Penguin Modern Classics

Kathrin – five years into a disenchanting marriage – struggles to work the farm with her sister-in-law while her husband Heinrich is away fighting for the Third Reich. To help them with the harvest, Heinrich arranges for Alexei, a Russian prisoner of war, to labour in the fields. Though initially suspicious of this watchful stranger, Kathrin is soon drawn to Alexei, with ruinous consequences.

First published in 1956, Woman in the Pillory is a formative novella by one of East Germany’s most significant writers, showcasing Brigitte Reimann’s vivacious ideological engagement with the legacy of Nazi Germany and the Communist drive to create ‘a new kind of person’ following the devastation of the war.

In the oppressive silence of the sitting room, the woman finally smoothed out the paper and, without putting on her glasses, read the two words her husband had written:

The cat.

Amidst the din of their Parisian neighbourhood, Émile and Marguerite live in total silence. After a hasty marriage in their sixties, their uneasy peace was shattered when Émile’s beloved cat mysteriously disappeared and was later found dead. Branding his wife the culprit, Émile’s retaliation against Marguerite’s cherished parrot sparked a silent battle of wills. Now they live parallel lives, communicating only through spiteful notes, mocking glances and mute accusations. As their suspicion and resentment mount, this bitter game of psychological warfare becomes a twisted necessity, binding them together in a relentless cycle of torment from which there can only be one escape.

First published in 1967, The Cat is a masterful exploration of marital discord, loneliness and the absurdity of human relationships, painting a vivid portrait of two souls trapped in quiet desperation.

'A love that cannot be throttled by the rubber tube of an enema bulb is immortal.'

Bookish and idealistic Vladimir is tormented with love for Olga; he brings her flowers when other men bring her flour and millet. Olga eventually agrees to marry him, as her building’s central heating will be out of service all winter and at least with two in the bed they’ll be warmer. When she decides she’d like to serve the revolution, he introduces her to his brother Sergei, a Bolshevik who manages the waterways. Thus begins an excruciating love triangle, measured in ration coupons and black market goods.

Described by the poet Joseph Brodsky as 'one of the most innovative novels in Russian literature,' Marienhof’s Cynics is a pitch-black comedy set during the wild and savage years of War Communism and the New Economic Policy. Cinematic in its style and collagist in its aesthetic, it establishes Marienhof as a true formal radical. It is a bawdy, savage, lavishly emotional portrayal of working for the revolution (and trying to ignore it).

Vienna, 1939. Count Wallmoden, an officer and veteran of the First World War, is preparing to take part in a mysterious ‘military exercise’. One evening, while off duty, he meets the austere and beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors, whose secretive nature and elusive circle of acquaintances suggest that things – including the ‘military exercise’ – are not quite what they seem. Forced to leave the Baroness, Wallmoden promises to return for a tryst once his tour of duty is over, only to discover his unit has been mobilised for war. He finds himself over the border, marching across Europe – and, more seductively, stumbling to and fro over the border that separates the living from the dead. One constant remains: in this world or the next, he must keep his tryst with Baroness Pistohlkors.

Simultaneously a ghost story drawing on the phantasms of the unconscious mind, a thriller where the erotic and the supernatural converge, and a shockingly realist account of the German Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland, the novel Mars in Aries was refused a publishing permit by the Nazis, hinting as it did at the existence of an Austrian resistance. The book’s entire print run was put into storage and subsequently destroyed by an Allied air raid. Reprinted from the author’s proofs after the war, Mars in Aries is one of Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s finest and most celebrated novels.

After ten long years spent away from Dublin, Richard, Bertha and their young illegitimate son Archie are back home. Despite expectations of comfort and domesticity, the couple's return to the place where they first met triggers an existential questioning, an anxiousness which is exacerbated by meetings with old friends and lovers.

James Joyce's only surviving play, Exiles builds upon one of his most famous short stories, 'The Dead', to provide a profound exploration of jealousy, doubt and the complexity of human desire.

It is only James Joyce's towering genius as a novelist that has led to his comparative neglect as a poet. And yet his poems not only occupy a pivotal position in Joyce's career, they are also magnificently assured achievements in their own right. 'Chamber Music' is an extraordinary début, fusing a broad swathe of styles with characteristically sharp irony and joyful verbal exuberance. 'Pomes Penyeach' confronts painful personal issues of adultery, jealousy and betrayal and so paves the way for the more detached and fully realized treatment of these feelings in Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses. Also included here is 'Ecce Puer', written for his new-born grandson, as well as juvenilia, satires, translations, limericks and a parody of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.