Fiction

William Shakespeare's sonnets are a beautiful expression of a range of human emotions - from love to grief, anger, jealousy and lust. Including the instantly recognisable 'Shall I compare thee...

Flame-haired Grady McNeil is beautiful, rich and defiant. Her privileged society life leaves her wanting, and excitement comes in the form of the highly unsuitable Clyde, a Brooklyn-born, Jewish parking...

Jonathan Noel, bank security guard, has spent 30 years protecting himself from people and events. But an encounter with a glaring pigeon upsets his ordered life and flings him into...

In a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere . . . As darkness falls, a man caught in a snowstorm is forced to shelter at the strange, grim...

Wild child Huck has to get away. His violent drunk of a father is back in town again, raising Cain. He won't rest until he has Huck's money. So the...

Out of his smoke-filled rooms in Baker Street stalks a figure to cause the criminal classes to quake in their boots and rush from their dens of iniquity . ....

Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs...

Eight years ago, Anne rejected the man she loved because her friends and family persuaded her that he wasn't rich or important enough. In all that time, she's never found...

A Room of One's Own grew out of a lecture that Virginia Woolf had been invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928. Ranging over Jane Austen and Charlotte...

'A brilliantly executed extended essay that reads like a tense political thriller' Sunday Telegraph 24 August 1939- The fate of the world is hanging in the balance. Hitler has ambitions...

New to Penguin Modern Classics, a timeless tale of divided generations and enduring friendship Following a baseball game that nearly became a religious war, two Jewish boys become friends. Danny...

E. H. Carr's What Is History? is the classic introduction to the theory of history. Exploding the Victorian myth of history as a simple record of fact, Carr draws on...

Simon Winchester's The Surgeon of Crowthorne was an international bestseller and tells an extraordinary true story of murder, madness and an extraordinary friendship in the nineteenth century. It is the...

Paul Davies' The Mind of God is a scientific search for the meaning of the universe. Ranging across the cosmos, Davies explores the origin of the universe, the laws of...

Brian Greene'sThe Fabric of the Cosmosis an astonishing grand tour of the universe and the best layman's guide to current thinking on 'how everything works'. Brian Greene's The Fabric of...

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is the definitive hardboiled detective story and Philip Marlowe the perfect expression of the cynical, world-weary gumshoe. Hired by the crippled General Sternwood to shake...

Alex Garland's The Beach was published to immediate acclaim, and has since become a bestselling cult classic and a Hollywood blockbuster. Richard, a gap-year student, is introduced to a beautiful...

Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected is a delightfully dark collection of sixteen stories, each with a startling end. Among the unforgettable characters lurk the homicidal wife and her deadly...

Sir Ernest Shackleton's South is one of the greatest survival stories of all time. In 1914, Shackleton led a party of men hoping to be the first to traverse the...

John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders sees our eponymous hero tackle his first ever case. It is just after the war and two RAF heroes are found shot...

John Updike's Rabbit, Run is a classic story of dissatisfaction and restlessness. Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school. Now twenty-six, his life seems full of...

Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest captured the radical anti-establishment mood of 1960s America. Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her psychiatric ward with an iron fist and a penchant...

Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals is a charming and comic autobiographical novel. Fleeing the gloomy British climate, the Durrell clan move to Corfu carrying the bare essentials of...

Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue is a hymn to the English language. In examining how a second-rate, mongrel tongue came to be the undisputed language of the globe. Bryson explores English...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is a brilliantly crafted, beautifully written story of love and the love-sick. Spurned as a young man, Florentino Ariza has a...

Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate is a wickedly funny satire, brilliantly lampooning upper-class society. When Polly, a beautiful aristocrat, declares her love for her married, lecherous uncle -...

D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover scandalized the world when it was first published in paperback, and helped put Penguin Books on trial. The powerful depiction of the sexual liaison...

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre to this day entrances readers with its passionate portrayal of a woman struggling to make a life for herself in a cruel and indifferent world. As...

Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is the brilliant story of one man's journey of self-discovery. When Rob - a thirty-five-year old record shop owner and music obsessive - is dumped by...

Roald Dahl's Going Solo is the marvellous account of his life as a young man. He describes getting his first job in Africa and his wartime exploits as an RAF...

Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated won the Guardian First Book Award in 2002. It tells the story of a young man who goes to the Ukraine in search of...

Anais Nin's Delta of Venus is a stunning collection of sexual encounters from the queen of literary erotica. From Mathilde's lust-filled Peruvian opium den to the Hungarian baron driven insane...

Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence is the much-loved account of an English couple living their dream abroad. When they buy a 200-year-old farmhouse in the South of France, Peter...

Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is a satirical depiction of the 'sterile' generation between the wars. It tells the story of bored Lady Brenda Last, who abandons her husband's...

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have...

Discover the Mysteries of The Waterhole Embark on a captivating journey with internationally celebrated author and illustrator, Graeme Base. Known for turning children's books into multi-layered experiences. Down to the...

Dive into an enigmatic world crafted by Graeme Base, the acclaimed author and illustrator of Animalia, where you're not just a reader but a detective too. The Grand Celebration Horace...

I wonder if you want to fly, to float about up in the sky? There's magic here for everyone - a picture book that's just for fun.Pamela Allen is a...

A wild chase that takes the Queen, the King, the Admiral, the Captain, the General, the Sergeant and even the little dog through the night.Pamela Allen is a phenomenon in...

This is the Classics edition of one of the greatest works created by any culture, and overwhelmingly the most influential of all Tibetan Buddhist texts in the West The most...

Joseph Heller said that if it weren't for his having read The Good Soldier Svejk he would never had written his American novel Catch 22 Hasek's most important work was...

Penguin Classics relaunch. The trial and condemnation of Socrates on charges of heresy and corrupting young minds is a defining moment in the history of Classical Athens. In tracing these...

This definitive three-volume Penguin Classics edition provides a complete and unmodernized text, presenting the History as it appeared to its early readers Edward Gibbon's six-volume History of the Decline and...

Multi-award-winning, a bestseller andmade intoan award-winningfeature film, Looking for Alibrandi has become a modern classic. Melina Marchetta'sstunning debut novel Looking for Alibrandi is one girl's story of her final year...

First time in Modern Classics Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is...

A detailed and compelling political study of how elite forces shape mass media Contrary to the usual image of the press as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in its search for...

The evocative tale of an idyllic childhood in the English countryside. The classic evocative tale of an idyllic childhood in the English countryside Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid...

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature A landmark in American fiction, Light in August explores Faulkner's central theme- the nature of evil. Joe Christmas - a man doomed, deracinated...