Fiction

Le Carre shows espionage at its best and worst in this novel, new to Penguin Modern Classics When the Department - faded since the war and busy only with bureaucratic...

Le Carre exposes the ugly face of international relations in this spy thriller, new to Penguin Modern Classics West Germany, a simmering cauldron of radical protests, has produced a new...

The final novel featuring Smiley, Le Carre's most enduring character, and a gripping feat of narrative brilliance The Cold War is over and Ned has been demoted to the training...

A spy story, a love story, and a fable for our time Barley Blair is not a Service man- he is a small-time publisher, a self-destructive soul whose only loves...

An extraordinary collection of essays arguing for literature's complicity with evil, new to Penguin Modern Classics 'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays,...

Calvino's fascinating and cerebral collection of essays celebrating all aspects of the visual, translated for the first time and new to Penguin Modern Classics Italo Calvino claimed that 'the brain...

A tale of wasted love, and beauty, by Japan's literary master Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the...

A new translation of this counterculture classic by David Horrocks A new translation by David Horrocks. At first sight Harry Haller seems like a respectable, educated man. In reality he...

One of the most influential books of the 20th century comes into Modern Classics When Betty Friedan produced The Feminine Mystique in 1963, she could not have realized how the...

A funny and charming novel about four women in Italy, introduced by Salley Vickers A notice in The Times addressed to 'Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine' advertises a 'small...

The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a superb translation by Michael Hofmann The subject of this book is the life of the former cement-worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf...

'As nearly perfect a haunted-house tale as I have ever read' - Stephen King Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pile known as Hill House- Dr. Montague, an...

A drama of decay in Southern America, this depiction of patriarchy, power and repression is one of Williams' landmark works 'Big Daddy' Pollitt, the richest cotton planter in the Mississippi...

Penguin Modern Classics presents Tennessee Williams' first successful play which has continued to win audiences over ever since Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her...

'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked' Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. This...

All My Sons brought Miller his first major success, and continues to be a bestseller today In Joe and Kate Keller's family garden, an apple tree - a memorial to...

The definitive 25th-anniversary edition of Burroughs's legendary second novel Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a...

A guidebook to the wilderness of mind and an indispensable resource from the founding father of psychedelia for the first time in Modern Classics The Psychedelic Experience, created by the...

New to Penguin Modern Classics Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman...

First time in Penguin Modern Classics In Ponyboy's world there are two types of people. There are the Socs, the rich society kids who get away with anything. Then there...

A towering philosophical novel that is the summation of her Objectivist philosophy, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the saga of the enigmatic John Galt, and his ambitious plan to 'stop...

New to Modern Classics When a deranged boy, Alan Strang, blinds six horses with a metal spike he is sentenced to psychiatric treatment. Dr Dysart is the man given the...

New to Modern Classics Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is a genius, the most brilliant musician the world will ever see. But the court of eighteenth-century Vienna doesn't recognize his talents -...

Ayn Rand's most famous and controversial novel comes to Penguin for the first time Ayn Rand's story of Howard Roark, a brilliant architect who dares to stand alone against the...

First new translation since publication of Albert Camus's story collection The stories of Exile and the Kingdom explore the dilemma of being an outsider - even in one's own country...

'He's a writer who, once you read him, makes you want to read everything he's done' Martin Amis, Sunday Times Prosperous, good-looking and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell...

With a new introduction by Christopher de Bellaigue Shah of Shahs depicts the final years of the Shah in Iran, and is a compelling meditation on the nature of revolution...

At long last Ken Kesey's 1962 cult classic novel has entered Modern Classics series. Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal...

A reissue with a new introduction by Geoff Dyer Anthony and Gloria are the essence of Jazz Age glamour. A brilliant and magnetic couple, they fling themselves at life with...

Hartley's classic novel of innocence lost, now reissued with a new jacket When one long, hot summer, young Leo is staying with a school friend at Brandham Hall, he begins...

Reissuing in Penguin Modern Classics as part of our Paul Bowles relaunch, with a new introduction by Paul Theroux 'The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge...

We're the one percenters, man - the one percent that don't fit in and don't care. 'A phalanx of motorcycles cam roaring over the hill from the west ... the...

A landmark collection of Orwell's writings, with a new Introduction by Jeremy Paxman 'Shooting an Elephant' is Orwell's searing and painfully honest account of his experience as a police officer...

The captivating autobiography by one of America's most influential folk singers, Woody Gutherie Bound for Glory is the funny, cynical and earthy autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the father of American...

Arguably Achebe's most important novel, Things Fall Apart has sold over 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than fifty languages Okonkwo is the greatest warrior alive, famous...

Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from...

When Bill Masen wakes up blindfolded in hospital there is a bitter irony in his situation. Carefully removing his bandages, he realizes that he is the only person who can...

An Inspector Calls, first produced in 1946 when society was undergoing sweeping transformations, has recently enjoyed an enormously successful revival. While holding its audience with the gripping tension of a...

A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant...

Nabokov's suspenseful whodunit and one of his most acclaimed works The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with...

Famously associated with the term 'magical realism', Marquez is probably South America's most famous literary export An acknowledged masterpiece, this is the story of seven generations of the Buendia family...

With prose that is every bit as raw, intense and bitingly honest as the world it depicts, Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave contains a new afterword by the...

'Carson's books brought ecology into popular consciousness' -- Daily Telegraph Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, SILENT SPRING exposed the destruction of wildlife...

Another addition to Penguin Modern Classics' key Kerouac holdings. THE DHARMA BUMS appeared just one year after the author's explosive ON THE ROAD had put the Beat Generation on the...

"Bellow is one of the giants of the twentieth-century novel. Read Seize the Day and see why" San Francisco Examiner Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning...

A superb portrait of a generation of black Americans, this novel established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the twentieth century Ralph Ellison's blistering and impassioned first...

Taking its title from T.S. Eliot's modernist poem The Waste Land, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is a chronicle of Britain's decadence and social disintegration between the First and...

One of fifteen new translations of Freud's key writings, this project, under the general editorship of Adam Phillips, reimagines one of the modern era's greatest writers One of Freud's central...