(P/B) MAURICE
Maurice Hall is a young man who grows up confident in his privileged status and well aware of his role in society. Modest and generally conformist, he nevertheless finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, whom he encounters at Cambridge, and through Alec, the gamekeeper on Clive's country estate, Maurice gradually experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening. A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster's death i...
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(P/B) THE DIARY OF LADY MURASAKI
The Diary recorded by Lady Murasaki (c. 973-c. 1020), author of The Tale of Genji, is an intimate picture of her life as tutor and companion to the young Empress Shoshi. Told in a series of vignettes, it offers revealing glimpses of the Japanese imperial palace - the auspicious birth of a prince, rivalries between the Emperor's consorts, with sharp criticism of Murasaki's fellow ladies-in-waiting and drunken courtiers, and telling remarks about the timid Empress and her powerful father, Michinaga. The Diary is also a work of great subtlety...
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(P/B) BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S
It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail-hour to breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly. Pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock department', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction. (from the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE FORTUNES AND MISFORTUNES OF THE FAMOUS MOLL FLANDERS
"I grew as impudent a Thief, and as dexterous as ever Moll Cut-Purse was" Born and abandoned in Newgate Prison, Moll Flanders is forced to make her own way in life. She duly embarks on a career that includes husband-hunting, incest, bigamy, prostitution and pick-pocketing, until her crimes eventually catch up with her. One of the earliest and most vivid female narrators in the history of the English novel, Moll recounts her adventures with irresistible wit and candour - and enough guile that the reader is left uncertain whether she is u...
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(P/B) PALE FIRE
The famous American poet John Shade was murdered in 1959. This book contains his last poem, Pale Fire, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he - can he possibly be - mad, bad, even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal, he reveals perhaps more than he should about 'the glorious friendship that brightened the last months of John Shade's life'. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE
Romantic, heroic, comic and tragic, unconventional schoolmistress Jean Brodie has become an iconic figure in post-war fiction. Her glamour, freethinking ideas and manipulative charm hold dangerous sway over her girls at the Marcia Blaine Academy - the 'creme de la creme' - who become the Brodie Set, introduced to a privileged world of adult games that they will never forget. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE FACE OF ANOTHER
The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident - a man who has lost his face and, with it, connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. But soon he finds that such a mask is more than a disguise: it is an alternate self - a self that is capable of anything. A remorseless meditation on nature, identity, and the social contract, The Face of Another is an intellectual horror story of the highest order. (From t...
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(P/B) A HAPPY DEATH
Is it possible to die a happy death? This is the central question of Camus's astonishing early novel, published posthumously and greeted as a major literary event. It tells the story of a young Algerian, Mersault, who defies society's rules by committing a murder and escaping punishment, then experimenting with different ways of life and finally dying a happy man. In many ways A Happy Death is a fascinating first sketch for The Outsider, but it can also be seen as a candid self-portrait, drawing on Camus's memories of his youth, travels an...
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(P/B) THE OUTSIDER
"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know" Meursault will not lie. Unmoved by his mother's death, he refuses to satisfy the feelings of others by pretending grief. At the end of the funeral, he returns to his simple, batchelor existence in sun-bleached Algiers. Until he is involved in a violent murder and placed on trial. Will he now, with his life in danger, give in to society's demands and 'play the game'? Albert Camus's first novel, The Outsider received instant acclaim when it was published in 1942, by Gallimard in Paris, a...
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(P/B) DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
George Orwell's first published work, Down and Out in Paris and London, is a vivid, sensitive account of the time he lived as one of the poor in the late twenties. In a bug-infested hotel, surviving only between the pawnbroker and a little teaching and writing, Orwell shocked the middle-class establishment with his observation of the misery, the hopelessness and the despair of the poor of a previously unexplored Paris and London. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) COUNT BELISARIUS
The sixth-century Roman Empire is a dangerous place, threatened on all frontiers by invaders. But soon the attacking armies of Vandals, Goths and Persians grow to fear and respect the name of one man, Belisarius: horseman, archer, swordsman and military commander of genius. As Belisarius triumphs in battles from the East to North Africa, his success causes him to become regarded with increasing jealousy and suspicion. In his palace in Constantinople the Emperor Justinian, dominated by his wife Theodora, plots the great general's downfall. ...
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(P/B) THE TRIAL
"Somebody must have laid false information against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning without having done anything wrong." From this first sentence onwards, Josef K. is on trial for his right to exist in a novel which, more than any other, is infinitely perceptive about the nature of terror. Idris Parry introduces his remarkable translation with an essay in which he points to the autobiographical elements in The Trial, in particular Kafka's broken engagement to Felice Bauer. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) FRANKENSTEIN
A terrifying vision of scientific progress without moral limits, Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" leads the reader on an unsettling journey from the sublime beauty of the Swiss alps to the desolate waste of the arctic circle. This "Penguin Classics" edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle. Obsessed with the idea of creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material with which to fashion a new being, shocking his creation to life with electricity. But this botched creature, rejected by its...
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(P/B) ON THE ROAD
On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion. (From the publisher)...
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(H/B) LEWIS CARROLL'S ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Since childhood, Kusama has been afflicted with a condition that makes her see spots, which means she sees the world in a surreal, almost hallucinogenic way that sits very well with the Wonderland of Alice. She is fascinated by childhood and the way adults have the ability, at their most creative, to see things the way children do, a central concern of the Alice books, by Lewis Carroll. The book will be colour illustrated to very high specification, with her images interspersed thoughtfully throughout the text. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) CAPOTE: THE COMPLETE STORIES
A complete collection of short fiction by one of the masters of twentieth-century American literature. (From the publisher)...
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(P/B) THE BOOK OF DANIEL
As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents pay a surprise visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment. After a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Decades later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives. But while he is tormented by his past and trying to appreciate his own wife and son, Daniel is also haunted, like millions of others, by the need to come to terms with a country destroying itself in the Vietnam War. A stunnin...
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KEATS: COMPLETE POEMS
Keats’s first volume of poems, published in 1817, demonstrated both his belief in the consummate power of poetry and his liberal views. While he was criticized by many for his politics, his immediate circle of friends and family immediately recognized his genius. In his short life he proved to be one of the greatest and most original thinkers of the second generation of Romantic poets, with such poems as ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. While his writing is illuminated by his e...
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(P/B) ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND AND THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
'Contrariwise ...if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic' 'I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole... without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,' wrote Charles Dodgson, describing how Alice was conjured up one 'golden afternoon' in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. His dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking-Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig; time is abandoned at a disordered tea-p...
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(P/B) WIDE SARGASSO SEA
Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage disturbing rumours begin to circulate, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness. (From the publisher)...
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