsquo;riddles&rsquo; from The Exeter Book; all the &lsquo;elegies&rsquo;, including The Ruin, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife&rsquo;s Complaint and The Husband&rsquo;s Message, in which the virtu of Old English is found in its purest and most concentrated form; together with the great Christian poem The Dream of the Rood.

The Earliest English Poems

Christina Rossetti

'She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth' 
 
A selection of Rossetti's most famous poems, from the hallucinatory 'Goblin Market' to 'In the bleak mid-winter' 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Rossetti's The Complete Poems is available in Penguin Classics.

Goblin Market

Herman Melville

'No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.' 
 
Stories and poems by Herman Melville drawn from his years at sea 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Herman Melville (1819-1891). Melville's works available in Penguin Classics are Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Confidence-Man, Omoo, Redburn, Israel Potter and Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories.

The Maldive Shark

Dolly Alderton

Since early 2020, Dolly Alderton has been sharing her wisdom, warmth and wit with the countless people who have written in to her Dear Dolly agony aunt column in The Sunday Times Style. Their questions range from the painfully - and sometimes hilariously - relatable to the occasionally bizarre. They include breakups and body issues, families, friendships, dating, divorce, the pleasures and pitfalls of social media, sex, loneliness, longing, love and everything in between. 
 
Without judgement, and with deep empathy informed by her own, much-chronicled adventures in love, friendship and dating, Dolly leads us by the hand through the various labyrinths of life, proving that a problem shared is truly a problem halved.

Dear Dolly

On Love, Life and Friendship, the instant Sunday Times bestseller

Sue Townsend

Mole Press - a brand new imprint of Penguin Books - is proud to announce the first publication of The Collected Poems of Adrian Mole. 
 
From his timeless first poem - The Tap - via classic odes to his muse, first and only true love Pandora (I adore ya) as well as his burgeoning political anger in Mrs Thatcher (Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?) and on through late works examining the hollow shell of masculinity and his declining libido - such as To My Organ - Adrian Mole moves readers in ways they cannot expect.

Adrian Mole: The Collected Poems

Crikey, the world according to Clarkson's been a funny old place of late . . . 
 
For a while, Jeremy could be found in his normal position as the tallest man on British television but, more recently, he appears to have been usurped by a pretend elephant. 
 
But on paper the real Jeremy remains at the helm. That's as it should be. For nearly thirty years he has been fearlessly leading the charge as one the best comic writers in the country. And in 2015, he shows no sign of slowing down. 
 
So, whether it's pondering 
 
 If Jesus might have been better off being born in New Zealand 
 Why reflexive pronoun abuse is the worst thing in the world 
 How Pam Ayres's head trumps Gordon Gecko's underpants 
 Or what a television presenter with time on his hands gets up to 
 
Jeremy is still trying to make sense of all the big stuff. 
 
Circumstances change. Nothing's forever. But As I Was Saying provides glorious proof that Jeremy remains as funny, puzzled, excitable, outspoken, insightful and thought-provoking as ever. As if you ever doubted it . . .

As I Was Saying . . .

The World According to Clarkson Volume 6

W. G. Sebald

In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

Austerlitz

Sam Riviere

Frederick Seidel

Kathryn Maris

Occasional Wild Parties brings together Sam Riviere, one of the most discussed of the new generation of British poets, whose 'post-internet' poetry sees him acting now as scribe, now as DJ, taking in everything from technologized romance to celebrity culture as filtered through Kim Kardashian's make-up routine; the 'elegant ghoul' Frederick Seidel, zooming through the dark underbelly of international high society on his Ducati racing bike; and the wonderfully observant Kathryn Maris, whose work ranges with a dark wit over incomprehensible deities, wayward mothers, the politics of children's sports contests, and psychoanalysis. All three lift the lid on their corners of civilized society to show the less glittering realities that lie just beneath the surface.

Penguin Modern Poets 5

Occasional Wild Parties

Will Self

FEEDING FRENZY, Will Self's third collection of journalism and selected writings takes us through the turbulent years 1995-2000. During this period Self surfed the great wave of olive oil which nearly swept British metropolitan culture away, and produced a series of restaurant reviews for The Observer, whose coruscating criticality led to a cabal of restaurateurs plotting his contract killing. In essays to accompany the work of admired artists such as Marc Quinn, feature articles on rock music and remote places, reviews of cultural phenomena as diverse as voyeuristic television and the Queen Mother, Self has produced what can only be described as a cachinnating cacophony of wilful provocation.

Feeding Frenzy

Ovid

In a world of gods and monsters, nothing is as it seems. 
 
When a deadly serpent's teeth are sown in the ground, warriors spring from the bloody soil. Only a great man can tame them and fulfil his destiny. Far away, Medusa, snakes writhing in her hair, meets her nemesis; the princess Andromeda is chained to a rock; people are transformed into owls, frogs, even mountains; a boy falls tragically in love with his own reflection. 
 
Enter a universe where love is cruel, men are destroyed by the gods and treachery is paid for in blood ...

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