Penguin Modern Classics

The most difficult and often savage relationship in 20th century western Europe was between the French and the Germans. Twice, cataclysmic wars were fought out on their borders, successfully by the French in 1914-18 and unsuccessfully in 1940. Both wars led to military occupation--for the large block of northern France behind the German trenches in the First World War and ultimately the whole country in the Second.

Richard Cobb's extraordinary book is a meditation on the whole idea of occupation. How do you survive? When do you collaborate? What moral compromises are necessary? Above all, it is a book about the way that history gives a shape and rationality to events which for those living through them are completely mysterious, and terrifying. For those trapped under German rule--frightened, confused, malnourished--what is the right course of action? French and Germans, Germans and French recreates, with a brilliant mix of wit and sympathy, the story of one of the modern era's great dramas.

'You will be a great hero, a general, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Ambassador of France!'

For his whole life, Romain Gary's fierce, eccentric mother had only one aim: to make her son a great man. And she did. This, his thrilling, wildly romantic autobiography, is the story of his journey from poverty in Eastern Europe to the sensual world of the Côte d'Azur and on to wartime pilot, resistance hero, diplomat, filmmaker, star and one of the most famed French writers of his age.

Thea Kronberg, a young girl from a small town in Colorado has a great gift - her beautiful singing voice. Her talent takes her to the great opera houses of Europe, and through ambition and hard work, she forges a life as an artist. But if she can never go home again, nor can she leave behind her past. At last, in a desert canyon in Arizona, Thea has a revelation that will allow her to attain a new state of spirituality and become a truly great artist.

"Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown... I want to write the history of that war. A women's history."

In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich set out to write her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, when she realized that she grew up surrounded by women who had fought in the Second World War but whose stories were absent from official narratives. Travelling thousands of miles, she spent years interviewing hundreds of Soviet women - captains, tank drivers, snipers, pilots, nurses and doctors - who had experienced the war on the front lines, on the home front and in occupied territories.

With the dawn of Perestroika, a heavily censored edition came out in 1985 and it became a huge bestseller in the Soviet Union - the first in five books that have established her as the conscience of the twentieth century.

Child of Fortune is deceptively gentle and dreamlike, teetering on the edge of tragedy. It covers a year in the life of a single mother with an eleven-year-old daughter, combining a complex interior world with memorably visual imagery. The narrative is patterned with themes of loss, despair and fragmentation.

It follows the course of an unexpected pregnancy which threatens to sever frayed family bonds. The story is interwoven with repressed memories of childhood dreams, missed opportunities and a trio of unsatisfactory men. There is darkness in the novel, but it is not ultimately depressing, and it concludes with a sense of optimism.

Rome, December 1944. The city has been liberated by the Allies, but no one feels like celebrating. A bitter wind blows down Via Flaminia, where Signora Adela Pulcini keeps her boarding house and discreetly finds Italian girls for lonely America soldiers. Robert is one such soldier; Lisa is the girl procured to keep him company in return for food and shelter. But the simple exchange doesn't go to plan, as Robert and Lisa find themselves tangled in a dark, mutually destructive affair. Exposing the fault-lines between men and women, the old and new worlds, and victor and vanquished, Hayes's spare, taut novel is an incisive portrayal of sexual economics and the dark side of love.

To the anger of her brothers, it is Alexandra who is entrusted to manage their family farm in the tough, hostile prairie of Hanover, Nebraska following the death of their father. As the years pass, Alexandra rises heroically to the challenge, finding strength in the savage beauty of the land even as loneliness and personal tragedies crowd in. A rapturous work of understated lyricism, Willa Cather's 1913 tale of a pioneer woman who tames the wild, hostile lands of the Nebraskan prairie is also the story of what it means to be American.

A Short History of Decay (1949) is E. M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the nature of civilization in mid 20th-century Europe. Touching upon man's need to worship, the feebleness of God, the downfall of the Ancient Greeks and the melancholy baseness of all existence, Cioran's pieces are pessimistic in the extreme, but also display a beautiful certainty that renders them delicate, vivid, and memorable. Illuminating and brutally honest, A Short History of Decay dissects man's decadence in a remarkable series of moving and beautiful pieces.

War with the Newts (1936) is Karel Capek's darkly humorous allegory of early 20th-century Czech politics. Captain van Toch discovers a colony of newts in Sumatra which can not only be taught to trade and use tools, but also to speak. As the rest of the world learns of the creatures and their wonderful capabilities, it is clear that this new species is ripe for exploitation - they can be traded in their thousands, will do the work no human wants to do, and can fight - but the humans have given no thought to the terrible consequences of their actions.

'We are Progress and the New Age. Nothing can stand in our way.'

When Oxford-educated Emperor Seth succeeds to the throne of the African state of Azania, he has a tough job on his hands. His subjects are ill-informed and unruly, and corruption, double-dealing and bloodshed are rife. However, with the aid if Minister of Modernization Basil Seal, Seth plans to introduce his people to the civilized ways of the west - but will it be as simple as that?

In the fifth book of the Romanzo di Ferrara, Bassani follows a day in the slipping life of Edgardo Limentani, a man of forty-five who sets out with a shooting party into the watery countryside surrounding Ferrara. As the day wears on, his malaise grows, seeping from his thoughts and feelings into the natural world around him, until it reaches an intolerable pitch. This taut depiction of one man's reckoning with his unfulfilling life evokes in cinematic detail how inescapable loneliness turns to despair.

An inability to control his fantasies sends Gilbert Pinfold, a well-known author, cruising on a Ceylon-bound liner to recuperate. Yet, to his horror, the hallucinations increase and life on board becomes very embarrassing. This curious and diverting novel throws new light on Evelyn Waugh's remarkable talent.

Two French priests, friends since childhood, are sent to the newly created diocese of New Mexico. Life there is hard and frequently dangerous. Journeys between parishes are beset by the perils of bandits and storms. The people do not always want to hear the priests' message. But through their many years together, the two priests are sustained by friendship, faith and the magnificent landscapes of New Mexico, until at last they must be separated.

Cather's beautiful novel is renowned for its vivid writing on landscape and is a variation on her great theme: the making of America in the west.

'There were two kinds of landscape characteristic of the inner planets of the Sun: the purposeful and the desolate.'

The planet Quinta is pocked with ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. The Earth spaceship Hermes arrives on Quinta with the best of intentions towards the humans' 'brothers in intelligence'. But something on the planet has gone terribly wrong...

Deep in the American South, 'land of the hunted and the haunted,' three young slaves have broken free. But they have their former master hot on their heels, and they must outrun, outwit, or outgun him and his personal 'CIA' if they are to secure their freedom--all while dodging the bullets of the Civil War raging on around them. When the three men part ways, the adventure begins: the first buys up a huge number of arms in readiness for a final showdown; the second sells his body for pornographic flicks; while the third, Raven Quickskill, hero, poet, heartbreaker, swigs champagne on a non-stop jumbo jet to Canada. Flight to Canada is fun, pacey, adventurous, and touched by Reed's taste for the absurd. Reed takes us on a wild ride through a nineteenth-century Virginia that looks a lot like the West today, littered with everything from Xerox copiers to jumbo jets, and casts an unsettling sideways look at history, race and the American media.

'New York City is very peaceful and quiet, and the pale grey mists are slowly rising, to show me the world'

Pip switches identities, sexes and centuries in this punk, fairytale reimagining of Charles Dickens's original Great Expectations. Both familiar and unfamiliar, our orphaned narrator is transplanted to New York City in the 1980s; becoming, by turns, a sailor, a pirate, a rebel and an outlaw, through adventures incorporating desire, creativity, porn, sadism and art. This ribald explosion of literature, sex and violence shows the literary anarchist Kathy Acker at her most brilliant and brave.