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The Garden Party and Other Stories
with an introduction by Lorna Sage Innovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour, these fifteen stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set...
The Driver's Seat
New to Modern Classics, published alongside The Ballad of Peckham Rye Lise has been driven to distraction by working in the same accountants' office for sixteen years. So she leaves...
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
This brutal, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Discover the importance of a piece of...
The Thirty-Nine Steps
Twenty new titles in the much-loved and hugely successful Penguin English Library series 'My guest was lying sprawled on his back. There was a long knife through his heart which...
Closely Watched Trains
A classic of postwar literature, a small masterpiece of humour, humanity and heroism from one of the best Czech writers For gauche young apprentice Milos Hrma, life at the small...
I, Claudius: Popular Penguins
Regarded as little more than a stammering fool, the nobleman Claudius quietly survives the intrigues, bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the imperial Roman dynasties. Regarded as little more than...
We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Popular Penguins
Living in the Blackwood family home with only her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian for company, Merricat just wants to preserve their delicate way of life. But ever since...
The Little Prince: And Letter to a Hostage
Antoine de Saint-Exupery's timeless tale of love and loneliness, now widely available in Penguin Modern Classics for the first time Antoine de Saint-Exupery first published The Little Prince in 1943,...
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is one of the best loved novellas of all time. Two drifters - small, shrewd George and huge, simple-minded Lennie - get work on...
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's is a brilliant glimmer of the excitement of 40's New York. Holly Golightly - brashly beautiful with a slim black dress, a mysterious past and...
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is the shocking seminal novel that spawned one of the most notorious films ever made. Fifteen-year-old Alex and his thrill-seeking gang regularly indulge in ultra-violence,...
A Dutiful Daughter: Text Classics
Australian literature's strangest novel, written by its most familiar novelist. It is the duty of a good child to let his parents know the second they turn into animals. Barbara...
Dancing with Strangers: Text Classics
Winner, Kiriyama Prize 2004 Winner, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2004 Winner, Best History Book, Queensland Premier's Literary Awards 2004 Dancing with Strangers is Inga Clendinnen's...
Lilian's Story: Text Classics
Listen, I told myself, and heard the waves against the harbour-wall, a gull being peevish, the white tapping stick of a blind man against the stones. Listen, I told myself,...
The Idea of Perfection: Text Classics
Kate Grenville's Orange-Prize winning novel The Idea of Perfection is the story of the small town of Karakarook, and of Douglas Cheeseman and Harley Savage-two people who seem the least...
Moral Hazard: Text Classics
I disapproved of bankers, on principle. Not that I knew any. Until this job, I had worked and made friends with people who shared my views. Mostly moral, mostly kind....
The Catherine Wheel
The wind from Siberia as announced by the BBC came down Bayswater Road from the direction of Marble Arch...Searing skin, and petrifying metal and wood, it took possession of London...
Outbreak Of Love
Our minds are like those maps at the entrance to the Metro stations in Paris. They are full of unilluminated directions. But when we know where we want to go...
All The Green Year
Introduced by Michael McGirr 'The year I remember best from those days is 1929. This was the year I turned fourteen and went into the eighth grade; the year too...
The Cardboard Crown
Introduced by Brenda Niall This remarkable novel, first published to a chorus of acclaim in 1952, is one of the lost classics of Australian literature. Martin Boyd is a deeply...
The Watch Tower
Breaking their poses like trees snapping branches, the women urgently regarded each other, cleared away all signs of work in an instant, examined their souls for defects, in a sense...
Diary of a Bad Year: Text Classics
Introduced byPeter Goldsworthy Winner, Nobel Prize for Literature 2003 She pouts. I was expecting more of a story, she says. It is difficult to get into the swing when the...
Bring Larks and Heroes: Text Classics
A wonderful novel by one of Australia's most loved and awarded writers, long out of print and now revived by the Text Classics series. Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary...
Dark Places: Text Classics
This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest: you have to begin somewhere, and...
They're a Weird Mob
Who the hell's Nino Culotta. That's what you asked yourself when you first picked up this book, wasn't it? Well I'm Nino Culotta. My father baptised me Giovanni-John-well Giovannino is...
Wake In Fright
The controller stood back. 'Right,' he said. 'Spin 'em!' The man flipped the piece of wood and the coins spun up into the air above his head and dropped down...
A Difficult Young Man
Introduced bySonya Hartnett Winner, Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1956 Nearly everyone between the ages of eighteen and thirty turns against his family and wants to escape from it....
Animal Farm
'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.' Drunken Mr Jones of Manor Farm has neglected his livestock for too long. In a burst of insurgent...
Family and Borghesia
Architect Carmine and translator Ivana were once lovers. Their child died and their relationship ended but now, decades on, both with marriages and children of their own, they are friends....
Headshot
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of...
All Our Yesterdays
Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, after a brief romance finds herself pregnant. To save her reputation, she marries an eccentric older family friend and...
Family Lexicon
'The places, events and people are all real. I have invented nothing.' Natalia Ginzburg wrote her masterful, Strega Prize winning novel Family Lexicon while living in London in the 1960s....
Scenes from a Childhood - WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 In the title work, a loosely autobiographical narrative covers infancy to awkward adolescence, unearthing the moments of childhood that linger longest in...
Sixty-Nine
In a small, inconsequential city in Japan, all that matters to 17-year-old Kensuke Yazaki and his friends is girls, rock music and, to a much lesser extent, school. Told at...
Popular Hits of the Showa Era
It's a set-up like a video game: two rival gangs fight to death for the control of a Tokyo district. In one gang, six young losers committed only to drinking,...
Away With the Fairies
Phryne Fisher-dangerous, passionate, kind, clever, and seductive. She drinks cocktails, dances the tango, is the companion of wharfies, and is expert at conducting an elegant dalliance. It's the 1920s in...
Reamde
In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed...
Blackouts: A Novel
Juan Gay lies dying in a room in The Palace: a monumental, fading institution in the desert. There, a young man cares for him - someone whom Juan met only...
The Ten Loves of Mr Nishino
Over the course of his life, Mr Nishino falls hopelessly in love again and again. One woman is a colleague, another a chance encounter; one is the girlfriend of a...
The Vegetarian: Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their...
The Nakano Thrift Shop
Among the jumble of paperweights, plates, typewriters and general bric-a-brac in Mr Nakano's thrift store, there are treasures to be found. Each piece carries its own story of love and...
Human Acts: Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature
Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised...
The Cry of the Silkworm
1994, rural China: Twelve-year-old Chen Di loves and protects her long-awaited little brother, but when she witnesses an unforgettable scene with her aunties and the authorities, everything she thought she...
In Ascension: Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2024
'Monumental' Telegraph 'Magnificent' Guardian 'Transcendent' New Scientist Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the...
The Arrest
The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, computers, and airplanes,...
The Red Queen
The princess is taking her over, bodily and mentally. Dr Babs Halliwell is no longer herself.A young girl is plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea. In...
A Ballet of Lepers: A Novel and Stories
In A Ballet of Lepers Leonard Cohen explores themes that would come to permeate his later works - shame stemming from feelings of unworthiness; sexual desire, in all its sacred...
The Radiant Way
1979. Three old Cambridge friends are brought together at a party to celebrate New Year's Eve and the end of a decade. Esther, Liz and Alix first met in Cambridge...