Penguin Modern Classics

At birth Edmund Gosse was dedicated to 'the Service of the Lord'. His parents were Plymouth Brethren. After his mother's death Gosse was brought up in stifling isolation by his father, a marine biologist whose faith overcame his reason when confronted by Darwin's theory of evolution. Father and Son is also the record of Gosse's struggle to 'fashion his inner life for himself' - a record of whose full and subversive implications the author was unaware, as Peter Abbs notes in his Introduction. First published anonymously in 1907, Father and Son was immediately acclaimed for its courage in flouting the conventions of Victorian autobiography and is still a moving account of self-discovery.

If you know London primarily through novels like WHITE FANG, these stories will provide a new perspective. Full of intriguing characters and snippets of pidgin, they also highlight London's concern with social issues.

Momo has lived at Madame Rosa’s Paris boarding house ever since he can remember, one of an ever-changing band of prostitutes’ children. But when money becomes tight, and Madame Rosa gets too ill to climb the six flights of stairs to their apartment, he determines to support her any way he can. Along the way, he finds community in a host of eccentric characters in the slums of Belleville – from Madame Lola, a Senegalese trans woman who watches out for Momo and the other children, to Monsieur Hamil, an Algerian carpet seller with a passion for Victor Hugo.

A work of streetwise humour and tender devotion, The Life Before Us was published under the pseudonym Emile Ajar and went on to win the Prix Goncourt.

Astrophysicist Dmitri Malianov is on the precipice of a major discovery - a Nobel Prize-worthy breakthrough. Yet, home alone in his Leningrad apartment, his work is beginning to be stymied. Strange and improbable distractions are mounting around him - and he is not alone. Across the city, his scientific colleagues, all close to their own Eureka moments, keep finding themselves subject to countless mysterious interruptions. Are they paranoid, or is a malign authority conspiring against them...?

A science fiction classic from two Russian masters, One Billion Years to the End of the World is at turns both hilarious and suspenseful, while at its heart hiding a quiet yet biting critique of Soviet totalitarianism.

Three brothers live with their father, uncle and maid in a dilapidated Cairo suburb, spending as much time as they possibly can doing nothing whatsoever. But Serag, the youngest of the three, has started having crazy ideas that threaten to shatter the household’s torpid equilibrium. He wants to find a job. If only he wasn’t so sleepy.

Written in 1953, in the louche Parisian hotel room Albert Cossery called home for fifty-seven years, The Lazy Ones is a playful celebration of Cossery’s belief in the ultimate dignity of indolence in an alienated society. As he remarked, ‘the more you are idle, the more you have time to reflect. Laziness is a critical position by which to judge the world.’

'God created woman from a crooked rib and anyone who trieth to straighten it, breaketh it' Traditional Somali Proverb

Ebla lives a nomadic life in rural Somalia; an orphaned teenager raised within the strictures of patriarchy. But when her grandfather tries to force her into marriage with a much older man, she flees to Mogadishu, in search of freedom, dignity and self-possession. There, she slips into a spiral of dependence, poverty and violence, fighting to retain her identity in the face of chauvinism and stifling tradition, determined to claim her own life in a world set against her.

First published in 1970, From a Crooked Rib is the unforgettable debut that announced the arrival of one of the most original voices in world literature. Fiercely political and deeply humane, it remains a daring exploration of gender, power, and resistance.

Against the shifting political landscape of the Ogaden plateau, between the Ethiopian Highlands and the Somali border, Askar is born in the midst of turmoil. After his freedom fighter father is killed and his mother dies in childbirth, Askar is raised by Misra, a loving older woman who develops a mysterious, protective bond with the boy. As he struggles to understand where he comes from, and where his loyalties lie, threads of family, nation, and the self become impossible to untangle.

First published in 1986 and dubbed Nuruddin Farah’s masterpiece, Maps is both an intimate coming-of-age tale and a profound meditation on the borders that shape us.

I don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.

I Don't Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.

At 84 years old, Chiyo Uno was already an established novelist; she had been named a ‘person of cultural merit’ in 1990 and had captivated a national audience with her prose. But her life off the page was as extraordinary and scintillating as her fiction. She was a renowned kimono designer whose contributions to the world of fashion broke new ground in Japan, even as her magazine Style went down in the flames of tax evasion and bankruptcy; she married four times and counted numerous powerful and influential men among her lovers (scandalising society by her willingness to conduct her affairs openly); she moved socially among such literary titans as Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata.

Living Like This, published towards the end of her life, is the book that established Uno as a memoirist of unrivalled calibre. Born in 1897, Uno witnessed the Meiji, Taisho, Showa and Heisei eras, and the modernisation of Japan. At once a refreshingly honest and witty account of a life lived to its fullest and a buoyant depiction of a ‘moga’ (modern) Japanese girl, Living Like This is also a portrait of Japan in an era of unprecedented change. Effortlessly charming, Living Like This will entirely enchant with its promise of a life well-lived.

A story collection from the Bulgarian dissident writer.