PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

John Steinbeck

Drifters in search of work, George and his childlike friend Lennie have nothing in the world except the clothes on their back - and a dream that one day they will have some land of their own. Eventually they find work on a ranch in California's Salinas Valley, but their hopes are dashed as Lennie becomes a victim of his own strength. Tackling universal themes of friendship and shared vision, and giving a voice to America's lonely and dispossessed, Of Mice and Men remains Steinbeck's most popular work, achieving success as a novel, Broadway play and three acclaimed films.

Of Mice and Men

Penguin Modern Classics

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges remains one of the most influential short story writers of the twentieth century, whose spellbinding tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his greatest stories, including 'The Garden of Forking Paths', 'The Book of Sand' and 'Shakespeare's Memory'.

The Library of Babel

Virginia Woolf

'The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful'. In such conditions, Virginia Woolf takes to London's streets in search of a pencil. The account of her journey - the people, the places, the pleasure - soon becomes one of the great paeans to city life. This collection also includes other wonderful essays, such as 'How Should One Read a Book?' and 'The Sun and the Fish'.

Street Haunting

Vladimir Nabokov

Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, these stories sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

Nabokov's Dozen

Arthur Conan Doyle

Emerging from their smoke-filled rooms at 21B Baker Street, Holmes and Watson grapple with the forces of crime that stalk the streets of London. From the first story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia' where Holmes is foiled by the quick-thinking of 'the woman', Irene Adler, to what was presumed to be the last, 'The Final Problem' where Holmes at last comes face to face with the diabolical Professor Moriarty, this selection is presents the very best of Arthur Conan Doyle's iconic detective.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Regarded as one of world literature's foremost novelists, Fyodor Dostoevsky's short stories are also some of the best ever written. 'White Nights' tells of love and loss on the streets of St. Petersburg, 'A Nasty Business' presents the hilarious tale of a general dropping in on the wedding of a subordinate, while 'The Meek One' is an existentialist tale of marriage and tragedy.

White Nights

Kate Chopin

This candid portrayal of a woman who refuses to accept her allotted role as wife and mother caused an outcry when it was published in 1899. It is the story of Edna Pontellier, who spends the summer on the Gulf of Mexico with her businessman husband and her two sons. When an illicit romance awakens unfamiliar ideas and longings in Edna, she discovers a new identity for herself, but cannot hope for understanding in the stifling attitudes of Louisiana society.

The Awakening

Clarice Lispector

The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man's abandonment of a dog; an animal in a zoo: each one leads to mystery and self-discovery, delight and devastation.

The Imitation of the Rose

Dylan Thomas

For a boy growing up in an ordinary town in Wales, summer is 'always radiant, rainless, lazily rowdy and skyblue', and it always snows at Christmas. Weaving through the course of a year, this selection of Dylan Thomas's most evocative and bittersweet stories depicts silent winter mornings by the sea, glorious holidays in the countryside and lovelorn nights in the pub. It ends with 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', perhaps the most beautiful story of the festive season ever written.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Franz Kafka

Michael Hoffman

One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, is one of the twentieth century's most influential works of fiction, and is accompanied here by two more classic stories.

Metamorphosis

Edith Wharton

In these elegant and devastating tales of deception, desire and social intrigue, Edith Wharton exposes the brittle veneer of civility that masks human ambition and longing.From the sunlit terraces of Rome to the drawing rooms of New York, Wharton’s characters navigate a world bound by class and convention, yet charged with emotional undercurrents they barely understand. In 'Roman Fever', two middle-aged women confront the unspoken rivalries that have shadowed their friendship for decades; in 'Mrs. Manstey’s View', a lonely widow’s cherished glimpse of life beyond her window becomes the stage for a quiet tragedy; and in 'After Holbein', the elaborate pretences of two ageing New Yorkers reveal the haunting persistence of vanity and illusion.

Roman Fever

Oscar Wilde

With warmth, tenderness and quiet wit, Oscar Wilde's fables and fairy tales have moved and delighted for generations. In far-off kingdoms and ocean realms, in the company of giants and nightingales, Wilde speaks of heartbreak and redemption, of cruelty and compassion, of love lost, of love gained, of love lasting. Included in this selection are stories from The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates.

The Star-Child

Anaïs Nin

Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise, Sabina leads a double life inspired by her relentless desire for fleeting romance. But when the secrecy of her affairs becomes too much to bear, Sabina makes a late night phone-call to a stranger from a bar, and begins a confession that captivates the unknown man and soon inspires him to seek her out...

A Spy In The House Of Love

Sylvia Townsend  Warner

Lolly Willowes, so gentle and accommodating, has depths no one suspects. When she suddenly announces that she is leaving London and moving, alone, to the depths of the countryside, her overbearing relatives are horrified. But Lolly has a greater, far darker calling than family: witchcraft.

Lolly Willowes

A novella regarded by Edith Wharton as one of her very best, Summer tells the tale of forbidden sexual passion and thwarted dreams set against the backdrop of a lush summer in rural Massachusetts. A sensation on first publication, its honest depiction of a young woman attempting to live on her own terms remains as vital today as it was in 1917.

Summer

Elizabeth Von Arnim

The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim's brilliant, irrepressible novella, tells the tale of four very different women who, on answering an advertisement in The Times, find themselves far away from the drizzle of London and instead in the warmth of an Italian sun. There, alongside the lapping of the Mediterranean, the women's spirits begin to shift, and quite unexpected changes take place.

The Enchanted April

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield's perceptive and resonant writing helped to define the modern short story, observing apparently trivial incidents to create quietly devastating revelations of inner lives. Graceful, delicate and burning with emotion, Mansfield's stories were integral in shaping the Modernist movement and redefined a genre. This collection contains some of Mansfield's most celebrated stories, including 'Bliss', 'The Garden Party' and 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel'.

Bliss

O. Henry

O. Henry is one of the most popular American writers of the twentieth century and a true master of the short story. This selection of tales ranges from Christmas in New York to the cattle-lands of Texas, taking in con men, clerks, shop assistants, tramps and tricksters. They all highlight O. Henry's comic eye, his gift for evoking speech and setting, and his unique approach to life's quirks of fate.

The Gift of the Magi

Leo Tolstoy

Dmitry Andreich Olenin, in the hope of escaping the hollowness of his privilege, joins the army and heads to the Caucasus. There among the foothills, he will meet the Cossacks: a people he considers to be at one with the land. In their company he will hunt, he will drink, he will fall in love and, slowly, he will begin to understand that between people, between cultures, there is often a space that cannot be traversed...

The Cossacks

Saki

Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. 
 
With his signature flair and razor-sharp wit, Saki is an undisputed master of the short story. His tales are by turns hilarious, festive, supernatural and macabre, but all offer fabulous, bite-sized satires of a decadent upper-class Edwardian world. 
 
'Saki, like a chivalrous highwayman, only robs the rich: behind all these stories is an exacting sense of justice . . . they dazzle and delight' Graham Greene

Reginald's Christmas Revel

Yuko Tsushima

Territory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her two-year-old daughter, in her first year of separation from her husband. At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time, and remains one of Yuko Tsushima's most beloved works.

Territory of Light

Jane Austen

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. 
 
 Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
Recently widowed, the unscrupulous and beautiful Lady Susan Vernon is determined to scheme her way through high society in the hope of a profitable new match - all while trying to marry off her unfortunate daughter. Told through a series of letters, Jane Austen's magnificent first novella is as subversive as it is charming. 
 
'The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste' - Virginia Woolf

Lady Susan

Isak Dinesen

Karen Blixen, author of the acclaimed memoir Out of Africa, was also a master of the short story form: her tales offer luminous meditations on rebirth and redemption, on the mystery and unexpectedness of human behaviour. Alongside 'Babette's Feast', this selection also includes 'Sorrow-Acre', often thought to be one of her finest stories.

Babette's Feast

Françoise Sagan

Published when she was only eighteen, Françoise Sagan's astonishing novella, Bonjour Tristesse, became an instant bestseller. It tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences.

Bonjour Tristesse

Nella Larsen

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. 
 
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
Clare Kendry, elegant, fair-skinned and ambitious, is married to a white man who is unaware of her African-American heritage. When she reunites with childhood friend Irene, who has not hidden her origins, both women are forced to confront the secret fears they have buried within themselves. A taut exploration of race and gender, Passing is one of the Harlem Renaissance's greatest works. 
 
'A tragic story rooted in inescapable facts of American life' The New York Times

Passing

Penguin Classics

Joseph Conrad

On sea, on land, at the edges of the colonial experience, Joseph Conrad's short stories offer a glimpse of the violence, the kindness, and the mystery at humanity's heart. 'The Lagoon' tells of love and its shadow, 'The Typhoon' of the gap between man and nature, while 'The Secret Sharer' provides a brilliant exploration of truth and trust.

The Lagoon

Italo Calvino

Twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe from the giant of Italian literature, Italo Calvino. His characters - whether human, dinosaur or mollusc - disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life.

Cosmicomics

Edgar Allan Poe

Arguably America's most influential short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe's tales of suspense never fail to spook and amaze. Gathered in this selection are his very best horror stories, including the gothic tour de force 'The Fall of the House of Usher', the other-worldly 'The Masque of the Red Death', and the murderous 'The Tell-Tale Heart'.

The Masque of the Red Death

Anton Chekhov

Widely considered to be one of greatest ever writers of the form, Anton Chekhov's short stories offer unforgettable character, crystalline expression, and a beautiful, quiet uncertainty. Collected here are five of his very best tales: 'The Lady with the Little Dog', 'The House with the Mezzanine', and the trilogy of stories, 'The Man in the Case', 'Gooseberries' and 'About Love'.

About Love

Sam Selvon

Sam Selvon is now widely considered to be one of the greatest chroniclers of the West Indian emigrant experience. His evocation of voice, of place, of longing, defined for many the experience of a generation. Describing life in the Caribbean and day-to-day adventures in London, this collection features many his most acclaimed stories, including 'The Village Washer', 'A Drink of Water' and 'The Cricket Match'.

Calypso in London

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 Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

Search Results

Penguin Shop: 15% off with code PENGUINXMAS2025

Little Black Classics Box Set

Penguin Modern Box Set

Frankenstein

An illustration from the book There's An Elf in Your Book and The Christmasaurus

Children's quizzes

Are you on Santa's naughty or nice list?

There's An Alien in You Book by Tom Fletcher

Extracts

There’s an Alien in Your Book by Tom Fletcher

The Creakers by Tom Fletcher

Reading lists

The best books to gift your grandchildren

An image of several space books for kids on a dark purple background with rocket, planet and star doodles around them

Children's reading lists

11 out-of-this-world space books for kids

75 Christmas books for kids

An image of a selection of spooky children's books on a dark purple background with an orange shape which features a zig-zag pattern

32 spooky books to read this Halloween

A photo of the book The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher on a wooden background next to  some presents and a candy cane

The Christmasaurus by Tom Fletcher

A picture of a several different books by Tom Fletcher on a light blue and red background

Where to start with Tom Fletcher’s books

An image of a selection of funny books for under 5s on a purple background with white dotted lines

14 books that will make under 5s giggle

Space Band by Tom Fletcher

The best dystopian books of all time

A photo of a copy of The Christmasaurus and the Winter Witch by Tom Fletcher on a light blue background alongside white paper snowflakes

The Christmasaurus and the Winter Witch by Tom Fletcher

85 books to read before you're 12

Christmas gifts for 2025: Books for under 5s

An image of a selection of books for under 5s on an orange background with a large splodge and cloud print

24 must-read books for under 5s

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 photo of a selection of children's crime books on a red background with a magnifying glass hovering over the book The London Mystery by Siobhan Dowd

Showing results for: ‘tom fletcher there's a in your book’

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter